UPDATE: Call extended! This call has now been extended to 29th October for writers from the following communities: POC, LGBTQIA+- communities, disabled and chronic illness communities, neurodiverse writers, writers with specific learning difficulties, displaced people and those from non-anglophone countries (please note submissions must be in English), and otherwise disadvantaged writers. We will also be able to offer extensions to this deadline. For more details, click here.
Calling all Fans, Critics and Academics of Fantasy and Games of all kinds: Charly Harbord and I (and the British Fantasy Society Journal) want your work!
We’re proud to announce that we’re editing a special issue of the British Fantasy Society Journal on Fantasy and Gaming. This is an opportunity for Critics, Fans and Academics of Fantasy to write for a knowledgeable general audience on Fantasy (broadly defined) and table-top/electronic Games (including RPGs, video games, and so forth). Retrospectives, opinion pieces, interviews, responses to current debates, and more are welcome. This is the first of what the BFS hopes will become a regular series of special issues for the journal, and we’re rather honoured to be invited to take part.
It’s also another chance to work with Charly Harbord [Kilted Otter, Women in Games (WIGJ), Abertay University and more]. You may remember Charly from my events for the Tinderbox Playaway Festival (2021) and Shoreline of Infinity‘s Digital Wor(l)ds event on SF and gaming (2020). We’d like to thank the committee at the British Fantasy Society for this fantastic opportunity!
You can find the full call for submissions below (deadline: 15th October 2022), but please feel free to get in touch with any queries at BFSSpecialEdition@gmail.com. We can’t wait to hear from you!
Call for Submissions: British Fantasy Society Journal Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming
Fantasy and Gaming have a long association, from the entwined history of Dungeons & Dragons and Epic Fantasy, to the real-life manufacture of Thud!, the game from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Fantasy games and their representations in other media have affected gambling laws, education, the treatment of social isolation, and even Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse (via Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One).
With this in mind, the British Fantasy Society Journal opens its call for submissions for a very Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming. Following the proposed BFS constitution, our definition of fantasy includes “Science Fiction, Heroic, Horror, Supernatural and related fields”. Meanwhile, we use games to describe both table-top and video games (including computer games).
Topics may include, but are not limited to…
– History of Fantasy Games
– The influence of games on other areas of fantasy (e.g. D&D and Fantasy, etc)
– Portrayals of games in fantasy books, movies, and other genre media
– The impact of fantasy games in other spheres (e.g. running apps, education, etc)
– The symbolism of games in fantasy
– LARPing based on fantasy games
– Choose Your Own Adventure stories
– Fantasy games and the Law
– Representation, diversity, and access in fantasy games
– Current debates in fantasy games
This issue will contain pieces of 1.5k to 3k words. We look forward to receiving opinion pieces, reviews, responses to current debates, retrospectives and biographies, interviews (please query the word count for any interviews), and other non-fiction pieces. We especially welcome submissions and queries from early-career writers and writers from traditionally marginalized backgrounds.
The British Fantasy Society membership comprises fans, creators and people across the creative industries, as well as academics. As the BFS website states, “Our readers are generally quite knowledgeable when it comes to fantasy, so don’t be afraid to suggest topics slightly off the beaten track” – as long as they relate to Fantasy and Gaming!
Please note that for this issue we will not be accepting academic papers. However, we encourage academics to submit pieces in a style suitable for audiences outside the academy. You can find examples of the style we are looking for in Uncanny Magazine (www.uncannymagazine.com/ under Non-fiction > Essays) and Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com under Archives > Non-fiction). Please note that any pieces in a “listicle” style will have a higher bar to clear than other submissions, but please get in touch if you have a good idea for this format.
All submissions, plus any queries about possible submissions, should be sent to: BFSSpecialEdition@gmail.com.
All submissions should adhere to the General Submission and BFS House Style Guidelines (found on the BFS website at: https://www.britishfantasysociety.org/bfs-journal-submission-guidelines/).
Please note that we also request that files are submitted in a sans serif font (Arial preferred) and are double-spaced. Please supply any accompanying images as separate files, and use letters in the filenames to indicate the preferred order (e.g. a-arrival.jpg, b-conversation.jpg, c-departure.jpg).
All contributors to the BFS Journal who are not society members will receive a free copy of the Journal. Further details of the Submission Terms can be found here: https://www.britishfantasysociety.org/bfs-journal-submission-guidelines/.
The deadline for submissions is Saturday 15th October 2022 by 11:59pm BST.
We look forward to receiving your work!Ruth EJ Booth and Charly Harbord
Special Issue Editors
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