Science Fiction and the Playing Fields of Eaton (J. Lloyd Eaton) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Note: this essay was originally written to serve as the afterword in a projected collection of essays from the first ten years of the Eaton Conference. In its early years, I experienced the J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, long held every year at the University of California, Riverside, only as an awestruck spectator, listening to distinguished scholars as they analyzed works of science fiction and fantasy at the podium and fielded stimulating questions from the audience. Later, I became a regular speaker and panelist at those conferences, and by the mid-1990s, I was serving as a conference coordinator, along with George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. In the course of two decades, then, I observed the Eaton Conferences from all possible angles, and while I did not attend every gathering or listen to every presentation, I grew very familiar with, and fond of, those annual conferences. Further, when I began to co-edit volumes of essays from the conferences in the 1990s, I came to appreciate the Eaton Conferences not only as stimulating experiences in themselves, but also as the invaluable first stages in a process that ultimately led to the publication of essays that were sharpened and improved by the numerous forces that acted upon them.