2021 Wrapped

This was going to be a list of 'non-work' stuff, but those lines have blurred quite a bit. 

Science fiction

Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. We did two issues, with me settling into my new role of editor-rumored-to-be-at-large. Editing #293 (Chinese SFF) was mostly the work of Polina Levontin and guest editors Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang, and #294 (SFF and Class) mostly that of Polina and guest editor Nick Hubble.

Cover art by Cao Fei.

Cover art by Sinjin Li.

To check these out, become a BSFA member. (Some 2019-2020 issues are also now available to download open access).

On my flying pink sofa, I zoomed around to some conferences and things. At the LSFRC conference on Activism and Resistance I gave a paper called 'Abolish Money': the text is here. And Francis Gene-Rowe and Avery Delany and I gave two versions of a panel about games, frames and flames: one at Eastercon and one at the SFRA conference. My bit was called 'Liliputopia' and was about post-scarcity and being small (like Ant-man is, sometimes): slides and notes here. 

ConSpire was an online mini-convention collaboration between the BSFA and the Science Fiction Foundation; sessions are on the Vector YouTube. 

I reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change novel The Ministry for the Future, TWIIIIICCCCEEE. Once for Aargh with some emphasis on violence, once for STIR magazine, with some emphasis on political economy.

AI

Ghosts, Robots, and Automatic Writing: An AI Study Level Guide from Cambridge Digital Humanities. Co-written with Anne Alexander, Caroline Bassett, and Alan Blackwell. This is a textbook from the future, looking back at the history of text-generating AI. (This wasn't a BSFA publication, although a few BSFA members will be getting complementary copies. It's also free to download here). 

Cover and design by Jana Kleineberg.

Climate

Cover and design by Jana Kleineberg.

Not very SFF related, or is it? — Communicating Climate Risk: A Toolkit from AU4DM and the COP26 Universities Network. Expanded second edition coming in 2022. Here's an extract which explores links between SFF and climate risk communication. 

See also the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition.

Poems

Poems in FLW, Llengües de foc: Antologia de poesia anglesa actual, and Volume (for JHP).

Sad Press published books by Roz Kaveney; Ashwani Sharma, Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel; and Mira Mattar, and Kat Sinclair's is getting pretty imminent.

Roz's pamphlet was a limited edition riso collaboration with Earthbound Press. We're down to our last few copies, so if you are tempted, don't delay.

Games

The Sad Press SRD Collection contains eight System Reference Documents. These are basically small generic tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), which can be played in their own right, or used as templates for other designers to make things (they're released under Creative Commons licenses).

Two other tiny TTRPGs I wrote this year, one to play in your sleep, and one when you're walking around.

I contributed to the Conjurations: Reliquary zine (a collaboration with Ewerton Lua). I should have one or two spare copies soon, so if you'd like one let me know.

I also did some editing on The Soul Sword Forge, a double feature pretty seriously spooky OSR castlecrawl. One castle is upside-down.

We ran the Applied Hope: Solarpunk and Utopias games jam and got lots of incredible entries. I'll be announcing some prizes in January (sorry it's taking so long!). There's a podcast episode coming soon too.

Coming soon probably

If all goes to plan, essays in The Cambridge Companion to Economics and Literature (on SFF and post-capitalism), Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk History (on Shoshana Zuboff), Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities (on measuring wellbeing), Finance and Society (on bad comparisons between bitcoin and Yapese stone valuables), Digital Humanities Laboratories: Communities of/in Practice (collaboratively written account of 'how to avoid becoming a DH lab') and Strange Horizons (on wages for dreamwork).

Edited collection Utopia on the Tabletop and Climate Risk Communication: A Toolkit (2nd edition) are also planned for 2022. I have a vague idea to try out material for the toolkit on Medium.

There are future issues of Vector in the works on themes such as Greek SFF, SFF and justice, SFF and the future / applied SFF, SFF and modernism, and SFF and libraries / archives / information science. We're still accepting proposals for the libraries issue.

And hopefully some contributions to Index of Evidence, the UK Earth Law Judgments Project, and maybe even a short story in the energy futures anthology Phase Change.