2020 Awards
Dear SFRA, although we cannot meet in person this year, I wanted to pass along the names of the award winners we normally would have acknowledged at the annual banquet. My thanks go out to all the committees who worked tirelessly to produce the slate of winners, and my congratulations go out to this year’s honorees.
Full recognition, including remarks from the committee chairs and award winners, will appear in an upcoming issue of SFRA REVIEW.
Stay heathy! Gerry
SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship
Originally the Pilgrim Award, the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship was created in 1970 by the SFRA to honor lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship. The award was first named for J. O. Bailey’s pioneering book, Pilgrims through Space and Time, and altered in 2019.
This year’s awardee is Sherryl Vint of the University of California, Riverside.
SFRA Innovative Research Award
The SFRA Innovative Research Award (formerly the Pioneer Award) is given to the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year.
This year’s awardee is Susan Ang for her essay “Triangulating the Dyad: Seen (Orciny) Unseen,” from Foundation 48.132. Raino Isto received an honorable mention for his essay “‘I Will Speak in Their Own Language’: Yugoslav Socialist Monuments and Science Fiction,” from Extrapolation 60.3.
Thomas D. Clareson Award
The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service is presented for outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations.
This year’s awardee is Wu Yan of Southern University of Science and Technology.
Mary Kay Bray Award
The Mary Kay Bray Award is given for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year.
This year’s awardees are Erin Horáková and Rich Horton for their essays “Treknomics” and “Gene Wolfe,” respectively, both from issue #327.
Student Paper Award
The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student.
This year’s awardee is Conrad Scott for his paper “‘Changing Landscapes’: Ecocritical Dystopianism in Contemporary Indigenous SF Literature.” Erin Cheslow received an honorable mention for her paper “The Chow that Can Be Spoken Is Not the True Chow: Relationality and Estrangement in the Animal Gaze.”
SFRA Book Award
The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF, in each calendar year.
This year’s winner, the inaugural winner of the award, is Xiao Liu of McGill University for her Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize
Awarded by the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies program at the University of California, Riverside, The Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize honors an outstanding scholarly monograph that explores the intersections between popular culture, particularly science fiction, and the discourses and cultures of technoscience. The award is designed to recognize groundbreaking and exceptional contributions to the field.
This year’s awardees are Natania Meeker, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, and Antónia Szabari, also Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, for their Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (Fordham UP, 2019). The judges also decided to recognize, as particularly strong runners-up, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).