SFRA Award Winners

527 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE “One of my favorite items showed up in the mail one year. It’s a little Halloween tree that you hang pumpkins and ghosts on. Ray bought a bunch of these trees for his friends that year. You can see the price tag is still on the box. He bought it at Kmart for $6.99. He just loved Halloween,” she says. One of her fondest memories is Bradbury’s book signing at a DragonCon in Atlanta. The event organizers didn’t have anyone scheduled to help. “I promptly got this large crowd organized and in line, explained the two-item limit, and stood beside Ray and opened each item for him to sign,” she says. “That day we grabbed a hamburger lunch at the hotel and talked like friends—not about the meaning of life, but about his family, my dog, things like that. He was as down to earth as they come.” Hardin became Bradbury’s official “dragon lady,” a title he gave her after becoming overwhelmed by a crowd at the conclusion of a talk he was giving. “I always look for a second exit anywhere I go, and I spotted it in this big room where he was giving this talk,” she says. “When he finished, people started pouring up the aisle toward him. He looked at me and said, ‘Can you get me out of here?’ and I did after firmly telling the security guard at the second exit that he was going to let Ray Bradbury pass through.” Hardin placed her collection with U of SC Libraries as a gift to the university and the public so future generations can enjoy Bradbury’s vast body of work as much as she has. “Libraries keep stories and authors alive. So the perfect place for my Bradbury collection is at the library,” Hardin says. David Shay, a cataloger at the Irvin Department who is working with Hardin’s collection, says Bradbury is especially relevant today: “Ray said he didn’t write to predict the future, he wrote to prevent the future, and the future he wrote about when he was 20 has come true today.” The Anne Farr Hardin Collection of Ray Bradbury Books, Fanzines, Pulps, Magazines, Correspondence, Photographs, Memorabilia, and Ephemera is now accessible to University of South Carolina students, faculty, staff, and visiting researchers by appointment with the Irvin Department. An online exhibit, Ray Bradbury Now and Forever: The Anne Farr Hardin Collection at offers visitors a deep dive into the collection, from Bradbury’s most notable works to obscure and unseen items. A physical exhibit is scheduled to open on August 14, 2021. For more information about the collection, contact Michael Weisenburg at or 803-777-2721.—Michael Weisenburg, University of South Carolina SFRA Award Winners. Although the Science Fiction Research Association could not meet in person this year, I want 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 results, 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. 528 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship (originally the Pilgrim Award), was created in 1970. Its original name echoed the title of J.O. Bailey's Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947) and was altered in 2019. This year’s awardee is Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside). 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 winner is Susan Ang for “Triangulating the Dyad: Seen (Orciny) Unseen,” which appeared in Foundation 48.132. Raino Isto received an honorable mention for “‘I Will Speak in Their Own Language’: Yugoslav Socialist Monuments and Science Fiction,” from Extrapolation 60.3. The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service acknowledges outstanding service activities, including promotion of sf teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and

Advertising · Art · Art history · Business · Guard (computer science) · Media studies · Sign (mathematics) · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · History · Library Science and Administration · Mathematics