Karen Hellekson

Karen L. Hellekson (born 1966) is an American author and scholar who researches science fiction and fan studies. In the field of science fiction, she is known for her research on the alternate history genre, the topic of her 2001 book, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, and has also published on the author Cordwainer Smith. In fan studies, she is known for her work on fan fiction and the culture of the fan community. She has co-edited two essay collections on fan fiction with Kristina Busse, and in 2008, co-founded the academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, also with Busse.

Education and career Hellekson has a BA in English from Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota (1988). Her PhD (1998), also from the University of Kansas, was supervised by James Gunn; her thesis is entitled "Refiguring Historical Time: The Alternate History". Prior to completing her PhD, Hellekson left academia to work as a copy editor and independent scholar.

Research and writing Science fiction Hellekson's first book, The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (2001), derives from her MA thesis and incorporates material from a 1993 paper. Based on the archive of Cordwainer Smith materials at the University of Kansas, including drafts, reviews and unpublished material, the book reviews Smith's life and critiques several key stories as well as his novel, Norstrilia. A review in the journal Science Fiction Studies praises Hellekson's wide-ranging and detailed research and her "thoughtful" discussion. It criticizes her acceptance of prior critical thought, even when the material she has uncovered undermines accepted ideas about the author, and comments that her "sometimes scattered argument may be hard to navigate" for non-experts. In this book and her earlier paper, Hellekson classifies Smith as a humanist who views humanity as a "matter of an individual's heart or spirit" unrelated to "genetics, social status, or even intellect",

She also co-edited the book Practicing Science Fiction: Critical Essays on Writing, Reading and Teaching the Genre (with Craig B. Jacobsen, Patrick B. Sharp and Lisa Yaszek; 2010). She won the 2002 Mary Kay Bray Award from the SFRA for her paper "Transforming the Subject: Humanity, The Body, and Post-Humanism".

Fan studies Hellekson is known for her research into fan fiction, which she considers to have a long history: "fans have always been engaging with texts, often in transformative ways by literally scribbling in the margins, rewriting scenes, and crafting new endings". She has edited two collections of essays on the topic with Kristina Busse. Their first collaboration, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), was conceived, in Hellekson and Busse's words, to "give voice to the many scholars we had met at conferences and online; create a volume that would start with the premise that academics were often fans and fans often academics and that that was okay; and permit conversations that did not always begin with introductory definitions but instead would assume a knowledgeable audience, thus raising the level of discourse." The book's four sections are each introduced by the editors, and additionally there is a 25-page introductory essay "Work in Progress" by Hellekson and Busse. Alicia Verlager, in a detailed review for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, praises the "wide-ranging and intelligent" essays but describes the book as "a challenging read" for the non-specialist, with the contents predominantly being "dense with academic theory". The editors aim to take a literary criticism approach involving close reading, rather than discussing fan fiction as a social or cultural phenomenon, as most earlier works had done; however, Bronwen Thomas considers that the essays "sacrifice depth for breadth and only rarely engage with specific narrative techniques".

In their second collection, The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (2014), Hellekson and Busse aim to "gather together in one place some of the foundational texts of the fan fiction studies corpus". and Fiona N. Cheuk highlights the absence of any discussion of disability. The editors deliberately include only those texts that discuss works based on Western media. Kustritz characterizes some of these "classic" texts as "somewhat quaint" but adds that they give a "necessary grounding". She describes the editors' introductory contextualizing material as valuable and well balanced, and praises the volume's themed organization for bringing the older texts into conversation with the more modern ones. Hellekson has also written on the attempted monetization of fan fiction by the short-lived FanLib archive, She wrote the chapter "Fandom and Fan Culture" for The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction. With Busse, she co-founded the online academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures in 2008 and continued to act as its co-editor until 2022. It covers "popular media, fan communities, and transformative works" and is the earliest of two extant journals in the field of fan studies, the other being the Journal of Fandom Studies.

Selected publications Authored books

Edited books

Research articles

Hellekson's highest-cited research papers and book chapters (in Google Scholar, as of January 31, 2021):

References and notes