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CFP: Studies in the Fantastic Special Issue: Speculative Detectives (Abstract Deadline: 8/15/24)

"Speculative Detectives"
Studies in the Fantastic
University of Tampa Press

Abstract Deadline: August 15, 2024
Paper Deadline: December 1, 2024

The biannual journal Studies in the Fantastic invites proposals for an upcoming special issue investigating the popular yet puzzling pairing of detective and speculative genres, guest-edited by Christiana Salah and Steven Mollmann.

A locked room mystery where clones of the victims must find their killer. An investigation in which the victim and suspects are alternate-reality counterparts of the detective. A murder at a school for children who have visited Narnia-esque fantasy realms. Classic detective tropes have cropped up all over science fiction serials, fantasy novels, and other speculative storytelling media. These genre mashups may seem de rigueur in our algorithm-driven, high concept, x meets y culture, yet they date back as early as detective stories themselves, despite—or because of—the crisis of purpose they inevitably produce.

As scholars, we understand genres to have different projects: science fiction, China Miéville argues, estranges the reader by “literalizing the impossible,” thrusting the reader into a world that operates on unknown rational principles they must struggle to understand. Fantasy, by contrast, as Farah Mendlesohn claims, is “a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts.” The detective story may be inherently conservative, as some critics claim, with its carceral emphasis on security and the re-establishment of the status quo. Or perhaps, as Pamela Bedore counters, it is more complex: the genre evokes a specific society’s anxieties and dark desires, not merely to exorcize them, but to explore how “fears of contamination… are continually bumping up against, being rebuffed by, and even intersecting with the structures of containment.” How might these elements—the creep of contamination, the reassuring (or threatening) promise of containment—interact with the projects of science fiction, fantasy, or other fantastic genres?

This special issue invites papers that theorize what it means to tell a detective story within an imagined world that comes with rules and tropes of its own. For example, heroic fantasy and police procedurals carry different assumptions about the ethics of violence: heroic fantasy violence is authorized by the individual’s own moral certainty, whereas police violence is only (supposed to be) authorized inasmuch as it supports the rule of law. Which ethos, then, would a fantasy police detective operate by? Hard science fiction, the Gothic, and many other genres similarly raise questions for how the detective story and its subgenres may interact.

Proposal subjects may range from famous science fiction sleuths (e.g., Blade Runner, The Caves of Steel) to cops in quirky worlds (e.g., Zootopia, The Eyre Affair), from classic authors like Bram Stoker to modern writers like Mary Robinette Kowal, encompassing media such as prose fiction, comics, TV shows, video games, and beyond. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Nascent detective tropes within eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Gothic literature, sensation fiction, Weird literature, or proto-science fiction
  • Ventures into the fantastic by Golden Age or hardboiled detective writers
  • Adaptations or retellings that transplant real or realist detective figures into fantastic storyworlds
  • Gender-bent or queer reworkings of detective tropes in speculative genres
  • Speculative detective stories’ appeal or resistance to readers’ carceral/conservative impulses
  • Tropes such as the dark double, the femme fatale, the locked room, etc., and how they manifest in fantastic genres
  • The liminality of the detective figure, especially as regards class, race, gender, (dis)ability, (post)colonial identity, etc.

Please submit an abstract (250-350 words) and brief bio (three sentences) to fantasticdetectives@gmail.com by August 15, 2024. Full papers will be due by December 1.

Studies in the Fantastic is a peer-reviewed academic journal available on Project MUSE, publishing essays examining fantastic texts and their social function, informed by scholarly criticism and theory. Final submissions will need to conform to the journal’s style sheet, which uses the ninth edition of MLA.

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