a little reflection on my research

It's been quite a while since I've posted about my research: in part, because I haven't been posting much at all, with the demands of full-time work and thesis writing fitting in whenever I find the time and energy, but also because I don't want to add to the negativity around the process of thesis writing while still reporting honestly on my own experiences. Thus, silence. Today I've been tireder than usual - the mistake of trying to have a life somewhere in the weekend - but for me tiredness also seems to clarify things in a strange distanced way. I'm staring down the barrel of just a little more than two months to submission, and still a lot of work to do. My abstract is heading out into the universe today, while I have six months of a future planned the rest is still unsettled, and a house move is on the horizon. So I'm tired, and I'm stressed, and I have hours in the middle of the night where I hate my thesis and want to hit myself over the back of the head but still, as I insist to all the students I work with, my research does matter. I need to hold onto the passion that I felt for it somewhere along the line, and I need to convey that - to myself, to my examiners, to the universe at large.

What does my research do? It complicated things. While this might not sound like Nobel-winning stuff, to my mind, complicating things is the job of the humanities and social and cultural studies: to insist that people are messy, that history isn't singular, that we always say both less and more than we mean, that reading is an act of transformation, that trying to pin things down just creates more things. My thesis looks at one sub-genre of science fiction - the lost race story - and argues that recognising its presence in science fiction unsettles previous critical accounts of the development of science fiction. It helps to connect up science fiction to writing and reading practices in the Victorian period, while still showing how the pulp science fiction magazines of the early twentieth century were where the genre was first really articulated. Looking at lost race stories shows how pulp science fiction ambivalently negotiated the radical social and technological shifts of the period: that its 'prophetic vision' of the future was in fact underwritten by construction of its pasts. The writing, publishing and reception of lost race stories show how together, these factors created a shared memory of what science fiction was and how it worked: a dialogue both inside and outside fiction texts building a cultural memory of genre. And finally, that even up to the present, lost race stories keep being written and rewritten by science fiction authors, mapping newly imagined spaces through familar narrative terrain.

There's more, of course, but my head hurts enough without going into the critical theory side of things. From long experience, the best way for me to handle the way I'm feeling now is more writing and more sleep. Homewards and onwards.