SFRA Pioneer Award

The Pioneer Award is given by the Science Fiction Research Association to the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year.

Previous winners:

• 1990 - Veronica Hollinger, "The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider"
• 1991 - H. Bruce Franklin, "The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy"
• 1992 - Istvan Csiscery-Ronay Jr., "The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway"
• 1993 - No Award
• 1994 - Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi, "Towards the Theoretical Frontiers of Fiction: From Metafiction and Cyberpunk through Avant-Pop"
• 1995 - Roger Luckhurst, "The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic"
• 1996 - Brian Stableford, "How Should a Science Fiction Story End?"
• 1997 - John Moore, "Shifting Frontiers: Cyberpunk and the American South"
• 1998 - I. F. Clarke, "Future—War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900"
• 1999 - Carl Freedman, "Kubrick's 2001 and the Possibility of a Science-Fiction Cinema"
• 2000 - Wendy Pearson, "Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer," published in the March 1999 issue of Science Fiction Studies.
• 2001 - De Witt Douglas Kilgore, "Changing Regimes: Vonda N. McIntyre's Parodic Astrofuturism," published in the July 2000 issue of Science Fiction Studies.
• 2002 - Judith Berman, "Science Fiction Without the Future," published in the May 2001 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction
• 2003 - Lance Olsen, "Omniphage," from the Edging into the Future collection
• 2004 - Andrew M. Butler, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom," published in the November 2003 issue of Science Fiction Studies.
• 2005 - Lisa Yaszek, "The Women History Doesn't See: Recovering Midcentury Women's SF as a Literature of Social Critique," published in Extrapolation 45(1): 34-51.
• 2006 - Maria DeRose, "Redefining Women's Power Through Science Fiction," published in Extrapolation 46(1): 66-89.
• 2007 - Amy J. Ransom, "Oppositional Postcolonialism in Québécois Science Fiction," published in Science-Fiction Studies 33(2): 291-312.
• 2008 - Sherryl Vint, "Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," published in Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40(1): 111-126.
• 2009 - Neil Easterbrook for "Giving an Account of Oneself: Ethics, Alterity, Ai,r"
• 2010 - Allison de Fren, “The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve,” published in "Science Fiction Studies" No. 108, Vol. 36 (2), July 2009: 235-265).
• 2011 - John Rieder, "On Defining SF, or Not," published in Science Fiction Studies 37.2 (July 2010)