Inside Science Fiction Studies

Summary

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New Books Network: Inside Science Fiction Studies

Episode Release: July 15, 2026

Host: Cheryl Vince (UC Riverside, SFS Managing Editor)
Podcast Description: Welcome to a deep dive into the landmark journal Science Fiction Studies, exploring its editorial history, current directions, pressing challenges in academic publishing (including the impact of AI), and highlights of exemplary scholarship in the field.

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Episode Overview

This episode introduces the evolving editorial team behind Science Fiction Studies (SFS), unpacking its storied history, present aims, and future vision as a flagship academic journal in speculative fiction. The editors discuss the shifting academic climate, aspirations for inclusivity and innovation in scholarship, and current challenges—most notably the effects of large language models (LLMs) on research and peer review. The conversation emphasizes SFS’s enduring commitment to scholarly excellence, interdisciplinarity, and the nurturing of original, cutting-edge work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. History and Legacy of Science Fiction Studies

• SFS Timeline & Founders:
  • Founded in 1973 by R.D. Mullen; early years included a stint in Canada with Darko Suvin (influential in academic SF studies).
  • Major transition in 1991—Arthur B. Evans became editor, alongside Veronica Hollinger and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., pushing the journal to the forefront of theoretical, academically rigorous SF scholarship ([00:01]-[03:20]).
  • SFS now boasts more award-winning essays than any other journal in the field.

2. Meet the Editorial Team & Their Visions

Cheryl Vince (Host, Managing Editor)

• Committed to maintaining and evolving SFS's reputation for scholarly excellence.
• Emphasizes openness to new media, international perspectives, and diverse approaches.

Lisa Swanstrom

• Interests: Cyberculture, digital humanities, ecocriticism.
• Excited about interdisciplinary intersections and bringing clarity (as a hallmark of “human” writing) to academic prose ([03:20]-[03:49]).

Colin Milburn

• Focus: SF’s impact on the history of science and technology, responsible innovation cultures.
• Wants to go beyond “normative” uses of SF as mere idea mines—advocates for critical, ethical, and empirical research ([03:57]-[05:59]):

“I would like to see more work done in the field, not simply from a kind of normative perspective... but an empirical research perspective.” ([05:21])

Patrick Sharp

• Research: Genre systems, intersection of SF with other genres/media.
• Advocates for work on how SF connects with history, science, and other media (games, anime, etc.), as well as diverse cultural agendas ([06:05]-[07:49]):

“A lot of people experience science fiction these days not through literature, but through video games or tabletop games, through anime... So I’m interested in...how science fiction interacts with other genres in other media and across disciplines.” ([06:34])

Stephen Dougherty

• Literature professor, a latercomer to academic SF scholarship.
• Values both the deep tradition and contemporary developments in SF ([07:53]-[08:54]).

Phoenix Alexander

• Klein Librarian for SF & Fantasy, UC Riverside; former editor of Vector.
• Specializes in Afrofuturism, genre history, formal innovation, and the intersection of technology with human psychology ([09:06]-[11:36]):

“I think what I’m looking forward to in working with Science Fiction Studies is seeing that kind of formal innovation...thinking broadly across academic writing…how technology intersects with the mind, with the psyche of the human organism.” ([10:06])

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3. Defining SFS’s Present and Future Scope

Broader Submission Interests

• The editors highlight a significant shift from historical focus on print SF to:
  • Multimedia SF (games, installations, digital art)
  • Interdisciplinary and international work
  • Speculative genres shaping and responding to cultural, political, and technological shifts ([11:36]-[14:40])

“We are very open to video games, multimedia installations, digital artworks, any kind of genre experimentation, medium experimentation.” (Vince, [12:25])

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4. AI, LLMs, and Scholarly Publishing: Concerns and Reflections

The LLM “Glut”

• Surge in AI-generated submissions diluting scholarly quality.
• Example: NIH capping grant submissions due to AI-generated glut ([14:40]-[19:14]).

Colin Milburn:

“AI can digest a set of critical paradigms... and can synthesize certain critical perspectives. But... it doesn’t produce anything innovative in our field. We’ve ended those kind of discussions decades ago. The field has moved on. But AI isn’t quite aware of it.” ([17:22])

Human Editorial Judgment Remains Essential

• Editors are alert to formulaic, “cookie-cutter” analyses—whether by AI or humans.
• LLMs struggle with up-to-date field conversations and can produce plausible but unoriginal or even erroneous content (e.g., hallucinatory references) ([19:14]-[23:41]).

Lisa Swanstrom:

“The clarity of our prose has always been something that I have found refreshing...that clarity is still a hallmark of a human writer, especially in academic prose.” ([20:46])

Patrick Sharp:

“If an LLM brings you a series of texts and says, these are the things to read, read them. Familiarize with yourself with them. Make yourself an expert so that you can tell if it’s ringing true... It’s always one of those things where the voice starts to ring false.” ([21:52])

Phoenix Alexander (on AI in fiction submissions):

“I do not find anything about AI exciting or impressive at the minute...[T]he kind of ringing leaden question in the air was like, so what?” ([23:41])

Time, Labor, and Passion in Scholarship

• Using LLMs as a shortcut to publish more is discouraged; genuine, passionate scholarship takes time ([26:09]-[27:42]).

Stephen Dougherty:

“The time you take with a project and all of the energy and the passion and the love that you put into a research project is really, really important. ...It should take probably as much time as it takes otherwise.” ([26:18])

Patrick Sharp:

“It's not a shortcut to learning. ...You have to learn the stuff in order to have an original idea about it.” ([28:25])

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5. The Role of Editors and Future Aspirations

• SFS wants contributors to “teach us something.” Editors seek:
  • Fresh research questions, new perspectives, not “competently repeat[ed]” discussion
  • Scholarship that catalyzes conversation, not just “publishing more papers” ([30:51]-[53:20])

“We are in the business of producing new knowledge. We’re not in the business of printing formulaic versions of previous knowledge paradigms.” (Vince, [30:51])

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6. Exemplary Past Scholarship & Editorial Highlight Reel

Each editor shares a significant or exemplary publication from SFS’s history, illustrating what “excellence” means for the journal and what they aspirationally seek.

Patrick Sharp

• John Rieder’s “Defining Science Fiction or Not: Genre, Theory, SF, and History” (July 2010):
  • A “generational statement” that redefined genre theory, inclusivity, and opened doors for research into marginalized SF traditions ([35:16]-[38:09]).

“John Rieder’s essay synthesized...generations of scholarship...and pointed us in a new direction that opened up new doors for inquiry.” ([37:20])

Lisa Swanstrom

• Highlights formal innovation (e.g., Darko Suvin’s dialogic essay in SFS’s first issue) and the 1990 “Science Fiction by Women” special issue.
• Advocates for experimental forms and attention to absent or underrepresented voices ([38:30]-[40:59]):

“I would love to see more experimental form in our journal because we’re so used to...the conventional essay.” ([39:12])

Stephen Dougherty

• Praises Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s “Anti-Cybernetics and Art in Gibson’s Count Zero” (March 1995), which influenced his own scholarly development.
• Emphasizes value in reading past essays as models for great scholarship ([41:02]-[43:46]).

Phoenix Alexander

• Cites Paul Kincaid’s 2026 review of “H.G. Wells: Contemporary Perspectives” as a model for deep, narrative-driven, evaluative reviews ([43:58]-[45:52]):

“What Paul Kincaid does really well is...he strikes the balance of telling a narrative as well as informing you what’s in the book...not to be afraid...of inserting the reviewer into the narrative around the text.” ([45:16])

Colin Milburn

• 1991 Special Issue on Science Fiction & Postmodernism (Baudrillard’s first English translations, with essays by Hales, Porush, Landon, Sobchack, Ballard et al.):
  • Framed SF as an agent in the world, not just fiction—SF as theoretical engine and social force.

“This whole special issue really makes the case that science fiction does stuff in the world...it really has a transformative impact in the world.” ([52:07])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We want to see what the next exciting new thing that’s going to explode the minds of today’s grad students is, and we would like to be the venue to publish it.” — Cheryl Vince ([53:50])
• “We publish issues of the journal because we want new conversations to happen in the field.” — Cheryl Vince ([45:58])
• “The clarity of our prose...is still a hallmark of a human writer, especially in academic prose.” — Lisa Swanstrom ([20:46])
• “Using [LLMs] as a shortcut to learning...is the wrong way to think about what you do with these things, because it should take probably as much time as it takes otherwise.” — Stephen Dougherty ([26:18])
• “I hope I’m old man yelling at Cloud about this...but at the minute, I need to see the receipts.” — Phoenix Alexander ([25:21])

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Section Timestamps

| Segment | Highlights | Timestamps | |---------|------------|------------| | Introduction & SFS Historical Overview | Foundation, editorial changes, purpose | [00:01]-[03:20] | | Meet the Editors | Backgrounds, research interests, journal visions | [03:20]-[11:36] | | State of the Field & Broadening SFS Scope | Submissions, interdisciplinarity, international focus | [11:36]-[14:40] | | AI, LLMs, & Publishing Challenges | Impact on submissions, editorial criteria, LLM experiences, ethical reflections | [14:40]-[30:51] | | The Editor’s Role & Future Directions | Emphasis on new knowledge, human dialogue, against formulaic work | [30:51]-[35:16] | | Exemplary Scholarship from SFS | Editors highlight standout publications, their significance | [35:16]-[53:20] | | Closing Thoughts | Calls for innovation, what the journal seeks, gratitude | [53:20]-[end] |

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Summary Takeaways

• Science Fiction Studies remains committed to being at the leading edge of scholarship, fostering interdisciplinary, international, and formally innovative work.
• The editorial team is vocal about challenges stemming from AI-generated submissions and is setting a high bar for originality and intellectual engagement from contributors.
• Past and present, SFS has been a venue for mind-exploding, field-shaping scholarship, and its editors invite the next generation of researchers to join that tradition.
• As Patrick Sharp succinctly puts it:

  “Teach us something.” ([53:48])

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For prospective authors and readers: Science Fiction Studies wants your boldest, most original work—the research that will define the next exciting generation of scholarship in speculative fiction.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network. This is periodically a UC Press Journals podcast, conversations about research and scholarship from across the UC Press Journals portfolio. Hello. This is a podcast to introduce or reintroduce the journal Science Fiction Studies. We recently added a lot of new editors to our team and we're really excited to discuss the new directions we're taking for the journal. So Science Fiction Studies is a journal that's been around since 1973. It was founded by R.D. mullen, who was its editor for the first 20 to 25 years of the journal. There were a few periods of interruption. It also briefly was in Canada between 1978 and 1983 and it was supported there by a grant from the Canadian government. And at that time, Darko Subin, who is sort of highly influential in defining the academic study of science fiction, was one of the editors at that time. The next major transition our journal underwent was in 1991. At that time, Arthur B. Evans took over as the editor. And between 1991 and 2024, he, along with Veronica Hollinger and Ishvan Chise Rone, really redefined the journal as being a very academically focused, theory focused journal, really aligning with a lot of what was going on in literary scholarship at that time with cyberpunk, postmodernism, techno culture. All those conversations were very central to humanities academia, and Science Fiction Studies became the flagship journal of that. That team of three eventually expanded and added some new editors, a couple who are still with us today, including me. And now we're in another moment of transition. I'm Cheryl Vince, I work at UC Riverside and I have been with the Journal since 2011. I took over from Art Evans as managing editor in 2024, and then alongside with Lisa Swanstrom, who you'll be in a moment, another continuing editor. We expanded a new editorial team as the previous one retired. And so our podcast today is really to talk about the directions we'd like to see the journal moving, the things we think are exciting that we've done in our past and what kind of submissions we're for in our future. I will say of Science Fiction Studies that we do try to stay on the cutting edge of where the field is. So we're very interested in always moving into new directions as the field itself changes. So our past publications aren't necessarily the limit of what we're interested in seeing. And we do have a record of publishing more award winning essays in the field than any other journal in the field. And we definitely want to keep that reputation for scholarly excellence. So now I'm going to introduce you to each of our new editors that we've added and also our continuing editor, Lisa, who continued along with me. So I'll begin with Lisa, and as I turn to each editor, I'll ask them to just say a little bit about themselves and their research and their relationship to where they hope to see the journal go. So, Lisa, over to you.

[B]

Thanks, Darrell. My name is Lisa Swanstrom. I'm an associate professor at the University of Utah. I joined Science Fiction Studies as an editor in 2016 and have just been delighted with the quality of content that we continually publish. Primarily my research interests cyberculture, digital humanities, and ecocriticism. And I'm really excited to see more intersections among those disciplines emerge in the journal.

[A]

Thank you, Lisa. Next, I'll turn to one of the editors who just joined us last year, Colin Milburn. Go ahead, please, Colin.

[C]

Thanks, Cheryl. Hi, I'm Colin Milburn. I'm a professor at the University of California at Davis where I have a cross appointment in the Science and Technology Studies department, the English department, and the Cinema and Digital Media department. I'm also the director of the center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures and the MOD Lab, Experimental Media Laboratory. Most of my research focuses on the impact that science fiction has had on the history of science and technology. For example, I've written about the way that science fiction has shaped the research field of nanotechnology and contributed to the development of particle physics. I wrote a book about the way that science fiction has influenced the practices of computer hackers and shaping their political consciousness and the ways of thinking that other high tech activists engage with our increasingly high tech world. So I'm broadly interested in science fiction's contributions to the world that we live in today and the world that we might live in tomorrow. So I certainly would like to see more of that kind of scholarship in the journal, thinking about ways that science fiction can contribute to innovation cultures and not simply as a way of amplifying innovation, more science and technology thanks to extractive practices of grabbing ideas from science fiction, which is something that does happen. And I think it's a very interesting topic to pursue. But I'm also interested in the way that science fiction can contribute to our high tech culture in a kind of critical way, an evaluative way, an ethical way. And I would like to see more work done in the field, not simply from a kind of normative perspective, but it's an empirical research perspective showing how science fiction actually is playing certain roles in the maintenance of a Kind of responsible innovation culture today.

[A]

Excellent. Thank you, Colin. I'll next turn to Patrick Sharp.

[D]

My name is Patrick Sharp. I'm a professor of liberal studies at Cal State Los Angeles. My work has been, for the past few decades, interested in genre systems. So looking at the ways in which narratives emerge primarily from colonial discourse and the history of science and have circulated through a number of different disciplines, have circulated through history, have circulated through film and television, have circulated through literature, but also circulate across media. So one of the things I'm interested in seeing and one of the things I published on and one of the things I'm interested in seeing is work that actually examines the histories of science fiction as it intersects with other genres. And that doesn't mean just fictional genres like the race treaties of the 19th century. The ways in which, like Colin was just discussing the ways in which science fiction and science fact often become merged in scientific discourse. Looking at the ways in which. Also the ways in which a lot of people experience science fiction these days is not through literature, but through video games or tabletop games, through anime, through other media than some of us were trained in. So I'm interested in looking at and getting good work on how science fiction interacts with other genres in other media and across media and across disciplines. Right. So I'm very interested in that sort of ongoing evolution of science fiction, what it has meant in the past, what it continues to mean, and how it's constantly changing based on how people are using the thing we call science fiction, whatever that is, for various agendas.

[E]

Great.

[A]

Thank you, Patrick. And now, Stephen Dougherty.

[F]

Thanks very much. My name is Stephen. I'm a professor in Norway at the University of Agdar in Southern Norway in Christiansand. I teach literature courses. I teach American literature and British literature, science fiction, fantasy fiction, migrant fiction. So I'm a literature professor. I've always been interested in science and technology and the interface with literature. I actually have come to science fiction, I would say, kind of late in my career as a scholar. I Suppose for about 10, 12 years, I've been writing about science fiction, and I'm very much interested in contemporary science fiction. I love old science fiction, and I become increasingly interested in the long history of science fiction. And so, yeah, that's me.

[B]

Great.

[A]

Thank you, Steven. And now, as they say, last but definitely not least, our most recently joined editor, Phoenix Alexander. Please go ahead, Phoenix.

[D]

Thank you, Cheryl.

[E]

Yeah, I'm Phoenix Alexander, and I also work at UC Riverside as the Klein Librarian for science fiction and fantasy. We have one of the World's biggest collections of science fiction, fantasy and assorted genre materials, including horror at UC Riverside. And I've been in the position since 2022. And as Cheryl mentioned, I'm currently onboarding to be the new book reviews editor, working with the legendary Veronica Hollinger and all of you wonderful people. So very excited about that. My PhD was in the long history of Afrofuturism and thinking about how science fiction is a generic form, even before it had that title was helping, was influencing kind of black writers and artists to think about the future. Right. And think about societal change. And this is something I'm carrying with me as my current. As my current role as curator in Albarian. So mostly I'm working with scholars, but I am publishing in. I sort of get the luxury of getting to kind of pick and choose what I publish. So I have an article coming out in the Cambridge Companion to the Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance that's forthcoming again, looking at early genre fiction, early detective fiction. But outside of my day job, I guess I've been the editor in chief of Vector, the journal of the Science Fiction Studies for the past few years. So I'll still be working with. With folks there, but I'll be obviously sunsetting that as I could step into this new role at Science Fiction Studies. And I work on fiction too. I'm a fiction writer, so that feeds into my academic interests in interesting ways. And I think what I'm looking forward to in working with science fiction studies is seeing that kind of formal innovation as much as you can, obviously in book reviews is my domain, but sort of thinking broadly across academic writing and my kind of taste in science fiction veers towards the Doris Lessing 1960s, 1970s inner space fiction. Right. So I'm interested in science and technology, of course, but I. Maybe it's because I'm Greek, but I always feel like these are just new shiny forms of very ancient human psychologies, drives, impulses. So I'm very curious to read and to hear about how writers, artists, academics today are thinking about how technology intersects with the mind, with the psyche of the human organism, I guess, writ large.

[A]

Yes, great. I too love all that ancient stuff, actually. So all these new rewriting of Greek myth that we see these days as a really interesting development in the genre. So as you can see for our listeners, we have a really diverse set of interests among our team, and quite a few of us are of a generation like my generation, that is where when we started out in this field, it was a very niche and potentially not Very respectable thing to do to work on science fiction in your academic scholarship. And I think science fiction studies as a journal had a really particular place to play a role to play in that time where a lot of academic journals were not that interested in science fiction topics and science fiction texts. And we really were a place where we created a tradition of that kind of scholarship that was highly theoretical. I think the situation is incredibly different today that science fiction, speculative genres are intersecting all over the place in academia. And we've tried to put together a board of editors so that we have expertise and interest in a wide range of those domains. So while we remain under our title science fiction Studies, we're really interested in this broad sense of science fiction as a cultural formation that is important to a number of fields today. And I just want to pick up on a couple of things to, to emphasize the kinds of submissions we're hoping to see that were, you know, historically the journal was really focused on print science fiction, but we are very open to video games, multimedia installations, digital artworks, any kind of genre experimentation, medium experimentation. We're very interested in approaches beyond literary studies. So some of the things that Colin was talking about, relationships between science fiction and innovation, but also relationships between a kind of speculative futurity and political logics today that's something that I personally am interested in myself. And of course we're interested in international speculative fiction that the field again began very Anglo centric, but is a global field with multiple traditions of what counts as science fiction in the journal. Would love to see all of that kind of stuff. So now I'm going to shift gears a little bit. We've talked a lot about what we're interested in seeing and we hope this is of interest to our listeners and we'll get some great papers to review from you. But we've also noticed as journal editors that the current LLM moment is having a very negative effect on scholarly publishing. So we wanted to take a brief period in this podcast to address some of the concerns we see with the way that LLMs have integrated with academic writing. So for this I'll just see who would like to jump in first rather than call on people one by one. Colin, please go ahead.

[C]

Thanks, Cheryl. Yeah, as I mentioned, I direct the UC Davis center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures. And this question of the impact that AI has been having on scholarly publishing is something that our center has been really looking at and trying to grapple with. In general, I'm quite optimistic, even enthusiastic, about the potential for AI technologies in our world. And as a way of contributing to the advancement of scholarly research. But right now we are seeing a lot of very poor uses of the technology, and it's resulting in a glut of AI generated submissions to academic journals and academic conferences, grant proposals that's really watering down the intellectual quality of many fields right now. The U.S. national Institutes of Health, for example, last year noted that they had been receiving such a tremendous increase in the number of AI generated grant applications that it was leading to an overall decrease in the innovativeness of the grant proposals that they were seeing as a percentage. And so they have now imposed a limit on the number of grant applications that people can submit to the NIH as a way of trying to combat this. And many journals are considering similar policies of limiting the number of submissions. So it's a general problem that many academic institutions and publishers and journals are facing right now. In our own journal, Science Fiction Studies, we have definitely seen an increase in the number of either fully AI generated papers or submissions that have used AI at some point in the process. Not, not simply for doing data analysis or other kinds of analytic work, but for contributing to the writing and the structuring of the essays. And for the most part, these results have not been tremendously impressive. I have to say, one of the things that we see is that AI can be very well, let's say it can be very good at a certain kind of analytic humanities paper. And I think this is one reason why we've seen a lot of these submissions quite recently to the journal, which is to say, AI can digest a set of critical paradigms or theoretical approaches based upon its, you know, in large language models, the vast repositories of materials that it has at its disposal and can synthesize certain critical perspectives. And then when prompted to apply these critical perspectives to a particular text, it can fictional text, say, it can generate a pretty plausible essay analysis, applying some theoretical paradigm to a reading of a particular science fiction work. Okay. That type of analysis, however, even in our own field has seemed quite old fashioned for quite a while. And so we're now seeing the resurgence of this more antiquated mode of scholarly production, close readings of particular of single science fiction texts, or comparative analysis of two science fiction texts that may have very little in common with one another other than trying to exemplify a certain theoretical perspective. It is something that AI can do quite efficiently, but it doesn't produce anything innovative in our field. We've ended those kind of discussions decades ago. The field has moved on. But AI isn't Quite aware of it. And so I think that is really a challenge that scholars who want to use AI to develop work in the field need to be quite attentive to that. Although AI can do it, it's not necessarily attentive to the ongoing conversations in our field. The human to human interactions that are happening at conferences or in conversations between editors and writers, the vast production of new and exciting scholarship that's coming out all the time. This is only something that scholars who are really immersed in the field and trying to think about what's the next exciting thing that they might research and study as a contribution to the field can really see. So I really hope that for scholars who are using AI as part of their production pipeline, that they consider it as merely a component, but not the driver. It's really not resulting in good work at the moment.

[A]

Yes, thank you. And just to sort of double down on, part of what Colin is saying is that we as editors are using our judgment. So just another reading of a text that, you know, the same theoretical tools have been used to read different texts, not particularly this text. That's not something we consider worthy of space in our journal. Right. We want to be pushing, as I said in my intro, the science fiction studies was tried to be at the edge of where new scholarship was. So we don't want to publish sort of different textual example versions of work we published before. We want to know what the new research questions are. Does someone else would like to add in? Lisa, go ahead, please.

[B]

I think this is really exciting at the same time as I'm horrified by some of the submissions that I've been seeing. And one thing that I think it allows us to reflect on in terms of science fiction studies is the form of our content. Right. And you know, the things that these LLMs are being trained on, you know, are we're all responsible in some ways for the content that is emerging from these systems. And so, for example, this opportunity, I think, is to think about how. How involved we would like to be in the future in terms of training and being a part of that repository. I'm sure we're all familiar with the anthropic lawsuit. And at the same time as that was the kind of ethical violation of, you know, copyright and intellectual property, in some ways I wish they had had a further reach in terms of scraping up good content. And that's one thing that I find really refreshing about science fiction studies. And is that, sure, there is a commitment to theory, absolutely. But the clarity of our prose has always been something that I have found refreshing in contrast to perhaps other journals that get lost in the weeds a little bit in terms of theory. And so I think that we're grounded in a way that makes us special, and that clarity is still a hallmark of a human writer, especially in academic prose. And so I'll just end with that for now.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you, Patrick.

[F]

Go ahead.

[D]

Yeah, I was just to confirm some of the things I already said. One of the things I've seen in some of the submissions we've gotten, as well as with, you know, the writing of my students, is sometimes when people aren't familiar with a field like science fiction studies, they will use an LLM to help synthesize work that they have not read themselves and then try to apply it. And the way that they apply it rings false sometimes to those of us who are experts. Right. And so, you know, the thing I always encourage is to, you know, if. If an LLM brings you a series of texts and says, these are the things to read, read them right. Familiarize with yourself with them. Make them an expert. Make yourself an expert so that you can tell if it's ringing true for the analysis you're trying to give and will ring true for an expert. Right. It's always one of those things that. Where the voice starts to ring false. When I'm reading through, I'm like, that's not quite right. That's not quite right. I'm not sure about that. That seems to be sort of. And it. But it sounds pretty right. Which seems to be sort of the hallmark of LLMs right now. I also keep having my name misquoted to me as Leslie Sharp from in LLM Papers. For some strange. I don't know who Leslie Sharp is. It's a beautiful name, but that's not me. And Leslie Sharp did not write the things I've written. So. Yeah, I mean, little things like that.

[A]

Yes. I think those are excellent reminders that, you know, this. This is a field. We are people. This is one of the reasons we're doing our inaugural podcast to. To introduce the editors to our readership. As Colin was mentioning, we see one another at conferences, we're having conversations that don't appear in print. So sometimes when you get a hallucinated reference, even if the. A real person's name is attached to the hallucinated reference, we may well like, physically know that person and realize that they did not write the thing that the alum is claiming. So they're. That comes back to the groundedness, I guess, in prose that we have a lot of experience reading and in fact, sometimes editing the prose of these things. So we know it at an intimate level. Steven Phoenix. Phoenix, go ahead.

[E]

Yeah, this is a fascinating topic. I'm going to be the curmudgeon of the group and the grump. I do not find anything about AI exciting or impressive at the minute. Back in my day, we called it digital humanities and we were struggling to know what to do with it. So I remember when I was in grad school, you know, we'd have all these exciting presentations. Somebody who had, for instance, made an mlm, basically we would call it now of, you know, clarity of Shakespeare's plays and said, oh, I can do a quantitative analysis and point out every single use of the word chrysanthemum in all across all the plays. And everyone was like, oh, great, great, excellent, excellent. And. But then the kind of ringing leaden question in the air was like, so what? And I think in Vector, maybe I've been lucky. I've actually avoided because. Because at Vector, we're such a small editorial team, we've been able to solicit papers as much as we're open to, you know, open to submissions through call for papers. So I haven't actually seen a lot of AI submissions there, although I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of science fiction studies by the sounds of it. But I have seen it in fiction, in slash piles. So I mentioned I'm a writer and I've been doing slash reading for Escape Pod for the last couple years as well. And you see it, you know, and the timestamps are really interesting when you see this kind of barrage of submissions, like, you know, 10 01, 10 02, 10 03, and there are sensibly different stories and the submissions are anonymized, right, because that's how escape Pod submission system works. But it's. This is like, it's literally cookie cutter. And I'm just like, oh, this is really stupid. So again, just sort of to end on a more positive note, I'm interested in the weirdness of each individual researchers, the singularity of what they're questioning. What is the thing? What is their perspective? What is their angle? Like, yes, we all know, like, you know, everything's been written about already, right? At least historically. So what is it? How can you write about Arthur C. Clarke or, I don't know, N.K. jemisin? And what is your unique take on that to make folks think about things in a different way or see things in a different way? So I don't know. I hope I'm old man yelling at Cloud about this. And maybe in five years time I'll be, you know, AI, you know, proselytizer. But at the minute, you know, I need to see, I need to see the receipts.

[A]

I see Patrick wants to jump in, but Steven hasn't commented on this yet. So I'll let Stephen go first, then you. Patrick.

[F]

I, you know, I tend to be optimistic as well. I think that we are in a bad place now, and I think that ultimately we're going to make our way to a better place. But the thing is, I think that it's wrong to use this technology as a time saver because I think time is essential. And I think that the time you take with a project and all of the energy and the passion and the love that you put into a research project is really, really important. And so if people are out there thinking, well, geez, I can really speed this whole thing up and I can get three essays out this year if I do this stuff, if I use LLMs, that's the wrong way to think about what you do with these things, because it should take probably as much time as it takes otherw. So I think that what I'm trying to say, I think there is a place for these technologies, for writing technologies, and when these things first hit, it was just mind blowing. I mean, I thought it was incredible. And so I think that I do tend to stay optimistic about it because I think that we're going to find our place somewhere else, find another place. But, but, but it's definitely wrong to think about this as, as something that's going to save you time.

[D]

Yeah. And I am an old man who frequently shakes my fist at clouds. So I am where you think you might be. I am quite a curmudgeon with this too, though. I am, you know, willing to, you know, entertain that there might be a positive outcome to this dystopia nightmare we're living through right now when we grade papers and read submissions generated by AI. I had a, you know, I was having a great conversation yesterday at graduation with colleagues from chemistry, Biology, Philosophy about what they're seeing in their fields in regards to LLMs. And, you know, each one of us have different disciplinary perspectives on how it could be useful if. Right. And what you were just saying, Stephen, really rings true to that conversation we were having, which is that it's not a shortcut to learning.

[B]

Right.

[D]

It's a way to actually find things that you can learn, but it's not A shortcut for learning. You have to learn the stuff in order to have an original idea about it. Right. So like, I can see as a research tool, it could be very useful for bringing you things that might be useful that you then have to analyze. Like, okay, I know that Shakespeare says chrysanthemum this many times. Okay. What does it mean? Well, if you can actually figure out what that means and you find the parts of the plays and it actually, there's some pattern there that you could sort of have a scholarship around. Okay, Right. But that's not where we are right now. People are using it as a shortcut. People are, there are some very thoughtful people who are using it really interestingly. Right. But right now we're in that cheap experimental, get them addicted kind of phase. And, and it's, it's being used in ways that are not, that are slowing down our processes as graders and slowing down our processes as peer reviewers.

[F]

Right.

[D]

That's where micromudging list particularly comes out right now.

[A]

Yeah. Lisa, jump in.

[B]

Yeah. One thing I think that we're uniquely suited to discuss here is the fact that artificial intelligence is in some ways science fiction's bread and butter. And we have been thinking about artificial cognition, artificial consciousness, whether those are even distinct things or conflated things since science fiction emerged as a genre and even many, many, many centuries before that. Right. And so it's really exciting to think about how the things that we study, the things that we read, the games that we play, are informing our conceptions and practice regarding artificial intelligence. And so, you know, whether you're thinking of something as conventional as Asimov, or you're thinking of something as, you know, silly as Red Dwarf, or, you know, something as complicated as Stanislav Lem. You know, we're, we're just always grappling with this question. And so I think it behooves us to, you know, really grapple with it in our own writing practices. And we, we really hope that people who submit to the journal are, are doing so in a kind of self reflective way that sure, it's an exciting tool. But, you know, this is what I told my students. Use the tool, but don't, don't substitute it for your own cognitive development. Right. So that's something that I think is really exciting for us in contrast to other disciplines.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you. That we do spend a lot of time before there were LLMs already thinking about what AI should look like. And I think, you know, one of the things that I tend probably more to the curmudgeonly side myself on this in part because of the degree to which the use of LLMs and submissions pushes everything towards the more formulaic. Right. It's just another version of a thing that's already happened and that's really boring to me. And I think one of the things like that we are here to say as editors is that, you know, editing is an intellectual conversation. Editing is not just we fix your, you know, grammar errors and print your work, but the whole process of submitting to a journal, having us or our external readers give you feedback on your work, going through multiple drafts of the paper in response to the feedback. It's a dialogue, it's a conversation. It involves human judgment. And so we want to find what the new thing is in the field. We are in the business of producing new knowledge. We're not in the business of printing formulaic versions of previous knowledge paradigms to come back to what Colin was saying at the beginning. So there's potentially something exciting and new that might be able to be done with LLMs, but not have them write a cookie cutter paper for you. That's completely boring to all involved. And I think the other thing that maybe gives me some hope in this space is because the LLMs can do a certain kind of analytical paper competently, we're becoming less interested in those kinds of papers even we can't necessarily tell if it was a human who wrote it or an LLM. But if all the paper does is competently repeat stuff that's well established, that is not an interesting thing to publish. And so the sort of workload difficulty that LLMs are generating crisis for us and that we get just overwhelming formulaic submissions, it's also pushing us to have conversations about like, well, what should our submissions look like if not these analytical papers anymore? Because they can just be done with the push of a button, essentially, what do we want scholarship to look like? And I think that is a conversation that we're really, really interested in having at Science Fiction Studies for precisely these reasons. Lisa just mentioned that we have been thinking about these kinds of, like, what would altered cognition, non human cognition. We've been thinking about these things for a long time. And so this is a moment where we're really interested in potentially experimenting with the format of the journal as well, because we have zero interest in publishing formulaic LLN written papers. So that, you know, we would encourage you to think creatively with us and to recognize that we're here to be your intellectual partners. That's what editors are, are people that help you work to get your idea polished into its best possible version of itself. We're not just simply typesetters and copy editors, but this is an intellectual dialogue, so I'll abuse my managing editor position to be like that. That is my sense of where we'd like to go. But clearly, as you can see from this conversation, there is a way that the use of generative AI is changing the conversation around scholarly publishing, and we want to be at the forefront of what are going to become best practices out of this. All right, so now I'm going to transition a little bit from saying what we don't want to see in our submissions to wrap things up on a more positive note. And here I guess I'm just going to go in the order in which the podcast participants are arranged on my screen here, and I'm going to ask each editor in turn to give an example of something that we've previously published that they think is exemplary of the sorts of things that we have excelled at doing at science fiction studies and hope to continue in the same tradition. Perhaps not the exact same kind of essay, but something that's exemplary as it was related to its particular scholarly and historical context and thus what we'd like to see going forward. So I will begin with you, Patrick.

[D]

Oh, I'm first on your screen. Okay. I think that one that I come back to over and over is John Reader's essay, which was on Defining Science Fiction or Not Genre, Theory, SF and History, which was in the July 2020 July 2010 issue of Science Fiction Studies that went on to win the what was at that time called the Pioneer Award from the Science Fiction Research Association. And what that really was to me was sort of a generational statement of a lot of us have been doing work in this vein. Colin Cheryl I had been doing work in this vein. Lisa Yazzik, Roger Luckhurst, we'd all been working along this vein, and his this piece really captured how we were thinking about genre differently, just at the theoretical level and the practical level from the Suvan generation. So it wasn't a necessarily a critique of the Suvan generation. It was pointing out how Suvan was taking a position and engaging in the conversation about what SF is to drive it in a particular direction for historically specific purposes. Right. Instead of understanding that science fiction is a part of a system that is always changing, that is defined in relationship to the things that it's right next to fantasy, horror, you know, Westerns, colonial discourse, and really sort of opening up thinking about science fiction's use value, not trying to classify it for some sort of academic or literary prestige, which was necessary when liters. When science fiction was trying to be taken seriously in the academy, but instead shifting towards, okay, why was science fiction being defined in these ways at this moment in history, and by whom, and what purposes did that serve, and what sort of interesting and entertaining things came out of that? And using that as sort of an analytical framework for recovery work, using it as an analytical framework for understanding. Like, to me, that was sort of a launching point for a lot of things which are exciting in the field today, like the study of indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism and a lot of the recovery work with sort of lost traditions of science fiction within the science fiction magazines. Because later generations of science fiction scholars were defining science fiction in a way that excluded. Right. That excluded most women from night before 1945 from the field, for example. Right. So, John Reader's essay synthesized intelligently and brilliantly a couple of generations of scholarship about what science fiction is and pointed us in a new direction that opened up new doors for inquiry in a way that was not foreclosing conversation, but opening up conversations in a way that was respectful to the previous generation that had been defining and engaging in conversations that were necessary at the time.

[A]

Excellent. Thank you. And I think that's also, like, a really crucial reminder that the, you know, the best scholarship pushes the field to ask new questions. So what is the most important thing to do in 1991 is different than the question you want to ask in 2010 and the question we want to ask today? Like, we're looking for that next question. All right, Lisa, you're up next.

[B]

So I have the luxury of having all of the back issues at my disposal, because when we digitized all of our content, it was just such an instructive lesson. And so I'd actually like to go and highlight a couple of things. The first one is the very first issue, one of the first issue, and this is the subin piece that opens in the weirdest form. Right. It's this dialogue, and it's called the Significant Context of ff, a dialogue of comfort against tribulation. And it's set up as this conversation. It's called A, B and C. So A is a science fiction fan trying to become a writer, B is a graduate student of literature, and C is a university professor in an English department. And what unfolds is a conversation about the genre. And even though this is such a kind of blast from the past, I would love to see more experimental form in our journal because we're so used to, as everyone has said, we're so used to seeing just the kind of conventional essay. Here is our theoretical perspective, and here is our proof that this X, Y or Z conforms to it or departs from it. And what I love about this dialogue from 1973 is that it's a conversation rather than some kind of God's eye view objective attempt to be completely critical and impartial. So that's my first one that I think is just wonderful. The second one is the special issue that Veronica Hollinger edited, Science Fiction by Women, and her introduction, in particular Women in Science Fiction and Other hopeful monsters from July 1990. Just a fantastic lineup. The attention paid to, as you know, Patrick was just saying, just the excluded category of female authors. Here is the focus. And the timing was right. And now it's exciting for me to think about what else we've been neglecting. And I would say that I'm not sure because we don't know as we are neglecting it. Right. However, I think experimentum inform and just kind of absences. What are we not seeing? Where could we kind of look for those opportunities to bring in to the journal what we haven't yet seen? And that's very exciting to me.

[A]

Excellent. I wholeheartedly agree, Stephen.

[F]

All right. I mean, it's always important to know where you have been, too. And I've got. Maybe you guys have this too. Perhaps not with you, though. I've got this amazing list of all of the journal issues and all of the essays going back to spring 1973. This was the first issue Stanislaud Lim is in so many of these early journal issues, Frederick Jamus and Ursula K. Le Guin and so on. And I just want to tell. There's a particular essay, and this is one of Ishvan's essays, Ishvan Cicero Rone's essay Anti Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's Count Zero. And this is a terrific, a really terrific essay from a 1995 issue, the March 1995 issue. And I first came across this. Well, I came across this essay a few months ago when I was rereading Count Zero for a project. So this essay, as I said, first appeared in the March 1995 issue. And I ran across it in March 1995 or sometime after the issue was published. I was working on trying to figure out how to write my dissertation at Indiana University. I was up in the Bloomington Main Library, and my dissertation was on Edgar Allan Poe. As I said, I wasn't into science fiction back then yet, but I just remember coming back up to my Carol on the seventh floor and checking out the Science Fiction Studies issue and reading some of Istvan's article about Count Zero. Really terrific piece. And this is. It's one of these things that just stayed in my mind for a long time, is the kind of model of the kind of writing you want to be able to do yourself. And so it's always been useful to this for me, for this reason. And coming back to it after a number of years, seeing it again was really terrific. And so there are so many amazing writers that have appeared in the annals of science fiction studies. And I think I remember running across Lisa's very first publication of Science Fiction Studies, and Cheryl's yours as well. So it's a lot of fun going back and reading and using these essays as models for good form, for your own writing, I think is really, really useful and important, too.

[A]

Thank you. Yes, many, many of us did kind of grow up within the journal. We started out as fledgling graduate students trying to get published and made our way through Phoenix. You're up next.

[E]

Yeah, I agree with what folks have been saying about the formal innovation. I was one of those grad students that grew up with science fiction studies. And I'm telling you, the 1970s, man. It's no coincidence that the journal was founded in this era. You know, you have, you know, the high point, Le Guin Russ, of these fantastic experimental formalists. But to choose a recent example, I'm gonna. I'm gonna be very recent, actually. I'm gonna choose Paul Kincaid's review of H.G. wells contemporary perspectives in the March 2026 issue. And that is cheating a bit because Paul Kincaid is obviously legendary science fiction critic. We published him in Science in a Science Fiction Studies. Yes, but also Vector. But I think his kind of practice speaks to what Stephen was saying about time and the importance of time and deep scholarship and deep reading. Right. And in order to be able to draw upon so many references and contextualize and situate a text, contemporary text, in that milieu of what's come before. And another thing I think that Paul Kincaid does really well is that he really tells a story. He kind of. He does. He strikes the balance of, you know, telling a narrative as well as informing you what's in the book. So book reviews, you might think, okay, well, there's a fairly standard formula. This book was published here in this. And, you know, this is the table of contents and etc, etc. But I think reviews like, like Paul's kind of model a kind of step further. Right. So. And not to be afraid, as we've been talking about, of inserting the reviewer, you know, inserting themselves into, into the, the narrative around the text.

[C]

Right.

[E]

Has this book proved meaningful to you? Does it spark something that you. That changed the way you thought about an earlier text, you know, or, or you know, what, what kinds of things is it doing that speak to the reviewer?

[D]

Right.

[E]

So I think, and that's a great example of a recent book review that I think does it really.

[A]

Well, excellent. Thank you. And I think it's. It is important to remember to highlight the reviews that they, they serve a function in the field. Right. They are an informed scholar providing an analysis of. Should you invest your time in reading this book? Is this book useful for you? Is it furthering field conversations that we don't just publish reviews so that there are reviews in the world? And I think that's again getting into this sort of human scholarship. Logic versus generating of text. Logic. We don't like publish issues of the journal so that there's more papers in the world. The world would be fine without more papers in it. We publish issues of the journal because we want new conversations to happen in the field. And ideally we will get the submissions that will enable us to assist with that process.

[E]

Absolutely.

[A]

Colin, thanks.

[C]

So I want to highlight the 1991 special issue on Science Fiction and Postmodernism. And the reasons are many, one of which is that this special issue was tremendously influential on my own career and my own thinking as a scholar. Essentially my first book, Nanovision, is written in the framework produced by this special issue and is very much in dialogue and conversation with the contents of this special issue. But also because I think many of the methodological and theoretical issues raised by the special issue, even though very much part of that moment of postmodern theoretical discourse remained like super pertinent today. And indeed for the future of science fiction studies, maybe I'll just briefly mention what the contents of this amazing issue are. So it begins with an editorial framing introduction by Istvan, and then it presents two essays by Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Science Fiction and Baudrillard's essay on Crash for their first English language appearance. So Science fiction studies published the first English language translations by Art Evans as translator. And this is three years prior to the English language edition of Baudrillard's book Simulacra and Simulation, which of course became tremendously influential in its own right. But this framing of Baudrillard is a central theorist for science fiction. And the way that the special issue tries to grapple with the reasons why is pretty fascinating. So after Baudrillard's essays, we then have responses to Baudrillard by Kate Hales and David Porush and Brooks Landon and Vivian Sobchak. And then JG Ballard himself contributes a response. And then we have a series of essays that investigate some of the broader dimensions of the connections between postmodernist critical theory and science fiction by Christopher Palmer and Scott P. Kapman and Roger Luckhurst, another piece by David Porush, and then capped off by Ishvan's essay on the SF of theory. So I want to highlight a couple of the things that emerge out of this conversation. So first is the articulation of the Baudrillard theory, Baudrillard's simulation thesis, his arguments about the society of hyper reality in which he's arguing in these two essays in the special issue, that science fiction is no longer just a fictional or entertainment field that is representing possible realities or conjuring imaginary futures, but it is now also increasingly a model on which our societies produce themselves and reinvent themselves in. In the Image of Science Fiction. And so he's arguing this is symptomatic of what he broadly is. Is calling hyperreality. But it's a really powerful argument because it's suggesting that science fiction is a. Is a force in the world and it is act actively transforming reality, not simply in the idea that, oh, it can kind of inspire scientists to follow particular research directions, et cetera, but that the entire social apparatus is like reimagining itself in the image of. In the image of science fiction. And so the. The other contributors then grapple with that are that thesis. And they actually argue with each other, which I think I find just delightful. They're actually debating the epistemological stakes of this. They're trying to think about what's the importance of close reading as a method in literary studies for addressing this question. They're thinking about larger historical formations, et cetera. So they really dig into the nuances of the argument. And I find at the time I read this, when I was an undergraduate, my mind was just blown by the theoretical sophistication and the scholarly tools that are being brought to bear to engage with this really radical thesis. And then it concludes with Ishvan's essay that argues that postmodern theoretical discourse represented by Baudrillard and Donna Haraway and Frederick Jameson. It's not just drawing on science fiction as a set of examples. Rather, it is producing itself in the mode of science fiction, such that critical theory itself becomes a form of science fiction, ultimately making the field of science fiction itself already, always, already a mode of theoretical discourse that is necessary and adequate to the transformative conditions of our rapidly evolving high tech world. So it really makes the case for this whole special issue, really makes the case that science fiction does stuff in the world. Like it really has a transformative impact in the world and that we need to understand science fiction if we hope to actually be responsible citizens and thinkers in this world. Of course, this kind of line of argumentation then became part of science fiction's own toolkit. Like by the end of the 90s, the Matrix features Baudrillard's book as an object in the, in the opening scenes, kind of commenting on this Baudrillard or the thesis of this special issue about the way that society is modeling itself on science fiction in the mode of pure simulation, or Haraway becomes a character in the anime series Ghost in the Shell, et cetera. So, but there are ways in which science fiction comes to take on this argument in a very visible way, recognizing that in fact, science fiction has always been doing this, and now we are given the tools to think about it in a more robust and thoroughgoing way. So I continue to find this argument necessary to. Obviously, the world continues to transform, but it really makes a. Makes clear the stakes of a certain kind of scholarly argument about science fiction, that we're not just doing hermeneutic interpretations of individual texts, but we can also engage with the genre as a mode of social engagement, a mode of discourse, and a mode of change in the world.

[A]

Fantastic example. And I too basically have to credit my entire academic career to that. That issue and Haraway's body of work, there's very, very explosive moment in thought, I think. All right, so before I wrap up, is there anything else that anyone would like to share with our readers and potential contributors? No, we said what we don't want. We said what we want.

[D]

I mean, teach us something.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, we want to. We want to see what the next exciting new thing that's going to explode the minds of today's grad students is, and we would like to be the venue to publish it. So. So thank you for people who've listened to our podcast. We hope that we will hear from you as potential contributors and we hope you will follow the journal. We will be back with future podcasts that will focus on interviews with authors of essays that we're publishing in the upcoming year. So we will start to do this podcast one per issue as we release issues. But we thank you for listening to this introductory one where we could give you a sense of why we think this journal is a valuable venue for dialogue in today's academic environments and what we hope we will see from you as our readers and contributors. So thank you everyone, and we'll hope to see you at the next podcast.