Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Harryhausen, Stan Lee to receive Eaton Lifetime Achievement Awards

To quote from the news release:

"Award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin, special effects creator Raymond F. Harryhausen and Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee will be recognized with the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside’s Eaton Science Fiction Conference April 11-14, 2013.

The conference will be held at the Riverside Marriott Hotel and will examine science fiction in multiple media. Conference registration opens Aug. 1 and may be completed online. Registration for students is $95; early-bird registration, $150 (ending Feb. 1, 2013); general registration (after Feb. 1, 2013), $170; and single-day registration, $95.

Le Guin, who will receive the Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award for 2012, has written 20 science fiction and fantasy novels, among them “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed,” each of which won Hugo and Nebula awards. She is the author of many short stories, six volumes of poetry, 13 books for children, as well as criticisms, collections of essays and screenplays.

“Ursula Le Guin is probably the most significant American writer of science fiction and fantasy to have emerged in the past 50 years,” said Rob Latham, professor of English and conference co-organizer. “Her work has consistently pushed the envelope in terms of serious ethical and political engagement with these popular genres.”

Conference organizers decided to present two awards for 2013 “to honor both science fiction film culture and science fiction comic book culture, which we felt deserved to be recognized separately,” said Melissa Conway, head of Special Collections and Archives of the UCR Libraries.

Harryhausen, who created a type of stop-motion model animation known as Dynamation, will receive the award for his groundbreaking contributions to science fiction film. Among his best-known productions are “Mighty Joe Young,” for which the ARKO team won an Oscar for special effects in 1949; “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”; and “Jason and the Argonauts,” which included a swordfight against skeleton warriors.

Lee, former president of Marvel Comics, also will be recognized with the award for 2013 for his various contributions in the realm of comic books. Lee, who began as a comic-book writer at age 19, moved on to become editor, producer, publisher, and president and chairman of Marvel Comics.  The co-creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor and other superheroes is also being recognized for his successful challenge to the Comics Code Authority.

Previous recipients of the Eaton lifetime achievement award are Ray Bradbury (2008), Frederik Pohl (2009), Samuel R. Delany (2010) and Harlan Ellison (2011).

The 2013 conference theme, “Science Fiction Media,” reflects the increasingly diverse forms of expression of science fiction.

The science-fiction writing competition for full-time undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the UC system will continue in 2013. First prize is $500 and second prize is $250. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 7, 2013. Further details, including instructions for submitting entries, and length and format requirements will be posted at eatonconference.ucr.edu.

The conference will also feature the fourth Science Fiction Studies Symposium on the topic of “SF Media(tions)”  on April 11, 2013, at the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa. Admission is free.

Symposium speakers will be Mark Bould, reader in film and literature at the University of the West of England and co-editor of the journal  Science Fiction Film and Television;  Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., professor of Engish at DePauw University and author of “the Seven Beauties of Science Fiction” (Wesleyan University Press, 2008);  and Vivian Sobchack, professor emeritus of film, television and digital media at UCLA and the 2012 recipient of the Society for Cinema Studies’ Distinguished Career Award.

The conference is sponsored by the University of California, Riverside Libraries and the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. In 2013 the conference will partner  with the Science Fiction Research Association, the largest and most prestigious scholarly organization in the field.

UCR is the home of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the largest publicly accessible collection of its kind in the world. The collection embraces every branch of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian/dystopian fiction."

Related links:
The full Eaton Conference news release
Eaton Conference registration

2011 Eaton Conference to honor Ellison and Delany

Authors Harlan Ellison, Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gregory Benford and Howard V. Hendrix are among the expected participants at the 2011 Eaton Science Fiction Conference, a three-day event intended for authors, scholars and fans, Feb. 11-13, at the Mission Inn and Spa in Riverside, California.

Quoting  from the UC Riverside news release:

“ ‘We’ve attracted almost three times as many scholars than we’ve ever hosted, and there is greater diversity of presenters and topics,’ said Melissa Conway, head of Special Collections & Archives at UCR and co-organizer of the conference. ‘I’m particularly pleased that Harlan Ellison will be coming.’

“ . . . Authors Samuel R. Delany and Harlan Ellison will receive the 2010 and 2011 Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction. . . . Delany and Ellison are two of the most important science fiction writers of the past half-century, said Rob Latham, associate professor of English and co-organizer of the conference.”

Registration is $165 for the entire conference or $75 for a single day. Student admission is $55. The Mission Inn has extended its $120 conference rate to all attendees to Dec. 31. The Eaton Science Fiction Conference is sponsored by the University of California, Riverside.

Related links:
UC Riverside news release
Eaton conference website

Notes on rereading Dhalgren during the Summer of 2010

A guest-post and photo-illustration from Monkeyblake, a simian friend of ours:

Unreal City. Moscow. Set off by a historic heatwave acrid smog from the fires burning across the forests outside the city is seeping into apartments, offices and even the underground  Moscow metro, forcing many Russians to abandon the city. All over Russia, the worst heatwave in memory has blanketed the region in 110 degree or more heat, triggering wildfires, igniting peat bogs in central Russia, and choking Moscow with dense unbreathable smog for days on end. Plumes of smoke have gone as far away as Finland. At the same time, a heatwave has descended on the Eastern Coast and parts of the Great Plains of the United States this August. On the the radio reports of flash floods across Pakistan, thousands killed,  many others swept away and marooned, 600,000 homes destroyed, the worst flooding in 80 years...

"Unreal City," Eliot repeats like a refrain in The Waste Land (1922).  "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many," He quotes Dante in hell: "I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet..." like cars bumper to bumper fleeing New Orleans during Katrina.

Unreal City. Suburban wasteland. Nameless. I live where the heat usually goes above 110 even into the 120s during summer.  This summer is unusually mild. Rarely above 90. I am reading Dhalgren again this summer. I was a boy of 15 the summer it came out, the summer I read it, lured by the image of the giant sun on the cover and the thickness of the paperback that to my 15 year-old-mind meant quality, meant serious, Russian-serious. The paper I remember smelled quite  good, though it has since browned quite badly. The summer of 1975. 

When the book came out cities were not like Bellona, the city that is Dhalgren -- cities were not abandoned, off the grid, emptied of most of their populace... Describing such a place was Science Fiction: Dhalgren, Stalker.

No longer. Unreal cities are no longer rare. When I read the book in ‘75 no American city had been abandoned like New Orleans to disaster and its own fate. Not in living memory anyway. Not like Europe or elsewhere. Abandoned. Ruined. Emptied, the fleeing, the fled.  Some survivors and hold-outs trapped or lost.  Standing on roofs to keep from drowning. Shitting in stadium corners. A hole ripped in the man-made dome. Unreal New Orleans. 

Dhalgren was my first Unreal City. It helped me -- withstand the shocks of the later ones I became exposed to, Dresden, Hiroshima, Detroit. A homeopathic post-apocalyptic gem or germ. A shot in the arm for a 15 year old.

Why am I rereading it now? Harder to answer -- and more personal -- the kind of ruins you see around you at 50. A booster shot maybe. That and Samuel R. Delany was suppose to come and visit where I live to receive a prestigious Science Fiction award. We waited for weeks foolishly hopeful after the award was announced that he just might come. He declined. This place, nameless, too much of a wasteland even for Delany.*

As a genre descended from the Gothic, science fiction has many ruined landscapes to roam around in.  Post-apocalyptic novels are made from them. The gritty winds blasting the streets brownstone tenements of 1984. J.G. Ballard's divine books, The Drought and The Drowned World are alike post-apocalyptic and set in ruins. 

Some are even as beautiful as Dhalgren. Though they have plot. Things they say, mean. Things happen in Dhalgren, sure, but really, Dhalgren feels more like a place than a story. A landscape that is coextensive. Not a narrative, an unfolding. As a place, it is one of the most vivid places in letters you can roam in. Roam like the Kidd. You don't care if things happen or don’t happen, don’t care where you go or don’t go, you are happy to forget yourself for a while, keep reading, keep roaming, all 879 pages and then read again.

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*Though the guy who is getting the same prestigious award, the Eaton, the guy with a big mouth who must scream, is coming (though few I know can reread him, though we try, no longer 15). He hated Dhalgren by the way.