This week I saw that the Science Fiction collection at the University of Liverpool has been awarded ‘Designated Status’ by Arts Council England. I’m very happy for them because visiting the archive was one of the highlights of my trip to Liverpool for the Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference earlier this year.
Highlights from the Science Fiction collection
For the conference, curator Tom Dillon put together a room full of treasures from the archive, including:
Arthur C. Clarke’s typewriter
A letter from Octavia Butler submitting a short story to a magazine and the rejection letter she unfortunately received in response. It seems inconceivable not to fall upon anything written by Octavia with rapacious glee but such is the life of a writer (and an editor). Butler’s renown and profile have only risen and risen since then (much of it after her lifetime). I gingerly touched the piece of paper that had come from Octavia Butler’s actual typewriter and had her actual signature on it.
A copy of the Isaac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine from June 1984 in which Butler’s short story ‘Bloodchild’ was published.
The Octavia Butler material excited me most because I and my fellow panellists Dr Mary-Antoinette Smith and Dr Soondus Aslam were at the conference to present on aspects of her legacy (I will write about our panel separately another time). The archive was my first destination after flinging my suitcase into my student accommodation in Liverpool, and Butler’s presence in this selection helped me to know I had landed in the right place. It was nice to get a sign like that after all the effort it took to get there, from the competitive process of submitting a proposal for my paper all those weeks ago to negotiating train cancellations on the day.
There were numerous other manuscripts, books and magazines to pore over and I can’t not mention the erotic Star Trek fan fiction, starring Spock and Captain Kirk. It will disappoint you to learn I have no pictures of this, but then it was almost entirely unreproducable.
Cataloguing the Science Fiction Collection
Later in the conference, I participated in a community cataloguing workshop where I sifted through a pile of fanzines, identifying the relevant metadata and inputting this on a form so that future researchers might find what they are looking for, should they be looking for those exact zines.
There was a surprising amount of discretion required due to the irregular way in which material like this is created. Looking back, what made the task so enjoyable is the peculiarity of human intelligence. First, in the drive to produce these items. Then, as an archivist, in the way we come to recognise and categorise what we are looking at.
If you are looking for a mindful activity but have finished all your colouring books (or even if you never started them), I recommend cataloguing. Time passed without notice as we worked our way through our stack of zines. Apart from Isiah Lavender, who managed to end up with an immense document with no discernible start or end (was it several zines or just one? Were any of the pages meant to be bound together?) and no consistency on the date (this page says July, the next one says September!), and I think not even a title to be found. But even he seemed to relish the task, as he declined to relinquish the document for something easier in his determination to figure it out.
Decolonising the Science Fiction collection
For his previous trick as curator, Dillon worked to create the Decolonising SF collection within the Science Fiction collection, which brings together so many amazing resources it makes me feel more than slightly overwhelmed with all the things I haven’t read yet. Give me time (please). I wrote about the Decolonising SF collection in a previous blogpost, after I heard Dillon talk about it at the Women in the Black Fantastic conference.
Three cheers for archives
I’m currently in a moment of appreciating the wondrousness of archives as I am reading Science Fiction Ecologies: Worldmaking with Butler, Le Guin and Merril by Shelley Streeby. In it, Streeby explores the archives of those three authors to tell the story of their environmental politics and how this made its way into their fiction. I am reviewing this book for The Ancilliary Review of Books so I will post a link to the review once it exists.
