December 6–8, 2018 University of Graz, Austria www.worlding-sf.com WORLDING BUILDING, INHABITING, AND UNDERSTANDING SF UNIVERSES SF IMPRINT Publisher: University of Graz | American Studies Graz Editorial Staff: Michael Fuchs Responsible for the Content: Respective Authors

Artwork & Layout: Timna Simonson © 2018 WORLDING SF less) coherent and cohesive world. lonial subtexts of canonical texts Spivak unco- Everything is (in) a world. In the aforementioned essay “The Origin of vered and the feminist sf of Ursula K. Le Guin, the Work of Art,” Heidegger stresses that “[w] Joanna Russ, and Octavia Butler to afrofuturism “To be a work [of art] means: to set up a world,” orld is not a mere collection of the things […] that and visions of the future in which Earth liberates Martin Heidegger remarked in his 1950 essay are present at hand. Neither is world a merely itself from human dominance. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Some four de- imaginary framework.” “Worlds world,” he con- In about 100 presentations by scholars from cades later, Carl Malmgren suggested that “the cludes, meaning that we are subject to worlding more than 25 countries, the conference “Worl- generic distinctiveness of sf lies not in its story “as long as the paths of birth and death […] keep ding SF: Building, Inhabiting, and Understanding but in its world.” Both Malmgren and Heidegger us transported into being” (italics in original). Ga- Science Fiction Universes” seeks to explore have a point—fiction, and more specifically sci- yatri Spivak has “vulgariz[ed …]” Heidegger’s no- world-building, processes and practices of being ence fiction, is more interested in creating plau- tion of “worlding,” suggesting that the “worlding” in fictional worlds (both from the characters’ and sible worlds than telling convincing stories. In- of any text carries ideological baggage—political readers’/viewers’/players’/fans’ points of view), deed, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has more recently messages that simultaneously naturalize spe- and the seemingly naturalized subtextual mes- remarked that world-building “determine[s] the cific ideas and seek to erase themselves. As a sages these fantastic visions communicate (or relationships in the narrative, even when the ac- result, building worlds seems to necessitate the sometimes even self-consciously address). tion is full of dramatic movement.” Accordingly, creation of hierarchies, which lead to processes everything is (happening) in a world; a (more or of oppression and marginalization—from the co- PROGRAM OVERVIEW

DECEMBER 6, 2018 DECEMBER 7, 2018 DECEMBER 8, 2018

11 a.m.: Opening Ceremony 9.15–11.15 a.m.: Panels C1–C4 9–11 a.m.: Panels F1–F5 12–1.30 p.m.: Keynote Mark Bould 11.15–11.45 a.m.: Break 11–11.30 a.m.: Break 1.30–2.30 p.m.: Warm Buffet 11.45 a.m.–1.15 p.m.: Panels D1–D5 11.30 a.m.–1 p.m.: Keynote 3–4.30 p.m.: Panels A1–A4 1.15–3 p.m.: Break Gerry Canavan 4.30–5.30 p.m.: Break 3–4.30 p.m.: Panels E1–E4 1–1.30 p.m.: Break 5.30–7 p.m.: Panels B1–B4 4.30–5 p.m.: Break 1.30–3 p.m.: Special Presentation 7.30 p.m.: Reception 5–6.30 p.m.: Keynote Austrian Space Forum Cheryl Morgan 3–3.30 p.m.: Break 7 p.m.: Film Screening 3.30–5 p.m.: Panels G1–G5 5.15 p.m.: Conference Closing 6 p.m.: Farewell Dinner PANELS A

A1: FRANCHISING (SR34.D2) A2: WORLDBUILDING BEYOND A3: PERFORMING WORLDS A4: COHERENCE AND DE- STORYTELLING (SR34.K1) (SR24.K2) COHERENCE (SR24.K3) Chair: Paweł Frelik Chair: Sarah Gawronski Chair: Peter Goggin Chair: Damian Podlesny

Dan Hassler-Forest Christina M. Heinen Sanja Vodovnik Mladen Jakovljevic & Milan M. “Transmedia Worldbuilding and In- “Music of Black Holes and Sounds “Have AI—Will Perform” Cirkovic dustrial Convergence in the Age of from Space: LIGO Sonification and “De/Coherence in Philip K. Dick’s Global Capitalism” Their Creative Side Effects” Karin Lingnau Ubik and The Man in the High Cas- “Science Fiction and (Ecological) tle” Stephen Joyce Jonathan Shipley Reality: The Use of Game Engines “Rights Regimes and Franchise “World Building: The Devils is in the as an Artistic Tool in the Construc- Manuela Neuwirth Guardians” Details” tion of Extrapolated Realities” “Beam me into Being? Star Trek’s Nova of (Dis)Appearance and/as Jonatan Jalle Steller Maximiliano Jiménez Erin Horáková the Existence and Essence of a Co- “Building a Common Universe: Nar- “‘Gratify the desires of the people “IV, IV $, V” hesive Multiverse” rative, Commercial, and Ideologi- who visit your world’: Immersion cal Strategies in the Marvel Cine- and Fictionality in Westworld” Michel Diester matic Universe” “World Transaction in Black Mir- ror” PANELS B

B1: STAR TREK I: DISCOVERY B2: URSULA K. LEGUIN B3: SF FROM THE FORMER B4: SEX AND GENDER (SR34.D2) (SR34.K1) EASTERN BLOC I (SR24.K2) (SR24.K3) Chair: Sabrina Mittermeier Chair: Francis Gene-Row Chair: Karolina Lebek Chair: Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

Jennifer Volkmer Magdalena Hangel Anna Warso Sarah Gawronski “Building the Building Blocks of To- “The Construction of Sexualized “Worlding Resistance: The Wom- “‘There are always two sides, aren’t day: How Zeitgeist Influences Star Violence and Its Representation in an‘s Place and the Oppressive there?’ The Lines That Divide Us” Trek’s Vision(s) of the Future” the Work of Ursula K. LeGuin” State” Jennifer Brown Mareike Spychala Elizabeth Shipley Damian Podlesny: “Queering Human and Alien Cul- “Mother of the Fatherland: Gender, “Worlding Gender in Ursula K. Le- “Politics and Science Fiction: The tures in the Wayfarer Universe” Sexuality, and the Mirror Universe Guin and Ann Leckie” Political Worlds of Stanislaw Lew in TOS and DSC” and Philip K. Dick” Christian Ludwig Amy Butt “‘What are little boys made of?’ Sabrina Mittermeier “As Plain as Spilt Salt: The City as Representations of Sex and Gen- “Captain’s Log: Experiencing Star Social Structure in The Dispos- der Beyond the Binary in the Star Trek’s Universe from the Captains’ sessed” Trek Universe and Their Potential Point of View” for the EFL Classroom” PANELS C

C1: MOVEMENT IS KEY C2: WORDS AND WORLDS C3: BETWEEN SCARCITY AND C4: ROGUES ONE (SR34.K3) (SR34.K1) (SR34.D2) ABUNDANCE I (SR34.04) Chair: Jennifer Brown Chair: Sean Guynes-Vishniac Chair: Cheryl Morgan Chair: Elisabeth Schneider

Paweł Frelik Agnes Aminot Erin Horáková Wojciech Klepuszewski “Lost in Space: Vast Game Worlds “Words of After: Rebuilding the “The Future, Wouldn‘t That Be “Boojly, Bandy, and Red Biddy: The and Spatial Science Fictions” World through Language and His- Nice?” Future of Drink in Kingsley Amis’ tory” Fiction” (Skype) Dietmar Meinel Pascal Lemaire “Running a Neoliberal World: Nadiia Vilkhovchenko “Steampunking Rome: Economics Iana Gagarina Movement in Space and Corporate “The Semantic Peculiarities of Spe- and Technology in Alternate Histo- “Worlding Food: The Familiar and Dystopia in Mirror‘s Edge Catalyst” cial Vocabulary Used in Science ry—The Case of the Roman Empire” the Strange” Fiction” Ria Narai Aurelie Villers Janin Tscheschel “Boldly Going: Traveling to Fictional Jerry Määttää “How the World of Alastair Reyn- “A World Within Us: Denis Ville- Worlds” “Minimalist Worldbuilding and SF olds’ Revelation Space Is Being neuve’s Arrival Opens an Outer Poetry: The Neologisms, Names, Built: Revealing What the Story Space of New Experience” Paweł Pyrka and Allusions of Harry Martinson‘s Does Not Say” “Critical Rules: Worldbuilding, Aniara” Sarah K. Stanley Character Immersion, and Sto- Lars Schmeink “Building the Multiverse in Paris rytelling that Matters in Tabletop Katherine Bishop “A Future of Extremism: Cyber- and Berlin, 1920–2500” Roleplaying Games in the Digital “Liminal Letters: Corresponding punk’s Commodification of Bodies” Age” Worlds” PANELS D

D1: ROGUES TWO (SR34.D2) D2: BEYOND PETRO- D3: SF FROM THE FORMER D4: SF BECOMES REAL(ITY) MODERNITY I (SR34.K1) EASTERN BLOC II (SR34.04) (SR34.K3) Chair: Leimar Garcia-Siino Chair: Graeme Macdonald Chair: Sylvia Spruck Wrigley Chair: Paul Graham Raven

Mojca Krevel Rhys Williams Natalia Chumarova Rhodri Davies “The Periphery of the Future; or, “Making Worlds for the End of the “Ivan Efremov’s Fictional World “Hard Science Fiction Faith: SF the Future of Periphery: William World” as an Example of the Soviet in Postwar New Religious Move- Gibson’s The Peripheral” Science-Fictional Imagination” ments” Amy Butt (Skype) Roxanne Chartrand & Pascale “The Fabric of the City: Scarcity Miranda Iossifidis Thériault and Sustainability” Chris Hall “Uses of SF: Everyday Readers, “Beyond Fiction: Performing the “Tarkovsky’s Solaris: Settling the Ambiguous Hopefulness, and Envi- Videoludic Cyberqueer Identity” Francis Gene-Rowe Otherworldly Self” ronmental Justice” “Just How Can We Tell Alternatives Norbert Gyuris to Petroreality? Kaladesh: An In- Artem Zubov Julia Grillmayr “Semiotic Concepts of Gravity: structive Failure” “Constructing the Cultural Imag- “Science/Fiction—the Most Prolific Simulation vs. Representation in inary: Factory Workers Reading Oxymoron: Contemporary SF Liter- Upside Down” Science Fiction in Late Imperial ature and Scenario Writing” Russia” PANELS D PANELS E

D5: INDIGENOUS E1: GREENING SF (SR34.K3) E2: UTOPIAN WORLDS E3: IMAGINING NON-BINARY COSMOLOGIES (SR34.K2) (SR34.04) FUTURES (SR34.K2) Chair: Kristina Baudemann Chair: Paweł Frelik Chair: Sean Guynes-Vishniac Chair: Simon Whybrew

John Rieder Beata Gubacsi Iren Boyarkina Indiana Seresin “The War of the Worlds in Albert “Anxieties of Annihilation and “The New Worlds in the Science “Intimacy, Light, and Worldbuild- Wendt’s Adventures of Vela” HumAnimal Futures in Jeff Vander- Fiction Novels of Wells, Tolstoy, ing: Encounters in Samuel R. Dela- Meer’s Worldbuilding” and Bulgakov” ny’s The Motion of Light in Water” Ania Paluch “Métis Futurism: Rosalie Favell and Sarah Lohmann Evelyn Danis Simon Whybrew Métis in Space Set their Phasers “A Utopia Without Us: Ecofemi- “The Science-Fictional Enclave: “Transitioning to the Future? Af- to Decolonize the Science Fiction nism, the Anthropocene, and the Worldbuilding and Utopia” fects of Trans-Becoming in Con- Universe” Paradox of the Non-Human Utopia” temporary SF Short Stories” Leimar Garcia-Siino Kristina Baudemann Patrycja Sokołowska “Building Utopia: Examining Star Elisabeth Schneider “(Un)Worlding Colonialism: Indige- “I Can Feel a Great Age Ending: An Trek’s Utopia through Its Forms of “A Queering That Is None: Intersex- nous Futurisms and the Unsettling Ecocritical Reading of the Dishon- Entertainment” uality in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘All of SF in Virtual Reality” ored Series” You Zombies—’” PANELS E PANELS F

E4: ONTOLOGIES AND F1: AFROFUTURISM (SR34.D2) F2: REGENERATIVE PLAY F3: HUMANS AND/AS ARTI- EPISTEMOLOGIES I (SR34.D2) (SR34.K2) FICIAL CREATURES (SR34.04) Chair: Dietmar Meinel Chair: Katherine Bishop Chair: Gerald Farca Chair: Damian Podlesny

Elena-Brindusa Nicolaescu Andrew Shepard Joost Raessens Gwenthalyn Engélibert “World(ing) Transitions in Haruki “The History of Lions: Charles “Collapsus; Or, How to Make Play- “‘They don’t work as good as peo- Murakami’s 1Q84 and Boualem Saunders’ Imaro and the Revision- ers become Ecological Citizens” ple’”: Robots and Humans in Rich- Sansal’s 2084: The End of the ist Lost Race” (Skype) ard Matheson’s Short Stories” World” (Skype) Paweł Frelik M. Giulia Fabi “Regenerative Modding” Eftychia Misailidou Alexander Popov & Vladimir Pole- “Worlding Plantations with Armies “Rejecting Reality: What the Non- ganov of Slaves: Frederick Douglass’ and Gerald Farca human Hosts of Westworld Teach “How Readers World: The Poetics S. R. Delany’s Speculative Fictions” “Building a Sustainable Future Us about the Eternal Quest for of Ontology of World Creation as in Outer Space: Mass Effect: An- Self-Discovery” (Skype) Negotiation” Hugh O’Connell dromeda as Critical Ecotopia” “The Dialectics of African-Futurism Lisa Meinecke Karolina Lebek between SF Worldbulding and Neo- Alexander Lehner “My Own Humanity: (Post)Human- “Sound as a Principle of World- liberal Development” “Regenerative Play and Empathy: ist Worldings in the Star Trek Uni- building in Anna Smaill’s Novel The Prey as an Example of—and Reflec- verse” Chimes” Sean Guynes-Vishniac tion on—the Aesthetic Potential of “Afrofuturism’s Specter: Alternate Video Games” History, Racial Capitalism, and Nisi Shawl’s Everfair” PANELS F PANELS G

F4: POST-/TRANS-/NONHUMAN F5: ROGUES THREE (SR34.K3) G1: STAR TREK II: BEFORE G2: BEYOND PETRO- WORLDS (SR34.K1) DISCOVERY (SR34.04) MODERNITY II (SR34.D2) Chair: Christian Ludwig Chair: Mareike Spychala Chair: Sabrina Mittermeier Chair: Francis Gene-Rowe

Aparajita Nanda Gerold Haynaly E. Leigh McKagen Paul Graham Raven & Johannes “Transnational Worldbuilding: Cre- “Perry Rhodan: The Most Success- “Imperial Worlding: Adventure Nar- Stripple olized Futures in Octavia Butler’s ful Science Fiction Book Series ratives, Empire, and Brave New “‘Let’s put fossil fuels behind us’: Lilith’s Blood” Ever Written” Worlds in Star Trek: Voyager” Toward the Instrumentalization of Science Fiction as a Sandbox for Öznur Cengiz Loredana Mihani Ricarda Krenn Social Science” “The Conflict between Technology “That ‘most severe evil’: The Quest “Everybody Comes to Quark’s: and Oppression: Hillary Jordan’s for Knowledge at the Peril of Social Looking at Star Trek: Deep Space Graeme Macdonald When She Woke” Estrangement in Mary Shelley’s Nine through the Lens of Casablan- “Monsters in the Forecourt: SF’s Frankenstein” ca” Gas Stations as Future Energy- Miriam Köberl scapes” “Crossing the Boundary: Between Victor Kennedy Agnieszka Urbanczyk the Human and the Alien in Sid “The Icons of Science Fiction as “World Re-Building: Eschatologi- Tom Lubek Meier’s Alpha Centauri” Depicted in Animated Cartoons” cal Thought in the Science Fiction “Imagining Beyond Petro-Cultur- Genre as Exemplified by Star Trek” al Angst: World-Ecological Con- Pelin Kümbet sciousness in Octavia Butler’s Kin- “Transhumanist Worldbuilding in dred” (Skype) Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon” PANELS G

G3: AGE AND AGING (SR34.K2) G4: ONTOLOGIES AND G5: FROM THE MIDDLE TO THE EPISTEMOLOGIES II (SR34.K1) FAR EAST (SR34.K3) Chair: Roberta Maierhofer Chair: Katherine Bishop Chair: Manuela Neuwirth

Roberta Maierhofer Grant Dempsey Loic Aloisio “The Real and the Imagined: Spec- “Science Fiction and (Extra)Natu- “Worlding Chinese SF: Science ulations on Age and Aging as a Hu- ralism: Notes on the Ontological Fiction Universes as a Mirror of a man Condition” Complexity of SF and Its Worlds” Society Developing at Breakneck Speed” Katie Stone Chris Pak “Through the Eyes of a Child: Nov- “Modeling What Could Be Science Agnieszka Podruczna elty and Age in Octavia Butler’s Fiction’s Environmental Futures” “Sites of Contamination, Sites of Fledgling” Contaiment: Liminal Spaces and Peter Goggin Practices of Resistance in Larissa Sylvia Spruck Wrigley “Mars, Power, Place, and the Build- Lai’s Salt Fish Girl” “Pushing Grandma Out of the Air- ing and Unbuilding of Worlds” lock: The Representation of Older Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay Women in Science Fiction” “The Atemporal Future in Early Kalpavigyan” THE GREAT CLOMPING FOOT OF NERDISM STAMPING ON THE HUMAN FACE—FOREVER: WORLDBUILDING AND CONTRADICTION December 6, 2018 | 12 noon Water as its starting points, this paper will begin Meerscheinschlössl (Mozartgasse 3) to explore the importance of contradiction to the worlds, fictional and otherwise, that we build. Mark J.P. Wolf’s symptomatically encyclopedic, anatomizing but largely pre-critical Building Imaginary Worlds (2012) attempts to normalize one particular mode of building, and of consum- ing, imaginary worlds—a mode that suits Dis- ney’s tyranny over our cinema screens, ancillary media, and themed merchandizing. Taking M. John Harrison’s notorious provocation about MARK BOULD worldbuilding and China Miéville’s unseemly UNIVERSITY OF THE enthusiasm for J. R. R. Tolkien’s Watcher in the WEST OF ENGLAND SYSTEMS OF SEX AND GENDER December 7, 2018 | 5 p.m. me-sex relationships. Even human history is far HS11.01 (Heinrichstraße 36) more varied than “traditional” Western culture allows. This talk will look at the glorious variety Science Fiction has created many intelligent of animal and human approaches to sex and ge- alien species, but all too often these are simple nder, and will be illustrated with examples taken variations on the human pattern. In particular, from science fiction that manage to break away they tend to follow the binary gender structure from the cisnormative and heteronormative pat- and heterosexual relationship pattern that we tern, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gethenians are taught is “traditional” for humans, and which and Martha Wells’ Raksura. we often project onto the animal world and histo- ry. In practice, Earth‘s creatures exhibit far more variation in reproductive strategies than we give CHERYL MORGAN them credit for, exhibit fewer or more than two INDEPENDENT genders, and seem perfectly relaxed about sa- SCHOLAR WORLDING CRISIS, CRISISING WORLDS December 8, 2018 | 11.30 a.m. Day after Tomorrow (2004). AULA (Universitätsplatz 3) How do we tell stories about a planet where every year is just a little bit worse than the last As Kim Stanley Robinson has noted, climate one, and just a little bit better than the next change is not a crisis—not exactly. While “abrupt one, on and on down through the decades, until on geological scales,” even in its most dire, (somewhere in there) the future no longer looks worst-case scenarios, climate change narratives anything like the past? How do we tell stories will always entail “individual humans living vari- about a shift that is barely recognizable on the ants of ordinary life … daily life of a slightly differ- scale of the individual human life, but undeni- ent sort, and seldom more.” One of the greatest able in the circuit from grandparents to grand- difficulties in contemporary science fiction is children? finding ways to depict the full magnitude of the The strange temporality of climate change as ecological situation without resorting to the sort a perpetual not-yet, always arriving but never ar- GERRY CANAVAN of unrealistic, apocalyptic break we see in such rived, haunts not only contemporary science fic- MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY blockbuster films as Pacific Rim (2013) or The tion but all contemporary fiction; as Aaron Bady has memorably noted, all fiction set in the pres- ent today is really about climate change—just usually starring characters who are in denial. This keynote will thus take up perhaps the most urgent worldbuilding problem in science fiction today: How to depict a planetary crisis on a human timescale, how to make the sheer weirdness of our postnormal future available to the present without sensationalizing it or reduc- ing it into a ludicrous cartoon? LOÏC ALOISIO WORLDING CHINESE SF: FICTION Song who addresses issues about China’s un- UNIVERSES AS A MIRROR OF A bridled development and political interference; AIX-MARSEILLE UNIVERSITY SOCIETY DEVELOPING AT authors such as Chen Qiufan who tackle urban PANEL G5: FROM THE BREAKNECK SPEED life’s problems, unemployment and pollution MIDDLE TO THE FAR EAST Since “it is almost impossible to write a work issues; authors such as Hao Jingfang who are SR34.K3, DEC 8, 3.30PM of fiction set in another world—be it some alien concerned about pressing issues such as over- place or our own world in another time—which population and inequalities; and authors such as does not make some sort of statement about Ma Boyong, whose The City of Silence is a bitter the writer’s own real world,” it is not surprising satire of China’s internet censorship. that the authors of the “new wave” of Chinese science fiction express their fears and worries WORDS OF AFTER: REBUILDING AGNES AMINOT about China’s current and future situation. To THE WORLD THROUGH LANGUAGE CAEN UNIVERSITY this end, many of their works are rooted in to- AND HISTORY IN RIDDLEY WALKER PANEL C2: WORDS & WORLDS day’s Chinese society, and the worlds built by AND THE BOOK OF DAVE SR34.D2, DEC 7, 9.15AM these authors are not so far from China’s reality. Riddley Walker (1980) is set 2,000 years in the This paper will analyze alternative worlds cre- future, after a global nuclear conflict destroyed ated by some new waves writers which reflect the world. Riddley, the eponymous character, is issues facing Chinese society today, such as a twelve-year-old boy in an Iron Age England who pollution, overpopulation, sharp economic and lives, as his entire clan, through the mythical ren- social disparities, or political pressure. For this ditions of historical events reinterpreted through purpose, I shall focus on authors such as Han Punch and Judy shows. The Book of Dave (2006) is also a posta- ly not considered as paramount: after the ca- pocalyptic novel in which Dave Rudman—an tastrophes (nuclear warfare and global flooding) enraged, pathetic London cabbie living in the which wiped out humanity almost entirely, the early 2000s—writes a diary which becomes the reader comes face to face with strange attempts cornerstone of a violent cult, 2,000 years in the to organize society according to forgotten and future, in the remnants of a post-flood England. ill-adapted guidelines. This “book of Dave” is the only glimpse of the These two novels focus on the importance past the new, postdiluvian world can get, togeth- atrributed to history, cults, and myths as the er with misunderstood ruins from our civilization. bedrock on which their world must be built. In These new Middle Ages/Dark Ages reproduce a world shattered, fragmented by the nuclear their ancient History—and Dave’s terribly dull bomb or obliterated by a giant flood, landmarks present—as a mythical Golden Age. are gone. By focusing on the past and adorning Fantasies of building a new world order after it with new qualities, these novels question both the end of the old one pervade the postapoca- the notion of history and belief and their use as lyptic genre. However, in Riddley Walker, as in a political delusion. I will explore this aspect, The Book of Dave, this notion of novelty is clear- in partciular, as this new world, filled with new challenges ranging from human mutation to geo- Words portray the postapocalyptic world as a graphical misconceptions and displacements, dangerous forgery of the old one. In my presen- concentrates not on the possible creation of tation, I will examine this generic characteristic something new, but on the repetition of forgot- and its impacts, both for our present and their ten patterns in order to reach (in vain) the same future, as well as the individual paths of the main grandeur as their ancestors. characters in their quest for meaning and their One of the most prominent features of these search for stable historical landmarks. two novels is the unusual language in which the KRISTINA BAUDEMANN stories are written. Both works display a mock (UN)WORLDING COLONIALISM: version of what future English could be. The INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS AND THE UNIVERSITY OF FLENSBURG words and concepts used are mostly embedded UNSETTLING OF SF IN VIRTUAL REALITY PANEL D5: INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGIES in our modern popular culture. As such, the bla- On the occassion of Canada’s 150th anniversa- SR34.K2, DEC 7, 11.45AM tant discrepancy between this technological and ry, the ImagineNative Film & Media Arts Festival modern language and its Iron Age or medieval commissioned five Indigenous multimedia art- use emphasizes how misfit this postapocalyptic ists and filmmakers to create 2167, a virtual real- world is. ity (VR) project that would portray the reality of In- digenous people in Canada 150 years—or seven his 2008 book Colonialism and the Emergence generations—in the future. When presented at of Science Fiction. This colonial imprint makes the 2017 festival, two of these projections—Dan- the creation of sf worlds especially difficult for is Goulet’s VR The Hunt and Postcommodity’s Indigenous artists and other people of color VR Each Branch Determined—turned out to be who, African-Canadian and Taino/Arawak sf writ- sf worlds; one more—Scott Benesiinaabandan’s er Nalo Hopkinson reminds us, are constantly VR Blueberry Pie Under a Martian Sky—might be “under suspicion of having internalized … [their] interpreted as an abstract representation of the colonization” for liking, and creating, sf. Virtual sf metaphor of time and interdimensional travel. space has moreover been understood according In my talk, I will argue that all artists, in order to a Cartesian dualism of body/mind in Western to create their Indigenous futurisms (i.e., their In- scholarship—as Cree filmmaker Loretta Todd has digenous-centered visions of a future world), had already argued in the mid-1990s—and therefore to “unsettle” sf first. Familiar themes and tropes seems to exclude the expression of Indigenous such as the (post-)apocalypse, first contact, and visions of space, time, and corporeality. Drawing even the future itself are rooted in colonial imagi- on Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholarship naries, as John Rieder has convincingly argued in on sf, post-colonialism, and future imaginaries, I will trace how Goulet, Benesiinaabandan, and spondents all, and provided a useful and veri- the artist collective Postcommodity transform fa- similitudinous frame for authors from Samuel miliar representations, dismantle colonial mech- Richardson to Bram Stoker. In the second de- anisms, resort to traditional knowledges, and cade of the twenty-first century (your temporal even subvert the medium of VR itself to create coordinates, Dear Reader), the idea of sending immersions that allow their users to experience a letter, a real honest-to-god letter with ink on Indigenous-centered sf worlds. paper delivered through physical travel routes and handled by genuine humans along the way, KATHERINE E. BISHOP LIMINAL LETTERS: feels at first blush, if not unusually intimate, then CORRESPONDING WORLDS egregiously romantic. Unnecessary, perhaps. MIYAZAKI COLLEGE When one looks to origins of the novel as we Anachronistic, certainly. There are vastly faster PANEL C2: WORDS & WORLDS know it, the voluminous correspondence of the (if less literal) ways to reach out and touch some- SR34.D2, DEC 7, 9.15AM seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cen- one. And so the epistolary novel has fallen with turies often fill the spotlight. The then-efficient postal stock. Is it any surprise, then, that in many conveyors of news, life, and seductions were speculations of the future, there is no stock at familiar to contemporaneous readers, corre- all? Paper is rarely illuminated as a means of communication, letters rarely a mode (except, of agents, linking the private realms in which they course, for technologically retrograde, dystopian were created to the public ones from which they futures or e-communications). But epistles have were forbidden, forging new worlds. This presen- not wholly died, in speculative literature or in life. tation will consider the worldbuilding properties Epistolarity in sf includes stardated captains’ of speculative epistolary texts and ask how they logs, holographic pleas for help, letters from the maintain and play with the formal conventions of future, and even plant diaries. In this presenta- correspondence, rethinking pathways and mate- tion I will focus on the latter in Ursula K. Le Guin’s rialities of communication. Drawing on narratol- “The Diary of the Rose” (1976) and Sue Burke’s ogy, ecocritical philosophies, and systems theo- Semiosis (2018). ries, I will discuss how epistolary texts inscribed Historically, epistolary novels have created by and inscribing ecological subjects open a dia- bridges between the world of the text and that lectic space between human and nonhuman in- of the reader, exchange being the watchword of terlocutors, grafting the two, as philosopher Mi- correspondence. Moreover, they have birthed chael Marder might say, in the paused narrative spaces for writers, particularly women, often time of Anthropocene era correspondence, and disregarded by their peers as valid authorial rebutting Heidegger’s refusal of plants’ worlding. IREN BOYARKINA THE NEW WORLDS IN THE works, H. G. Wells, Aleksey Tolstoy, and Mikhail SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS BY Bulgakov offer various views on the ideal society UNIVERSITY OF ROME WELLS, TOLSTOY, AND BULGAKOV and the ways it should be achieved. PANEL E2: UTOPIAN WORLDS Science fiction is one of the few literary genres This paper will focus on Aelita (1923), The SR34.04, DEC 7, 3PM very closely concerned with the analysis and im- Heart of The Dog (1925), and The Shape of provement of society. Any significant work of sf Things to Come (1933). These novels are import- can be viewed as a kind of a research laboratory ant milestones in sf literature, as they represent in which the important trends in the development different views on the construction of the future of a society are studied and then extrapolated ideal society. Bulgakov seems to be critical about to an imaginary world for further analysis. This the ways bolshevics imagined the construction imaginary world is like a metaphor, a model for of a new world. The paper carefully analyzes the the sf writer to work with. Indeed, various forms motives of his criticism and compares them to of utopia have been occupying the minds of sf the principles advocated by Wells. Tolstoy, on the writers for hundreds of years, and these debates other hand, seems to be in favor of the revolu- became particularly prevalent after the Great tionary establishment of a new world, a socialist October Socialist Revolution in Russia. In their state. The protagonists of Aelita are even ready to help their extraterrestrial colleagues to fight produced super-intelligent dog as novum to the for their rights against their oppressors. In fact, “zero world.” The choice of the super-dog as the these ideas are somehow similar to the Wellsian novum is not incidental and serves different cog- ideal of the world state, which has influenced nitive purposes, which this paper will investigate. many important writers, artists, and filmmakers. JENNIFER BROWN These novels also address ethics and morals QUEERING HUMAN AND pertaining to scientific research. The novels by ALIEN CULTURES IN THE BOSTON COLLEGE Wells and Bulgakov also dwell on the issue of WAYFARER UNIVERSE PANEL B4: SEX & GENDER eugenics, the field that was later widely explored This paper will focus on gender, sexuality, and SR24.K3, DEC 6, 5.30PM by many prominent sf writers. A careful analysis their importance in constructing identity in Becky reveals that the influence of Wells on Tolstoi and Chamber’s Wayfarer universe. In the first book, Bulgakov is more substantial than it seems at gender, identity, and sexuality are all explored, first sight. In The Heart of The Dog, Bulgakov cre- although less explicitly than in the second. One ates an alternative world, namely, an imaginative instance of this is the existence of the character framework alternative to the author’s empirical Ohan, who is a Sianat Pair, or an alien infected environment, by introducing the experimentally with a virus that allows him the understanding of the space-time continuum and its mysteries. human body and avoid the government’s detec- Ohan and other Sianat Pairs are referred to as tion. Allowing AIs to have human bodies is illegal, a plural “they,” and when Ohan is cured of the just as gender reassignments were considered virus, Ohan is referred to in the singular mascu- illegal and illicit until recently. Sidra struggles line as a “he.” This still holds interesting possibil- with forming her identity and experiences dys- ities, though, as the Sianat Pairs are considered phoria as she attempts to grow accustomed to gender neutral, but with the loss of The Whisper her new mechanical body. Sidra provides us with (the virus), they gain a gendered identity. Ohan’s a study of an individual who experiences dys- character allows for an analysis of the shifting of phoria and is discouraged from showing her true a gender identity and the effect it has on a char- nature, which, I will argue, allows readers to es- acter’s identity as a whole. tablish parallels to transgender individuals and Both books deal with the construction of hu- their struggles in the real world. man and alien identities, although the second book is more straightforward in its study. The central character, Sidra, is an AI who is put in a “kit,” or a mechanical housing meant to mimic a AMY BUTT AS PLAIN AS SPILT SALT: examine the spatialization of social difference THE CITY AS SOCIAL STRUCTURE manifest in the soaring steel of Urras and the UNIVERSITY OF READING IN THE DISPOSSESSED bare brick of Annares. It will explore how sf can PANEL B2: URSULA K. LE GUIN “Abbenay was poisonless: a bare city, bright, the provide designers with an empathetic appreci- SR34.K1, DEC 6, 5.30PM colours light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet. ation of how the built environment reflects and You could see it all, laid out as plain as spilt salt. informs social relations, a vital tool for those in- Nothing was hidden,” wrote Ursula Le Guin in volved in designing our built future. The Dispossessed (1974). There is a growing call for consideration of We are in a critical moment for the writing sf when discussing the future of cities in ge- and building of our built futures. With 54% of ography, planning, and urban studies, but the the global population living in cities, the rapid source material is predominantly drawn from proliferation of urban infrastructures has the po- a limited selection of seminal texts referred to tential to both structure the patterns of our daily by geographers Kitchin and Kneale as “a canon lives and shape the future political and social of ‘approved’ authors, novels and films,” which action they contain. centers on the written work of H.G Wells, J. G. This paper will turn to The Dispossessed to Ballard, and William Gibson, and the films Me- tropolis (1927) and Blade Runner (1982). Along- it contains, to the reflections of urban isolation side the narrow selection of sf visions being dis- contained in the mirrored glass of Urras. This cussed within the urban design professions, the paper aims to enable a deeper understanding of architectural profession itself suffers a similar how the spatial depiction of these places relate constraint of perspective, with the percentage to their alternative social or political structures, of licenced female architects in both the US and to support what urban theorist David Harvey the UK standing at just 20%. terms the right to the city; “the right to change Examining the spaces of Le Guin encourages ourselves by changing the city.” and supports feminist readings and imaginings of our built future within a profession which is THE FABRIC OF THE CITY: AMY BUTT sorely lacking in these perspectives. The imag- SCARCITY AND SUSTAINABILITY UNIVERSITY OF READING ined worlds of The Dispossessed are rich with The built environment accounts for 45% of UK PANEL D2: BEYOND PETROMODERNITY: allusions to the metaphorical and social role of carbon emissions, with raw materials account- ALERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURES I the built environment, from the symbolic role of ing for 10% of this total. In response, debate SR34.K1, DEC 7, 11.45AM the wall which surrounds the space port and de- and legislation around sustainability looks to fines a freedom for Annares from the universe mitigate both the embodied energy of construc- tion materials and the energy requirements of Timothy Morton has it—or have been abstracted buildings in use. However, the relative value of through capitalism, as Andreas Malm has con- these considerations is inherently framed by the vincingly argued. conceptualization of energy as a resource com- This paper will draw on the work of architects modity and of architecture as an object-product Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri, who ad- within the neoliberal city. dress these issues by conceptually enclosing the As Jeremy Till has argued, a socio-material built fabric, an approach explored and extrapo- understanding of “scarcity” demands a move lated in sf. It will undertake a close reading of away from sustainability which looks to techni- the dome cities of Scott Russell Sanders’ Terrar- cally refine the building-object, to understand ium (1985) and the settlements in Kim Stanley the wider dynamics which construct and consti- Robinson’s Red Mars (1992) by looking at how tute scarcity. This requires that architects con- resource and energy scarcity drives the material sider systems of energy and resource production construction of buildings and the infrastructure and consumption which precede and follow the of energy production to maintain them, and the architectural project, systems which are either reciprocal impact that this has on the societies “massively distributed in time and space”—as they contain. Through this close reading, this paper will ing of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter argue that the worldbuilding of sf provides a (1850). The novel presents a technology-based vital space to reflect on frameworks of thought oppressive society attached to religious doc- regarding sustainability and scarcity, by making trines. Hannah Payne, the protagonist, is a mem- manifest abstract systems and inhabiting their ber of conservative understanding in which the impact. These novels demonstrate how the built ones involved in illegal affairs are excluded and environment is shaped by the political and eco- chromed with different colors depending on the nomic frameworks of the societies it contains, crimes they have committed. sentenced to be and conversely, opens the potential for alterna- chromed red because of the abortion she has tive constructions of place. undergone, Future America or the world in general Jor- ÖZNUR CENGIZ THE CONFLICT BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY dan fictionalizes is formed with technological CANAKKALE ONSEKIZ MART UNIVERSITY AND OPPRESSION: HILLARY JORDAN’S enhancements in the frame of authoritarian PANEL F4: POST-/TRANS-/ WHEN SHE WOKE attitude, in other words, the social structure is NONHUMAN WORLDS At first glance, Hillary Jordan’s dystopian novel in conflict with technology and obedience. Tech- SR34.K1, DEC 8, 9AM When She Woke (2011) seems to be a reimagin- nological products are mostly used as a way of ROXANNE CHARTRAND punishment method rather than restoration of BEYOND FICTION: PERFORMING THE human life. Furthermore, individual features, de- VIDEOLUDIC CYBERQUEER IDENTITY & PASCALE THÉRIAULT sires, and ideas are repugnant to the society’s Video game culture is heavily tainted with milita- UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL general point of view and result in violence and rized masculinity and has therefore often been PANEL D1: ROGUES TWO even death. Hannah’s arduous journey in order described as toxic (Consalvo 2012). The state SR34.D2, DEC 7, 11.45AM to escape from chrome procedure, violence, of this world, which is vastly harmful to women, and oppression reflects her transformation that people of color, and otherwise marginalized peo- means an individual struggle and awakening ple, could be explained by the military-industrial against common cruel perception. Thus, this origins of video games (Kline et al. 2003). How- paper aims to concatenate human figure and ever, there is an increasing feminist resistance harsh social atmosphere in terms of technolo- in both video game creation and gaming prac- gy-oriented life style with respect to posthuman tices. Faced with the homogeneity of the video approach. game landscape, several creators and margin- alized people are trying to reclaim the space by resorting to different political and technological strategies. The emerging AltGames movement in the margins of the videoludic industry seems to form where rules are defined by a computerized subvert video game conventions to create rad- entity and not by a physical one. ically different objects from typical games and In this presentation, we will explore the ways can be situated within the queer game studies in which the AltGames movement is in line paradigm (Shaw & Ruberg 2017), which propos- with posthumanist and transhumanist theo- es to understand games as a system of plea- ries, including Donna Haraway’s concept of the sure, power dynamics and possibilities. Games cyborg (1991), which poses the idea of a femi- are conceived as a space within which players nist and queer resistance within the space be- are allowed to explore and subvert rules, thus tween the individual and the machine, as well shifting the focus from the content of games to as Morton’s idea of the cyberqueer (1995) and their very essence. Ultimately, queerness inter- Wakeford’s theorization of the cyberqueer iden- rogates the notion of social norms and subverts tity (2000, 2002). These unique conceptualiza- them by being voluntarily counter-cultural (Hal- tions of the self aim to imagine a post-human berstam 2011). The queering of games can also identity which transcends the physical norms be seen as a way to perform a virtual identity, to and space, to the benefit of individuals and explore the notion of the self in a disembodied groups who subvert the norms of cisgendered masculine heterosexuality (Wakeford 1997). that aims to recrystallize identity within a virtual While the concepts of cyborg and the cyber- space, thus getting rid of physical imperatives of queer identity have long been a central theme identity performativity. As such, we will compare in the science fiction world, the videoludic me- two games which tackle both the thematic and dium allows to re-actualize these notions in two performative aspects of the cyberqueer in the different ways: On the one hand, some games gameworld, 2064: Read Only Memories (Mid- will openly repurpose the classical themes of cy- Boss, 2015) and Cibele (Nina Freeman, 2015), perbunk and cyborg science fiction, while others in order to identify the components of a radi- will use the concept in a performative way, allow- cally subversive form, approaching the ideal of BODHISATTVA ing the developers to actively engage in a “mind Haraway’s cyborg and Morton and Wakeford’s uploading” (Hauskeller 2012) creation process cyberqueer identity. CHATTOPADHYAY which represents a form of recrystallization of UNIVERSITY OF OSLO the self in the virtual space as it shifts the focus THE ATEMPORAL FUTURE PANEL G5: FROM THE MIDDLE from body identity to identity as a construct. IN EARLY KALPAVIGYAN TO THE FAR EAST: ASIAN SF In this sense, the AltGames movement could In this paper, I will argue that kalpavigyan writers SR34.K3, DEC 8, 3.30PM be seen as part of a posthumanist movement of the early 20th century located the present in an atemporal future; that is, they engaged in an- within a colonial moment for kalpavigyan makes ti-colonial strategies by dislocating the present necessary a different approach to the notion and using the present as a template for a possi- of future: creating an atemporal moment that ble future. The specific form of this strategy that I redefines the present as a stand-in for a possi- will describe here is one that I will call the “atem- ble future. Progress in this genre does not take poral future.” I will return to the concepts of the the shape of a movement through time—that is, mythologerm and the delocalized locale, which I from a past to a future—but into and within time, have developed in various publications over the making it atemporal. The events in these other last three years, but I will employ them specifical- adventures take place in a present that is not the ly in an attempt to understand a central conceit present, but the container of a possible future. NATALIA CHUMAROVA often taken for granted in science fiction, bor- rowing from anthropology (Rieder 2008)—that IVAN EFREMOV’S FUTURE WORLD PARIS-SORBONNE UNIVERSITY the genre engages in a spatialization of time. AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE SOVIET PANEL D3: SF FROM THE I contend that this argument needs to be SCIENCE-FICTIONAL IMAGINATION FORMER EASTERN BLOC II reexamined in the context of non-Anglophone According to Darko Suvin, Soviet science fiction SR34.04 (SKYPE), DEC 7, 11.45AM genres. Specifically, the lack of an open future literature can be divided into two Golden Ages: the 1920s and the 1960s. The second period edy, which literary means “Andromeda Nebula”) came with the Thaw and was characterized by provided a fictional universe for most of science the social aspect of its novels. The social, and fiction novels written in the 1960s. sometimes political, critique of the Soviet sys- In my presentation, I will explore the revo- tem was made possible by the very nature of the lutionary role of this novel in relation to Soviet fictional worlds depicted in those novels. science fiction literature at large. To do so, I will The author who started the renaissance of study the construction of a fictional future world, science fiction literature in USSR at the end of first established inAndromeda: A Space-Age the 1950s and who remained henceforth one of Tale and then used as the basis for the short the key figures throughout this period was writer story “Cor Serpentis” (1958) and the novel The and paleontologist Ivan Efremov. Scholars from Bull’s Hour (1968). I will describe and analyze different parts of the world (like the Canadian the components of this fictional world: edu- Darko Suvin and the Argentinian Pablo Capanna) cation, political organization, history, science, have, in fact, called the 1960s the “epoch of Ivan working environment, penitential system, etc. In Efremov.” Efremov’s novel Andromeda: A Space- my discussion, I will put particular emphasis on Age Tale (1957; in Russian Tumannost’ Androm- components closely related to Soviet social real- ity, which includes Efremov’s sources of inspira- ination, and thus allows readers to witness so- tion, such as Russian philosophy (e.g. Nikolaï Fe- cial change from afar. However, sf criticism has dorov), Russian and early Soviet science fiction largely treated worldbuilding as highly allegori- literature, and Western literature, especially the cal. Accordingly, what sf has lacked is a method novels by H.G. Wells. specific to the genre that allows for its unique structural conventions to be translated into crit- EVELYN DANIS THE SCIENCE-FICTIONAL ENCLAVE: ical analyses of the utopian ideas it imparts. In WORLDBUILDING AND UTOPIA my paper, I will present an experimental version SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Science fiction is dedicated to discussing change of such a method, born of Fredric Jameson’s no- PANEL E2: UTOPIAN WORLDS and varying human responses to change. Cog- tion of the utopian enclave. SR34.04, DEC 7, 3PM nitive estrangement, which may be likened to Jameson’s enclave requires that the social sit- worldbuilding, allows sf to imagine radically dif- uation at the time of its founding be concerned ferent societies, and the ways in which our own with some dilemma. This could be anything from society might change to meet the challenges political to epistemological. Importantly, there we face. In other words, the genre produces a is some specific issue that requires a solution. third-person perspective on the utopian imag- The enclave, for Jameson, is what produces that solution or at least draws attention to the Then, able to recognize and navigate the ab- solution’s requirement. But the enclave in our stract enclaves of their contemporary moment, world cannot be easily read. It only exists as an they are better equipped to produce solutions to abstraction until it reaches an end, that is, when the dilemmas their society faces. it stops being an enclave and instead fulfills the Because the enclave is a constant structure role of a societal norm, or a ruling regime. of all utopian sf, it allows identification of how the Where Jameson’s enclave is abstract, the sf novel is symptomatic of changes in real-world enclave is a function of worldbuilding. sf incor- enclaves, and thus how real-world utopian porates the enclave into its estranged world and thought changes over time. Therefore, a method thereby makes the stakes of—and solutions to— for tracking how sf performs this feat is useful that world’s problems available for the reader. for elucidating the messages of the sf extrapola- Thus, it parallels the way in which the real-world, tions of our time. abstract enclave changes over time. And this Using Jameson’s framework, I will identify the is more than purely descriptive. With these es- enclave as a structural literary device employed tranged analogues to real-world enclaves, read- by at least two of sf’s most prolific and lauded ers develop a better understanding of utopia. writers, Isaac Asimov and Ursula Le Guin, and extrapolated as a method for analyzing all uto- elements, such as advanced technologies and pian sf. aliens, as well as pseudo-scientific and occult concepts in their cosmogonies. RHODRI DAVIES HARD SCIENCE FAITH: Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of- SF IN POSTWAR NEW fered by cognitive narratology and the cognitive BIRKBECK COLLEGE, RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS science of religion, this paper will explore how UNIVERSITY OF LONDON As a literature supposedly grounded in a materi- the apparent tensions between the elements PANEL D4: SF BECOMES REAL(ITY) alist, secular tradition, sf might well be regarded employed by these groups in their world con- SR34.K3, DEC 7, 11.45AM as an unlikely mode within which to construct struction can be reconciled. Sf, through its religious narratives, yet the postwar era saw the exploitation of the hegemonic authority of “sci- emergence of a number of New Religious Move- ence” as a “name” (a Latour has it) and its own ments (NRMs) which did just that. Adherents increased cultural currency following the reali- of the “I AM” Activity (est. 1930s), The Church zation of rockets and atomic weaponry during of Scientology (est. 1953), Unarius Academy of the Second World War, enabled the articulation Science (est. 1954) and The Aetherius Society of epistemologies popularly assumed to be in (est. 1955) employed explicitly science-fictional competition—the scientific and religious. The genre’s increased status at that moment and the E-Meter of the Church of Scientology. Such the familiarity of “hard sf” motifs and those of imaginal cognition, long regarded in mystical the “occulture” popularized in the generically hy- traditions as providing access to a realm of re- brid texts of the pulp era, such as “psi,” the “hol- ality intangible to the external senses, and its low earth,” and “Root Race” theory, facilitated rescripting and reiteration, has parallels in hyp- their appropriation in imaginative worldbuilding notherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy, and self-narration. Proceeding through past- suggesting its efficacy as a means by which me- life regression, “passive” channeling, and the tarepresentational hierarchies and intersubjec- application of the “active” clairvoyant imagina- tive ontologies can be established and shaped. tion (Hanegraaff), these acts were themselves The science-fictional worlding of these NRMs lent further metarepresentational authority shows, I will argue, how sf can function to over- (Cosmides & Tooby) by the auto-mythologizing come the lingering discontinuities between the of the leaders who determined the narrative Enlightenment Project and our belated pre-mo- parameters of the group, the credentials of the dernity. They illustrate both how “genres … have sources of channeled narratives, and even the … colonized reality,” as Jameson has put it, and use of technological arbiters of veracity, such as sf “has come to be seen as an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility” (Csicsery- genres, such as fantasy, tend to be mapped. Sci- Ronay)—and perhaps serve to encourage more ence fiction is, by definition, most essentially dis- critical evaluation of its modern appeal and po- tinct for holding itself, as imaginative play, within tential as a repository for our hopes and fears in the domain of naturalist conceptions of possibil- an increasingly bleak world. ity and plausibility, whereas fantasy essentially exceeds or abandons that domain. GRANT DEMPSEY SCIENCE FICTION AND This paper will challenge the tendency to take (EXTRA)NATURALISM: NOTES ON for granted as an ontological given that differ- UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO THE ONTOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY ence between naturalist possibility/plausibility PANEL G4: ONTOLOGIES OF SF AND ITS WORLDS and extranaturalist conceivability, which is often AND EPISTEMOLOGIES II Theories of ontological and existential pluralism held to ground science fiction’s work as a clearly SR34.K1, DEC 8, 3.30PM in philosophy and anthropology have productive distinct genre ontology, drawing on philosophical implications for our understanding of science arguments for a radical reconception of existen- fiction as a genre. They challenge the ontolog- tial agency, on expressions of Indigenous ontolo- ical formulations onto which the boundaries gies achieved in collaborative anthropology, and between science fiction and other speculative non-Eurocentric futurisms and scientific imagi- naries. To this end, the paper will consider ways tiple potentials for articulation of its world(ing)s that science fiction or science-fictional worlds, with others. insofar as they are conceived as essentially nat- uralist, are not built on an ontological given, but WORLD TRANSACTION MICHEL DIESTER rather are both products of, and participants in, IN BLACK MIRROR UNIVERSITY OF PADERBORN other modalities of worlding, entangled dynam- This paper will suggest that science fiction PANEL A4: COHERENCE ically with the determinations of the naturalism films build and legitimize worlds by distinguish- AND DECOHERENCE in and for which they operate, extending those ing them from other inner-filmic worlds. In oth- SR24.K3, DEC 6, 3PM determinations beyond the field of the empirical er words, filmic worlds gain their cohesion and over that of the imaginary. coherence through a specific (temporal, spatial, The paper will accordingly ask what science and/or medial) distinction to an additional con- fiction might be if its concept were not so bound cept of a world that is depicted within the film. To to naturalism and will propose alternative on- illustrate this argument, the paper will turn to two tological conceptions of science fiction. It thus Black Mirror (since 2011) episodes: “San Junipe- proposes new directions for thinking on science ro” (S3E4) and “Hang the DJ” (S4E4). fiction as a genre ontology with complexly mul- In “San Junipero,” a gadget allows users to enter a virtual world for a couple of hours once world of the algorithm. In addition, the simulated per week (or in full after death). In contrast to a doubles neither have memories of an anteced- video game, for instance, the experience in the ent life nor do they know of a world other than virtual world is full. In other words, users experi- the simulated one. ence only the virtual world while the perception The relations betwenn the two worlds are of the original world is suppressed. In addition, very different in the two episodes: The simulat- the users do not navigate avatars through the ed world in “San Junipero” is aesthetic, while virtual world, but a younger version of them- in “Hang the DJ” the other world is anaesthetic selves and encounter other subjects with whom (Welsch 1990)—at least from the perspective they cohabit the virtual world of San Junipero. of the original world. Both episodes display di- “Hang the DJ” represents the inner workings verging tendencies of digital media: On the one of an algorithm which determines whether a po- hand they provide access to new spaces of expe- tential partner will be a match. The protagonists rience. Here, the observer is no longer situated are entirely simulated in the sense that their re- in an external position but is entering the image lated subject in the original world has no explicit space (Krämer 1995). On the other hand, digi- knowledge of what is happening in the simulated tal media produce algorithmic spaces in which a human observer is no longer needed. The algo- that succeeds or fails. rithm processes information and thus generates knowledge as an autonomous authority without “THEY DON’T WORK AS GWENTHALYN any human intervention at all (Lovink 2008). GOOD AS PEOPLE”: ROBOTS ENGÉLIBERT However, both of these spaces could be de- AND HUMANS IN RICHARD UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN BRITTANY scribed as worlds. MATHESON’S SHORT STORIES PANEL F3: HUMANS AND/AS According to Cassirer, worlds are not defined In several of his short stories, Richard Mathe- ARTIFICIAL CREATURES by matter in space or occurrence in time but by son builds worlds in which robots and humans SR34.04, DEC 8, 9AM a particular “system of events.” Drawing on this coexist and cannot be told apart. Robots are a idea, this paper will argue that the virtual worlds way for him to explore the solitude of his char- of Black Mirror establish a logic of organizing acters and their incompatibility with the society eventfulness. But this logic unfolds itself em- they live in. In “When the Waker Sleeps” (1950), phatically not until it is clearly distinguished from for example, human beings are used as tools another worldly form of organization. The world- to take care of the Machine, a great mechanic liness then emerges when the different system that allows the city to live. Drugged by doctors, of events sets up a relation, a world transaction these workers dream that they accomplish great M. GIULIA FABI things while they are merely oiling parts of the WORLDING PLANTATIONS WITH mechanism. In “Brother to the Machine” (1952), ARMIES OF SLAVES: FREDERICK UNIVERSITY OF FERRARA on the other hand, a robot experiences moral di- DOUGLASS’ AND MARTIN R. DELANY’S PANEL F1: AFROFUTURISM lemmas about the world he lives in and about SPECULATIVE FICTIONS SR34.D2, DEC 8, 9AM the kind of humanity his society develops (sell- My paper will explore the ways in which Freder- ing extraterrestrials as pets or confining old and ick Douglass and Martin R. Delany engaged with sick people to certain parts of the city). His won- the genre of speculative fiction in “The Heroic dering about the society he lives in and the pro- Slave” (1853) and Blake; or, The Huts of America duction of weapons to destroy human beings is (1859). I will argue that the framework of specu- perceived as a malfunction, but it also questions lative fiction allowed them to advance critiques what humans renounce and delegate to robots of the slave regime and to represent an opposi- and machines. tional understanding of slavery by centering on As I will suggest in this paper, Matheson’s the slave’s thought life and ethos of resistance. short stories hence focus on issues of marginal- I will examine Douglass’ and Delany’s use ity and solitude. In this way, these tales question of militaristic imagery to portray plantations as conformity and difference in his sf worlds. worlds teeming with widespread slave unrest, or- ganizing, and rebellion. In their works of fiction, polities that take shape in works that propose the slaves stand out forcefully against a ste- projects of social change covering the spectrum reotyped background of supposed docility and from emancipation to transnational slave revolt. contentedness. They emerge as a large army with a capillary network of spies and conspira- BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE GERALD FARCA tors of both genders and all ages. They possess IN OUTER SPACE: MASS EFFECT: VITRUVIUS HOCHSCHULE secret codes of communication, share a rebel- ANDROMEDA AS A CRITICAL ECOTOPIA PANEL F2: REGENERATIVE PLAY lious ethos, have the ability to read “the mere Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) follows a new SR34.K2, DEC 8, 9AM countenance … of the master … with astonishing utopian trend in contemporary sf and envisions precision” (Blake 11), mobilize religion against a faraway future in which humankind searches their masters, organize to liberate a slave ship, for a new home in the depths of space. The game and plan a general insurrection for the overthrow endows the player (in the form of PC Sara/Scott of slavery. Ryder) with the task of transforming the Helios Douglass’ and Delany’s speculative fictions cluster of the Andromeda galaxy into a liveable offer an alternative, black-centered portal into space of co-existence with different races—for the world of slavery and into the more egalitarian the supposedly Golden Worlds are not the prom- ised Utopias the Initiative expected. This attempt and imaginative work and the finding of solutions at a fresh start confronts the player with a con- to problems that plague the gameworld. This ex- flict between ideologies and (alien) ethnicities perience and virtual trial action may translate to she/he has to mitigate—the Angara/Roekaar the player’s (potential) struggle for Utopia in the (natives), Krogans (military), kett (colonizers), Ini- real world. tiative (colonizers)—and involves the player in a regenerative struggle for Utopia. LOST IN SPACE: VAST GAME WORLDS PAWEL FRELIK I will argue that the game thus foregrounds AND SPATIAL SCIENCE FICTIONS UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW the encounter with the Other (known from post- If worldbuilding is, indeed, one of the most dis- PANEL C1: MOVEMENT IS KEY colonial sf) and builds on the framework of the tinctive features of science fiction, then video SR34.K1, DEC 7, 9.15AM critical utopian plot. This plot framework has games may well be one of the genre’s most the protagonist/player encounter a better but privileged media. While many games rely on flawed world, where arising issues aggravate convoluted storytelling and complex character the continual struggle for Utopia and demand development, even more foreground their sci- negotiation between many parties. The notion of ence-fictionality through the creation of game- regenerative play is here then linked to ergodic worlds. Their narrative complexities notwith- standing, the Homeworld series (1999, 2000, with the games’ narrative cohesion and game- 2003, 2016), EVE Online (2003), and the Mass play management, but it also detracts from the Effect trilogy (2007, 2010, 2012) have been appeal of presumably unlimited space. There are widely praised for the expansiveness of their uni- exceptions, though. A number of games, which verses and their visual detail. can be described as space operas, feature In absolute terms, however, most fictional universes that are functionally, if not literally, gameworlds prove much smaller than they feel infinite. Whether it is Noctis IV (2000) with 78 bil- to be—the original World of Warcraft’s (2004) lion stars or No Man’s Sky (2016) with 18 quin- continent of Azeroth only stretched for 80 tillion of explorable celestial bodies, such texts square miles. Of course, space opera titles fea- redefine not only the meaning of the advertising ture much larger stellar systems, but, again, their slogan “vast game universe” but also the very landing missions are limited to relatively small ar- nature of gameplay. While some titles belonging eas (e.g. all landfall missions in Mass Effect) and to this relatively small group are equipped with galaxies count mere dozens of stars and plane- systems of missions and quests, in many, the tary systems at best. Such territorial trimming is, experience of playing is shifted from action- and in most titles, dictated by very practical concerns task-based engagement to free-wheeling explo- ration. of space opera in all media. In this, such games In my presentation I will first describe this truly instigate a sense of alienness, which the particular variety of space flight simulators (the genre has long sought to convey, and reflect the name used for such games most frequently), ongoing revision of human agency occasioned by illuminating selected titles and describing their Anthropocenic processes. shared characteristics. My main argument will be that thanks to their near-infinite universes, REGENERATIVE MODDING PAWEL FRELIK such games dramatically redefine a mode of lu- The scope of regenerative gaming is fairly broad: UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW dic engagement that is novel for both the medi- from eco-games to non-confrontational game- PANEL F2: REGENERATIVE PLAY um of games and the genre of science fiction. On play to utopian game spaces. In this panel dis- SR34.K2, DEC 8, 9AM the one hand, their focus on spatial exploration cussion, I would like to focus on one more form: can be taken for a throwback to the spatiality of regenerative modding. While a prominent major- early sf texts. On the other, though, it can be con- ity of the world of mods seeks to streamline and/ strued as a de-humanizing gesture which helps or enrich the game experience aesthetically or convey the in/non-humanity of space and the functionally, there is a small but definite tradi- folly of human narrative that permeates much tion of mods that could be called “restorative” or “ecological.” These include Ecology Mod for existence. In his novel Under the Skin (2000), Minecraft, numerous environmental mods for Michel Faber creates such an alternative (and Skyrim (2011), and Wasteland Restoration Mod allegorical) world, where a group of extraterres- for Fallout 3 (2008). At the same time, however, trials runs a small animal husbandry that farms the relative rarity of such game modifications humans and produces meat for the rich back on reflects the predominantly exploitative nature their planet. By focusing on the daily routines of of most titles in the medium: given almost un- the main protagonist, such as picking up hitch- limited modding affordances, what is modded hikers for the meat production, the novel centers speaks as loud as what is not. on the aspect of (self-destructive) choice both on the side of the aliens and the humans, and thus IANA GAGARINA WORLDING FOOD: questions an essential definition of humanity. THE FAMILIAR AND THE STRANGE In my presentation, I will focus on the ways UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ The “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin) charac- in which Faber constructs this fictional world PANEL C4: ROGUES ONE teristic of science fiction makes possible the by making it at fist appear familiar, then bend- SR34.K3, DEC 7, 9.15AM stepping-out of a familiar environment and the ing, perverting, and turning the known into the offering of a new way of evaluating our present unknown, the familiar into the strange in an attempt to reveal the ambivalent logic behind tion and portrayal of a working utopian future some of the fundamental choices people make: landscape as Star Trek. The Federation’s (and the human becomes animal, the alien becomes by extension the franchise’s) claim to have abol- human, the hunted becomes the hunter. I will ished hunger, strife, poverty, war, racism, bigotry, discuss how Faber explores the conventional oppression, and greed—and to have established understanding of the dominance of the human a moralistic ethos of personal and societal bet- being in a wider universe and how justifications terment—is the foundational premise repeated for farming humans—sometimes expressed as across the shows and films. Countless articles compassion or remorse—question this estab- and book chapters have been written on the sub- lished assumption. ject of the utopian politics and social dynamics of the Star Trek universe. LEIMAR GARCIA-SIINO BUILDING UTOPIA: EXAMINING One aspect which seems to have remained STAR TREK’S UTOPIA THROUGH unexplored, however, is what the franchise’s ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY COLLEGE ITS FORMS OF ENTERTAINMENT love affair with our own (pre-22nd-century) liter- PANEL E2: UTOPIAN WORLDS No other science fiction television program in ature and history reveals about its representa- SR34.04, DEC 7, 3PM history has been as successful in the construc- tion and regards for utopia and utopian ideals. In The Literary Galaxy of Star Trek (2006), James do the holosuite programs, novels, and plays re- Broderick analyzes the gamut of literary refer- veal about the Federation’s culture? Then, in par- ences made by and through ST, and in chapter allel, I will analyze the subtextual implications of twenty, “The Quest for Perfection,” he explores this representation against ST’s overall utopian the shows’ basis, portrayal, and even criticism discourse for what it contextually and metatextu- of utopia, but he makes no connection between ally conveys to the viewer. the two. Moreover, the question of whether ST’s SARAH M. GAWRONSKI literary transtext is compatible with idealistic “THERE ARE ALWAYS TWO utopian aspirations is left unasked and unan- SIDES, ARENT’ THERE?”: THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA-LAFAYETTE swered. LINES THAT DIVIDE US PANEL B4: SEX & GENDER In this paper, I propose to examine not only It is often believed that when women create their SR24.K3, DEC 6, 5.30PM how the literary transtext fits in with ST’s utopian own community away from the war-mongering, philosophy, but whether its presence as part of aggressive nature of patriarchy, it is a commu- the in-universe modes of entertainment is con- nity of harmony and peace. Kit Reed counters gruent with a utopian society. Entertainment is this argument in her science fiction short story shaped by culture and shapes it in turn, so what “Songs of War” (1974); however, more fiction than not portrays women as the more peaceful tury feminist utopias, these three post-apocalyp- of the two genders. Just because authors repre- tic fictions offer a far more brutal reality should sent them as peaceful does not mean, however, division occur. that women are passive. To protect their societ- I will demonstrate that the three texts probe ies from men’s war-mongering, they must also into all the unique problems that are a result of become a society of warriors—and a society of dividing the genders. Their inventiveness, I will mothers. argue, provide an illuminating examination into This paper will focus on Suzy McKee Charnas’ how women are indeed the foundation of rebuild- Motherlines (1978), Joanna Russ’ The Female ing society. FRANCIS GENE-ROWE Man (1975), and Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988). These three texts epit- JUST HOW CAN WE TELL ROYAL HOLLOWAY, omize the propensity of feminists to fight back ALTERNATIVES TO PETROREALITY? UNIVERSITY OF LONDON against male domination by imagining a world KALADESH: AN INSTRUCTIVE FAILURE PANEL D2: BEYOND PETROMODERNITY: where men and women are physically divided by In 2016, the games company Wizards of the ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURES I some tangible means: a desert, a gate, a swiftly Coast released Kaladesh, an expansion to their SR34.K1, DEC 7, 11.45AM constructed barrier. Unlike the nineteenth-cen- popular trading card game, Magic: The Gath- ering. Kaladesh depicted—via card art, online in-game depiction of aether) was “energy,” and stories, game mechanics, etc.—the world of Ka- the majority of cards featuring it were aesthet- ladesh, a place of boundless technological cre- ically aligned with either the rebel artificiers or ativity, vibrant metropolitan culture, and harmo- Kaladesh’s animal species, rather than the Con- ny between civilization and nature. Kaladesh’s sulate. politics were progressive, its world centered Kaladesh, then, depicted a quasi-utopia of around non-white culture and featured same- boundless energy, seemingly antithetical to sex relationships and post-binary life forms, oil capitalist reality. However, Kaladesh’s pro- whilst its storyline revolved around political con- gressive politics collapse under closer scrutiny, flict between heterotopian communities of arti- whilst the energy mechanic was considered ficiers and a colonial Consulate. Underpinning “parasitic,” contributing to oppressive, homoge- these elements was Kaladesh as a world brim- neous gameplay. So long as your deck revolved ming with aether, a ubiquitous and seemingly around accumulating and consuming energy, the limitless source of fuel, serving as inspiration mechanic outstripped any alternative. Ultimate- for artificiers’ inventions and shaping the world’s ly, aether/energy behaves like oil, and both the biosphere. Kaladesh’s flagship mechanic (and gameplay it engenders and the fictive world it overflows are extensions of petromodernity This origin or human introduction has instigated fic- paper sets out to evaluate both the shortcom- tions of planetary construction and destruction ings and the possibilities of transmedia story- in SF film and literature. As such, Mars fiction is telling and worldbuilding systems as avenues for rhetorically complex and serves as a mirror on creating alternatives to petroreality. human ambitions, deviances, and endeavors on Earth. Multiple knowledges of engineering and PETER GOGGIN MARS: POWER, PLACE, technology, scientific discovery, geography, ste- AND THE BUILDING AND reotypes, literary genres, performance, and so ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY UNBUILDING OF WORLDS forth, are intertwined in co-constructed theories PANEL G4: ONTOLOGIES From the earliest recorded observations of the of material and imagined realities. AND EPISTEMOLOGIES II planet Mars in astronomy, myth, and legend from As theoretical physicist and feminist theorist SR34.K1, DEC 8, 3.30PM ancient Egypt to contemporary science fictions Karen Barad would argue, these constitutive the- of alien invasion, colonization, rebellion, and ories and phenomena are intra-active: “Discur- terraforming, Mars has held a special place of sive practices and material phenomena do not significance in the human imagination. The pos- stand in a relationship of externality to each oth- sibility of life on Mars, whether by native organic er; rather the material and discursive are mutu- ally implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity.” SCIENCE/FICTION— JULIA GRILLMAYR The agency of Mars is thus articulated in both THE MOST PROLIFIC OXYMORON: UNIVERSITY OF ART the materiality and fiction of Mars as ontological CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION AND DESIGN LINZ co-constituents in its existence in the cosmos LITERATURE AND SCENARIO WRITING PANEL D4: SF BECOMES REAL(ITY) and in human consciousness. In this presenta- The usually rather quarrelsome science fiction SR34.K3, DEC 7, 11.45AM tion, I will discuss evolving rhetorical constructs community seems to agree on one declara- of power, place and sustainability in selected tion: Science Fiction is an oxymoron (see Suvin, examples of Mars fictions of the 20th and early Csicsery-Rosnay, jr., Stableford, Sterling). Sf con- 21st centuries such as H.G. Wells’ The War of stantly negotiates scientific accuracy and artistic the Worlds (1897), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Prin- freedom. This negotiation has led to the creation cess of Mars (1912), Kim Stanley Robinson’s of opposing labels, like hard/soft or extrapola- Red Mars (1992), and Andy Weir’s The Martian tion/speculation. In addion, it has led to an am- (2011), among others. biguous public image of sf writers, who are often characterized as eccentrics, writing the most quirky, funky, and improbable books. On the oth- er hand, they are regarded as the experts and public intellectuals of the future. including Kim Stanley Robinson (Everything At present, the idea that sf literature predicts Change Climate Fiction Contest), Bruce Sterling the future is rather frowned upon among sf fans, (Tomorrow Now [2002], the Twelve Tomorrows critics, writers, and academics. At the same series [since 2014]), and Neal Stephenson (Proj- time, one can observe a growing trend for bring- ect Hieroglyph [est. 2011]). ing together science and fiction for purposes of In my paper, I will present first results of the futurology. “Scenarios” have become omnipres- research project “Science Fiction, Fact & Fore- ent. Traditionally, scenario texts were simple and cast,” which compares these contemporary short “what if”-thought experiments. Today how- “scenario” texts to sf literature. Central ques- ever, they increasingly assume literary shapes. tions of my analysis are: In which ways does lit- Futurists in think tanks, universities, and cor- erary extrapolation and speculation relate to the porations encourage writers, scientists, and future? What can (sf) literature express about the public to write “scenarios” in ways that they the future, while simple thought experiments fall become indistinguishable from sf short stories. short? What are the narrative strategies under- In addition, more and more acclaimed sf writers lying these science-fictional scenarios? What engage in the discussion about the near future, does this scenario-writing trend mean for sf as a genre? tasies of annihilation. The phenomenon of global weirding signals a crisis of categories—in particu- BEATA GUBACSI ANXIETIES OF ANNIHILATION lar that of the notion of “human.” AND HUMANIMAL FUTURES IN JEFF Global weirding is most visible in the emerging UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL VANDERMEER’S WORLDBUILDING discourse of critical posthumanism and its recent PANEL E1: GREENING SF “Global weirding,” a term coined by Hunter development of turning to animal and climate SR34.K3, DEC 7, 3PM Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Insti- studies, and advocating the “porous” nature of tute, and popularized by Thomas L. Friedman, subjectivity and thought. Blurred boundaries of columnist at The New York Times, is a suggest- human and non-human, experimenting with ex- ed substitute for “global warming” and “climate pressions of nonhuman sentience are the key change,” for these expressions have been hi- aesthetic and conceptual features of Jeff Vander- jacked by political discourse, and as a result are Meer’s work. In my paper, I will explore the com- no longer descriptive of the complex changes plexities of worldbuilding in Jeff VanderMeer’s the world is facing. I would argue that “global Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) and Alex Gar- weirding” should also refer to current aesthetic land’s adaptation Annihilation (2018). I will and philosophical shifts, as a sublimation of fan- argue that their strategies of worldbuilding are informed by apocalyptic visions, global weirding, instead that Everfair achieves its pan-Afrodias- and posthuman thought. poric framing of a hopeful futurism by remaking the past through the genre of alternate history. SEAN AFROFUTURISM’S SPECTER: ALTER- Shawl’s novel narrates a socialist revolution NATE HISTORY, RACIAL CAPITALISM, in King Leopold’s Belgium Congo Free State in GUYNES-VISHNIAC AND NISI SHAWL’S EVERFAIR the 1890s and the establishment of a free Af- MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY In this paper, I will focus on Nisi Shawl’s novel rican state comprised of indigenous Africans, PANEL F1: AFROFUTURISM Everfair (2016) as evidencing contemporary African Americans, white and mixed-race Euro- SR34.D2, DEC 8, 9AM Afrofuturism’s simultaneous embrace of futur- peans, and freed Chinese indentured laborers. It ism and countermemory in its efforts to imag- charts the birth of a utopian Afrofuturist project ine, create, and embody a world hospitable to by asking “what if” the most devastating geno- black folks and other people of color. In doing cide in modern African history had become the so, I want to complicate Kodwo Eshun’s under- cause for anti-colonial struggle. Like other black standing, in his essay “Further Considerations writers of alternative histories, such as Steven on Afrofuturism,” of the relationship between Barnes and Colson Whitehead, Shawl rethinks futurity and history in Afrofuturism, and argue a pivotal moment in the history of black oppres- sion, one that represents a flashpoint in the life italism in the history of blackness is what moti- of racial capitalism. In Everfair she offers a new vates Afrofuturism’s constant return to the past temporality for imagining utopian possibilities even as it demands better futures in the worlds springing from the atrocities of the commodifica- it makes. tion of black labor, bodies, and life. Though focused on a reading of Shawl’s Ever- SEMIOTIC CONCEPTS OF GRAVITY: NORBERT GYURIS fair, this paper will contextualize the relationship SIMULATION VS. REPRESENTATION UNIVERSITY OF PÉCS between Afrofuturism as a political mode of cul- IN UPSIDE DOWN PANEL D1: ROGUES TWO tural production and the alternate history genre “What if love was stronger than gravity?” The SR34.D2, DEC 7, 11.45AM as a unique articulation of science-fictional French-Canadian science fiction movie Upside worldbuilding. I willshow that Afrofuturist alter- Down (2012) is organized around this roman- nate histories represent a key textual-political tic question—and its utopian answer rejects ground for contesting the intersection between the rhetoric nature of this proposal. With the discourses of history, power, race, capital, and juxtaposition of emotion and physics, the film empire. I will argue that Shawl’s Everfair makes designates a set of more or less precisely artic- the claim that the legacy/memory of racial cap- ulated problems (i.e., the binary logic of attrac- tion, choice, action and reaction, matter and relocate the double nature of upside and down- anti-matter, etc.) and places them into the con- side, inside and outside, Self and Other, and the cepts of both existing and theoretically possible countless miniscule, superficial everyday bina- notions of gravity. The demonstration of parallel ries sustained for practical purposes. modes of gravity is self-reflexive in the film: both CHRIS HALL the scope and the mode of representation are TARKOVSKY’S SOLARIS: ordered by a binary logic, which eventually dis- SETTLING THE OTHERWORLDLY SELF UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS solves into gravitational unity by the end of the In the closing moments of Andrei Tarkovsky’s PANEL D3: SF FROM THE narrative. 1972 film Solaris, the camera rises from a scene FORMER EASTERN BLOC II As I will demonstrate, Upside Down attempts of apparent homecoming for protagonist Kris SR34.04, DEC 7, 11.45AM to tear down and de(con)struct the upturned, Kelvin, who had spent a traumatic and intermi- double iconicity of the mirrored and inverted nable portion of the film aboard a space station ways of seeing the world; moreover, apart from based at the planet Solaris. As this final shot juxtaposing the concepts of Newtonian gravity retreats into the atmosphere, it becomes clear and quantum gravity, the protagonist’s simulat- that Kelvin has not returned to Earth, but has ed gravitational identity seeks to subvert and in fact entered a replication of his memory of home, one produced upon the liquid surface of setting-forth of a world that allows a glimpse at the planet through a collaboration between Kel- the essence of being in the imaginary. In this vin’s memories and the planet’s capacity for ma- way, I will bring Lacan together with Heidegger terially manifesting human remembrance. The to reframe how we world the unconscious, and event is a colonization of Solaris, a homemaking how entering into co-becoming with the non-hu- with an other-world, whereby Kelvin territorializ- man reveals the processes of imposing episte- es the planet by taking flight into himself. This mological worlds on spatial ones, as we witness process allows for the male reproduction of the Kelvin’s creation of a world that is also a mirror. unknown self—the reinsertion of Kelvin into the MAGDALENA HANGEL Lacanian imaginary through a re-presentation THE CONSTRUCTION OF SEXUALIZED of the mirror through which we begin to become VIOLENCE AND ITS REPRESENTATION UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA aware of ourselves as individuals in the world of IN THE WORK OF URSULA K. LE GUIN PANEL B2: URSULA K. LE GUIN signs. My paper will approach the construction of sex- SR34.K1, DEC 6, 5.30PM In my reading of the film, I will treat Kelvin’s ualized violence in literary representations of settling of Solaris as a colonization of the planet alternative societies. While these types of soci- that is also a colonization of his own mind, the eties may be found within the genres of science fiction, utopian literature, fantasy, and feminist much more frequently and, thus, sexualized vi- fabulation, I will argue that Ursula K. Le Guin laid olence is deeply entrenched in the structure of a great groundwork in her approach of anthropo- such a society. To stress the direct connection logical science fiction when it comes to thinking between sexualized violence and violence and alternative societies and their hierarchies. power, I prefer using the term “sexualized vio- Accordingly, I will analyze the relationship be- lence” to “sexual violence” or “sexual abuse.” tween power and discrimination and the narra- I will explore sexualized violence to identify tives of rape cultures in literary works. I will use the relationship between the oppression of indi- of the term “rape culture” as the understanding vidual characters and the worlds they inhabit. I of a culture that does not only trivialize and dis- will discuss several novels and short stories by cursively erase the existence of sexualized vio- Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The lence, but also accepts it as a “normal” expres- Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), The sion of human sexuality. Furthermore, due to the Word for World is Forest (1972), and “A Woman’s binary construction of gender, which conceptu- Liberation” (1995). My paper will not only high- alizes one (woman) as “weaker” and the other light Le Guin’s feminist criticisms of sexualized (man) as “stronger,” the weaker one is victimized violence/rape culture, violence, colonialism, and sexism, but also try to establish an intersectional tion is trying to replicate this set of interlocking approach to sexuality and consent in her work. narrative, industrial, and communicative strate- gies, albeit with varying degrees of success. DAN HASSLER-FOREST TRANSMEDIA WORLDBUILDING In this talk, I will discuss the implications of AND INDUSTRIAL CONVERGENCE this media strategy from the perspective of po- UTRECHT UNIVERSITY IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM litical economy. Using the Marvel Cinematic Uni- PANEL A1: FRANCHISING In a media landscape where the most profitable verse as my primary case study, my paper will SR34.D2, DEC 6, 3PM media franchises are based on comic books and foreground how the complex ecosystem that the most vocal audiences are gamers, every has been carefully cultivated around this cen- entertainment conglomerate is reaching for the tral media property combines communication brass ring of accessible and immersive trans- strategies and narrative conventions from the media worldbuilding. The Disney Company has comic book industry, while adapting its commu- mastered this game more than any other, as Star nications and promotional tactics to a media Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have environment where gamer culture has become a become the most profitable global media fran- powerful online subculture that must simultane- chises. Every other transnational media corpora- ously be courted and condemned. GEROLD HAYNALY PERRY RHODAN: THE MOST tion processes to turn two black holes spin- SUCCESSFUL SCIENCE FICTION ning around and smashing into each other into INDEPENDENT BOOK SERIES EVER WRITTEN acoustic data. Soon, these sound phenom- PANEL F5: ROGUES THREE Aliens, faster-than-light ships, time travel, col- ena were presented as astronomic acoustic SR34.K3, DEC 8, 9AM onization, and war—the universe of Germany’s proof and paraphrased as sounds from space, longest-running science fiction series has always such as “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony” and been a mirror of its time. Perry Rhodan author “Sounds from the Distant Universe”—titles which Gerold Haynaly will discuss 57 years of ongoing mis-communicate the original scientific aims, adventures. but sonically made up stories of distant black holes, closely linked to science fiction. CHRISTINA HEINEN MUSIC OF BLACK HOLES AND SOUNDS Although most people know that what they FROM SPACE: LIGO SONIFICATION AND are listening to is not physically “astronomic UNIVERSITY OF OLDENBURG THEIR CREATIVE SIDE-EFFECTS sound” or “the sound of black holes,” these PANEL A2: WORLDBUILDING In 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitation- acoustic representations and the prospect of BEYOND STORYTELLING al-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected cosmic listening to something from space is a popular SR34.K1, DEC 6, 3PM gravitational waves. Scientists used sonifica- idea which fires up people’s imaginations and inspires creativity. While music producers pres- the stuff of playbor. Science-fictional themes are ent their LIGO remixes on YouTube, which invite the most popular subject of eurogames. How do the listener to go “beyond,” scientists create science-fictional board games realize their eco- new genres of literature and blog posts, in which nomic themes differently than other forms of sci- science and fiction get intermingled. This paper ence-fictional media? What are the potentialities will engage with these aesthetic side-effects of this developing form? by illustrating both the creative manipulation of The title of my paper is taken from popular LIGO sound data and the figurative discourses of space opera empire builder Race for the Gal- “astronomic sound.” axy (2007), which allows players to produce a va- riety of resources on appropriate planets (move ERIN HORÁKOVÁ IV, IV $, V option V), harvest these for double victory points Many entertainment options involve prerequi- (option IV), or turn them into cards (option IV) UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW site purchasing decisions, but gaming is unique that, when played (or spent/discarded to enable PANEL A3: PERFORMING WORLDS in being deeply economic in the actual activity another card to be played), will allow players to SR24.K2, DEC 6, 3PM of play. Resource and project management, en- settle worlds (option III) and construct a variety gine building, and worker placement become of mechanical “developments” that will build their tableaux-engine (option II). thing quite unique as vehicles for iteration, in- This survey will look at a variety of themat- volving experience and thought experiment. ic and mechanical gaming “subgenres” and explore titles like the cyberpunk card game THE FUTURE—WOULDN’T THAT BE NICE? ERIN HORÁKOVÁ Android: Netrunner (2012–18), with its corpo- How does sf television imagine the post-eco- UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW ration vs. hacker duel system. It will also touch nomic? In Doctor Who (1963–89; 2005–), the PANEL C3: SCARCITY & ABUNDANCE on the more “hard SF” corporate wrangles of title character is a free agent almost entirely be- SR34.04, DEC 7, 9.15AM Terraforming Mars (2016) and the agrarian ste- yond reliance on resources. He dips into various ampunk area control resource generation game situations to perform labor or skim experiences Scythe (2016). To my knowledge, these titles and materials, but does not lastingly enter into have yet to be conceptualized and discussed as the chain of consequences associated with giv- economic play systems, or considered alongside en places and times. But is the Doctor, a Time other science-fictional media. This is perhaps Lord, truly post-economic, or does he simply oc- something of a lacuna, for while board games cupy a privileged role familiar from many classic are hard-pressed to compete with, for example, swashbuckler narratives, which relegate the re- novels in terms of narrative, they offer SF some- sponsibilities involved in their protagonists’ aris- tocratic positions to the background in favor of employment, but it is fairly evident that this soci- presenting them as agents with limitless oppor- ety could support its citizens’ basic subsistence tunities for movement and intervention? It is, at with negligible labor; that the Federation “makes least, an individualist treatment of post-scarcity. work” for itself (TNG [1987–94] suggests as The more communal Star Trek presents us much). While we briefly see punitive prison la- with an economy that, after TOS (1966–69), bour in Voyager (1995–2001; which drifted far transitions beyond the use of currency, yet is from the logic of TOS), we don’t get much insight still energy-reliant (replicator use is rationed) into how the Federation sources its sanitation and dependent on the acquisition of difficult or engineers, how people gain or lose the right to impractical to replicate materials. Causality and live on Earth itself, and what motivates colonial consequences remain important in this future, settlement. and people almost universally elect to perform While neither program requires its core pro- jobs according to a utopian News from Nowhere tagonist(s) to work to live, these characters logic (though with less transient and voluntary choose intensive vocational work to give their labour conditions). It’s not clear whether a Fed- lives meaning. More people will see series like eration citizen can opt out of pursuing some these than will read, for example, Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. The television series’ lengths and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. give them a chance to show their economic These texts have been mobilized by artists and paradigms playing out in a variety of (some- activists in relation to urban and environmen- times jangling and mutually unintelligible) ways. tal justice activism as well as approaches fore- Thus, by talking about these major depictions of grounding the centrality of racial capitalism to “post-economic” futures, we can discuss what ecological devastation (Pulido & de Lara 2018), sf, pretty much the only artform dealing with the but they are also objects of more private, mun- question, presents to mainstream, non-fannish dane, and low-key readerly interest and plea- audiences as possible ways for people and soci- sure. eties to operate after scarcity. My paper will draw on data from the Prospect- ing Futures online project. This research has MIRANDA IOSSIFIDIS USES OF SCIENCE FICTION: EVERYDAY focused on everyday online reading practices, READERS, AMBIGUOUS HOPEFUL- exploring how readers are invested in discuss- NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY NESS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ing science fiction, and the different possibilities PANEL D4: SF BECOMES REAL(ITY) This paper will explore creative and interpretive that online spaces create for readers to collec- SR34.K3, DEC 7, 11.45AM responses to Octavia Butler’s Parable series tively, creatively, and critically (re)imagine them- selves, the world, and futures. Focusing on the acters and readers with a plurality of realities, ways in which these books are nourishing and which are (potentially) fictional. The existence of generative for different readers, the articulation alternate worlds in these two novels, their rela- of ambiguous hopefulness, distinguished from tionships, and the concomitant disintegration of “confidence” through its careful grounding in the borders can be interpreted by applying the sci- material conditions of the present. entific principles of decoherence, as formulated by H. Dieter Zeh and Hugh Everett III. This set of MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIĆ DE/COHERENCE IN solutions to the perennial ontological puzzles of PHILIP K. DICK’S UBIK AND quantum worlds is characterized by the rejection & MILAN M. ĆIRKOVIĆ THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE of the oberver’s special status in physical reality UNIVERSITY OF K. MITROVICA Philip K. Dick’s worldbuilding mechanisms call and the perpetual, fractal branching of the state & ASTRONOMICAL for the deconstruction and reconstruction of of the universe. OBSERVATORY OF BELGRADE the idea of reality by pushing the horizon of ex- According to the scientific principle of deco- PANEL A4: COHERENCE pectations far beyond the classical set of genre herence, not only would all parallel worlds with- AND DECOHERENCE tropes. His novels Ubik (1969) and The Man in in the multiverses of Ubik and The Man in the SR24.K3, DEC 6, 3PM the High Castle (1962) confront both the char- High Castle be equally real and actualized, but there would also be no need to “choose” the final entific discourse in an attempt to indirectly test state of the protagonists and to single out one the quantum multiverse theory. reality as actual, or more real than the others, as MAXIMILIANO JIMÉNEZ they would all be equally real in a never-ending “GRATIFY THE DESIRES OF THE PEOPLE sequence of a universe-splitting process. Fur- WHO VISIT YOUR WORLD”: IMMERSION UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM thermore, the disintegrating borders between AND FICTIONALITY IN WESTWORLD PANEL A2: WORLDBUILDING realities and the contact points between them Starting from the notion of cybertexts and ergo- BEYOND STORYTELLING challenge the principles of decoherence and in- dic literature (Aarseth), I will analyze the HBO TV SR34.K1, DEC 6, 3PM violability of boundaries among parallel worlds, series Westworld (2016–) in terms of its overt en- which turn Ubik and The Man in the High Castle gagement with worlding and the limits of fiction. into fictional examples of realities that have, at I will argue that this series aligns thematically least at certain points, de-decohered or re-co- with other works that, by means of a blurring of hered, thus becoming far more coherent then the boundaries between fiction and reality, bring they seem on the surface. In more than one to the fore relevant considerations about world sense, it is possible to draw a literary parallel construction and engagement. with the thought experiments constructed in sci- Westworld, which dramatizes the interactive, immersive experience of literally visiting a fiction- as to perpetuate the success of the park. al world overtly explores the concept of worlding Accordingly, I will analyze how the narrative and fictionality through its different narrative strategies of Westworld—through a metafiction- levels and arcs: the “hosts” of the park—hu- al lens that is prominent given the evincing of man-like androids unaware of their ontological fictional elements in the park’s stories—manage status—gradually gain consciousness thanks to to involve the viewer in a “game” similar to that the painful recollection of what they are forced played by the guests, for the series alternates be- to endure, while the “guests”—visitors who pay tween different narrative arcs that echo common to enter and play in this simulated reality—rely on takes of literary texts as labyrinths (Aarseth). Ulti- the thrilling, unmediated, and seemingly impro- mately, by exploring how the visitors engage with vised narratives of the park to be freed of “the and experience the park, I will draw parallels with real world.” Tellingly, the series also focalizes on the experience of the viewer as “immersed” in those in charge of running the park, and the mo- the narrative of Westworld and the overall impli- tif of the writers that design the storylines of the cations of blurring the reality-diegesis dichotomy hosts is presented in relation to the exploitation for contemporary notions of fiction. and commodification of pleasure and desire so STEPHEN JOYCE RIGHTS REGIMES AND stable rights regime, with rights passing from FRANCHISE GUARDIANS the original creator to several external parties, AARHUS UNIVERSITY Why do some transmedia franchises succeed each of whom has had a different creative vi- PANEL A1: FRANCHISING and others fail? This paper will examine the rel- sion for the franchise’s development, leading SR34.D2, DEC 6, 3PM ative success and failure of The Terminator and to confusion and contradiction. The Walking The Walking Dead as transmedia storyworlds. Dead, in contrast, has benefited from the zom- While The Walking Dead has broken new ground bie apocalypse’s open rights regime, which has across a least three different platforms, with made the zombie a public domain monster rath- critically acclaimed comics, TV series, and vid- er than valuable intellectual property. In terms eo games, The Terminator has repeatedly tried of worldbuilding, The Walking Dead benefits to relaunch as a viable transmedia franchise in from a primary focus on the world’s ethos, so the 21st century and three times met with failure. expansions are judged by fidelity to the series’ My paper will focus on three aspects of these characteristic moral dilemmas rather than plot franchises: rights regimes, world paradoxes, and continuity, whereas The Terminator is defined franchise guardians. by the grandfather paradox created by the ca- The Terminator has struggled due to an un- nonical first two films in the series. Finally, fan acceptance of transmedia expansions has been fiction include the future, “futuristic” science strongly influenced by the role of the franchise and technology, time machines, time and space guardians, figures that fans look to in order to travel, other worlds, robots, and aliens. All of protect the integrity of the storyworld. Whereas these icons repeatedly appear in sf novels and James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger films and have become a part of mainstream cul- have overshadowed attempts to expand The Ter- ture. During the twentieth century, these sf icons minator beyond their influence, Robert Kirkman reached a wider audience through animated car- is a nearly ideal franchise guardian who supports toons, including several Warner Brothers Bugs The Walking Dead expansions across multiple Bunny cartoons featuring Marvin the Martian platforms. These comparisons illuminate some and Frankenstein’s monster (1937–64), time factors influencing the success of transmedia travel in the Peabody and Sherman segments of franchises. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (1959– VICTOR KENNEDY 64), “futuristic” technology and weaponry in Wile UNIVERSITY OF MARIBOR THE ICONS OF SCIENCE FICTION E. Coyote’s fascination with Acme Corporation’s PANEL F5: ROGUES THREE AS DEPICTED IN ANIMATED CARTOONS gadgets (1949–64), the future in The Jetsons SR34.K3, DEC 8, 9AM Conventions commonly associated with science (1962–63), and all of these, plus mad scientists, in Dexter’s Laboratory (1996–2003). Most of fiction stories focus entirely on alcohol. In his these cartoon representations poke gentle fun four short stories, “The 2003 Claret” (1958), at science and scientists, but their ironic flout- “The Friends of Plonk” (1964), “Too Much Trou- ing of conventions reveals deeply-held anxieties ble” (1972), and “Investing in Futures” (1987), about the direction our technology-driven soci- Amis employs the concept of time travel in order WOJCIECH ety is taking. to fictionalize the future of alcohol. My paper will KLEPUSZEWSKI investigate this particular aspect of Amis’ fiction KOSZALIN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY BOOJLY, BANDY, AND RED BIDDY: within the context of sf literature penned by oth- PANEL C1: ROGUES ONE THE FUTURE OF DRINK IN er writers. SR34.K3 (SKYPE), DEC 7, 9.15AM KINGSLEY AMIS’ FICTION Alcohol plays a dominant theme or appears as CROSSING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN MIRIAM KÖBERL a highly charged image in numerous sf works., THE HUMAN AND THE ALIEN IN UNIVERSITY OF KLAGENFURT including Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTAURI PANEL F4: POST-/ to the Galaxy (1979), Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999) begins with TRANS-/NONHUMAN WORLDS Vorkosigan Saga (1986–), and William Gibson’s a human–alien contrast, with humans arriving SR34.K1, DEC 8, 9AM novels. However, some of Kingsley Amis’ science on an alien planet. In the ending with the most narrative support, this stark human–alien con- remains a beloved cult classic to this day. In a trast is resolved. By uploading themselves into way, the same label could be attached to Star the planetary consciousness, humans become Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99), which was in- a part of their new world and the boundaries of tended to more or less play second fiddle to the humanity are extended to include what would very successful Star Trek: The Next Generation previously have been thought to be completely (1987–94). It was an experimental project that alien. This paper will examine the representation turned into an unexpected classic. of the alien planet in the game and will focus on The similarities between Casablanca and how humanity alters the planet and the planet, in DS9 are neither tidy nor exact, in large part be- turn, alters humanity. cause of the extreme disparity in the length of the material. Casablanca runs under two hours, RICARDA KRENN EVERYBODY COMES TO QUARK’S: meaning that there is not even one minute of film UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ LOOKING AT STAR TREK: DS9 for every episode of DS9, which lasted for an im- PANEL G1: STAR TREK II: THROUGH THE LENS OF CASABLANCA pressive 176 episodes. Yet, there are a number BEFORE DISCOVERY Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) has been of similarities and parallels and this paper aims SR34.04, DEC 8, 3.30PM described as an “accidental masterpiece” and to view DS9 and the way it constructs a (nation- al) identity for its characters through the lens to take advantage of them is also taken into of Casablanca. Even though Star Trek posits a account. Subsequently, I will discuss the corre- post-national future, its worldbuilding bears la- spondence of individual characters to those fea- tent albeit clear national(ist) imprints and this af- tured in Casablanca, with particular attention to fects both the individual characters and the set- their choices when it comes to negotiating their ting in which they exist. Casablanca takes place often divided loyalties and senses of belonging. in a world at war, with people of many different This takes into account the fact that in their own nations trying to come to terms with the chang- way, none of the human protagonists in DS9 ing world and how it affects them personally, not share in their home world’s dominant narrative, only in terms of security, but also identity. which is particularly true of Sisko, who ultimately The paper will examine the general setting as makes a choice similar to that of Rick’s and de- a place where none of the characters are truly cides to take a stand in a home that became his at home, yet where they have to create a home through happenstance rather than choice. for themselves, whether through choice or cir- cumstance. The large number of refugees and people passing through, as well as those trying MOJCA KREVEL THE PERIPHERY OF THE FUTURE; suggested. Within the ontological framework of OR THE FUTURE OF PERIPHERY: the current phase of postmodernity, the shift of UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA WILLIAM GIBSON’S THE PERIPHERAL extrapolation from the temporal to the spatial PANEL D1: ROGUES TWO Repeatedly asserting that in the new millennium axis seems inevitable, making Gibson’s “sci- SR34.D2, DEC 7, 11.45AM the reality changes with a rapidity that prevents ence-fiction realism” (Hollinger’s term) all but extrapolation of the present into a specific fu- paradigmatic of the development of sf in the new ture, William Gibson positioned his Blue Ant Trilo- millennium (see also Jameson 2005). gy (2003–10) in realistic, contemporary settings, However, Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014) is which, however, exhibit distinctive sf features. set in the future—two futures, even, which has The shift of temporal focus has been largely at- generally been hailed as Gibson’s return to his sf tributed to the collapse of futurity upon present roots. Conversely, I will argue that the nature of in the techno-cultural societies of postindustrial the building blocks of these future worlds, their capitalism, where the future no longer seems “a social, cultural, and economic dimensions, as site of meaningful difference,” and the present, well as their spatio-temporal positioning and re- due to its totalizing spatial multiplicity, gains an lation actually reinforce and accelerate the main estranging quality, as Veronica Hollinger has premises of science fiction realism of the Blue Ant Trilogy. The analyses of the properties of the Atwood, Saunders, or Alderman. conventional sf structural components in the PELIN KÜMBET novel, as well as of its internal structure reveal TRANSHUMANIST WORLD- that the worlds in the novel are firmly anchored BUILDING IN RICHARD KOCAELI UNIVERSITY within the existing ontological order, and that the MORGAN’S ALTERED CARBON PANEL F4: POST-/ temporal dimension in fact serves to convey the In its transhumanist worldbuilding Richard Mor- TRANS-/NONHUMAN WORLDS categories of spatiality. In a nod to Brian McHale, gan’s 2002 cyberpunk/detective noir novel Al- SR34.K1, DEC 8, 9AM we might say that The Peripheral translates the tered Carbon features rather dystopian, utterly main premises of science fiction realism from bleak 25th-century far-future, where “the mighty the level of form to the level of content, making altered-carbon technologies of data storage and the metaphor of the future invading the present retrieval” of a person’s experiences, skills, feel- (and the ensuing Jamesonian disappearance of ings, emotions, thoughts, memories that we de- the historical past) literal. As such, The Periph- fine as “consciousness” is viable. This transhu- eral is less an instance of Gibson’s return to sf manist enhancement of the human condition is roots, as it is a diversion from them—arguably in achieved with a device called “cortical stack”—a the direction of contemporary social criticism of small chip implanted at the base of the neck of a person at birth, which later may be repeatedly have their own sleeves cloned in clone replace- transferred into new bodies, or “sleeves” as they ment facilities, while the poor have to grapple are newly called. The digitalization and cyborgi- with the consequences of augmented technolo- zation of human personality and consciousness gies, and get what they can afford with their lim- through the “stack” also enables “needlecast- ited budget. That is why their manual identities ing” (inter-space data-casting), which is inter- can end up in the body of an opposite gender, or stellar travel between bodies, virtual realities, at a different age, or race, causing complexities, planets, and colonies, providing us with a mo- and blurred genders and races. saic of different transhumanist worldbuildings. This paper will explore the great but unequally Even though the possibility of uploading the con- distributed luxuries among people and the atten- sciousness into a “stack” constitutes the basis dant uncanny possibilities at the heart of Altered of worldbuilding in terms of providing a futuris- Carbon, a novel struggling with bioethical and tic vision of biological life in hardware systems, biopolitical implications and conundrums. My what kind of sleeve one can get is contingent paper will question the bioconstitutionalism of upon one’s positioning and financial status in life where the corporealities, ontologies, bodies, society. The elite referred to as “Mets” can even and rights are reframed in this transhumanist fu- ture which might be ahead of us. sensual to highly technical vocabularies in its dystopian worldbuilding and storytelling. With its KAROLINA LEBEK SOUND AS A PRINCIPLE OF emphasis on listening and the immediacy of ex- WORLDBUILDING IN ANNA perience, the novel creates a world that unfolds UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA SMAILL’S NOVEL THE CHIMES in the dynamics of everyday sonic events and PANEL E4: ONTOLOGIES Imaginary worlds predominantly rely on appeal- the experience of the characters in the present, AND EPISTEMOLOGIES ing to vision in their establishment of speculative which results in the radical truncation of the past SR34.D2, DEC 7, 3PM ontologies, which in literary works means the and the future (enhanced by the first person nar- dominance of the vocabulary connected to the ration done in present tense). visible, with the remaining senses relegated to The aim of my paper is to explore this aural the position of accessories responsible for de- complexity to show how author Anna Smaill tailing and sensual depth. The Chimes, a novel translates the aesthetic experience of the phe- published in 2015, offers an unprecedented nomenological onto metaphorical language. exception to this representational and commu- In terms of perception and affect, the acoustic nicative principle by employing a complex sonic world serves as a means of cognition, orienta- and musical imagery, ranging from the merely tion, spatial exploration, and inhabitation of the ALEXANDER LEHNER world including participation in forms of togeth- REGENERATIVE PLAY AND EMPATHY: erness (relying on the phenomenon of phonom- PREY AS AN EXAMPLE OF—AND UNIVERSITY OF AUGSBURG nesis in the readers); metaphor, in turn, frames REFLECTION ON—THE AESTHETIC PANEL F2: REGENERATIVE PLAY understanding of ethical, social and political POTENTIAL OF VIDEO GAMES SR34.K2, DEC 8, 9AM dimensions. In such resonance between the My talk will deal with the regenerative power of actual and the metaphorical, Smaill achieves a videogames, exemplified and reflected upon by high degree or world coherence and consistency Prey (2017) and supported by the theoretical ap- of her dystopia, with a strong imperative to rebel proaches of Hubert Zapf (2016) and Alexa Weik against such forms of oppressive power as ex- von Mossner (2017). The game’s narrative and pressed, surprisingly, in the notions of harmony gameplay are intertwined to advocate the aes- and attunement. Instead, the novel champions thetic potential of video games: in a final twist, subversive categories of noise, cacophony, and it is revealed that the whole narrative was set-up dysrhythmia as liberating sonic forces. to teach an alien mimic empathy via a game-like simulation. This is examined according to the player’s emphatic level; did she show compas- sion or did she go on a mindless killing-spree? If successful, the player can become the ambas- and kill the researcher or take his hand in affir- sador between the two species; or decide to kill mation of the (potential) future. everybody. While offering insight into broader issues like This evaluation becomes meaningful in this human greed, capitalism and its terminal impact context through Prey’s open design which allows on the world, Prey presents video games as an the player a tremendous amount of freedom in opportunity for the player to learn about the Oth- her choices. Thus, the act of play becomes a way er by inhabiting their role and, in turn, to create to achieve understanding for an unknown entity empathy with the formerly unknown, which can by inhabiting it and acting as it. Prey engages in be understood as a step towards a utopian soci- a rhetoric which sees video games as a means ety—if it is accepted by the player. to facilitating empathy and, consequently, with the potential to breach the gap between the hu- STEAMPUNKING ROME: PASCAL LEMAIRE man and the non-human. Of course, this needs ECONOMICS AND TECHNOLOGY IN INDEPENDENT to be accepted by the player. She can voice this ALTERNATE HISTORY—THE CASE PANEL C3: SCARCITY & ABUNDANCE through her last decision: if her actions have OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE SR34.04, DEC 7, 9.15AM been approved, she can neglect this concept While the steampunk genre is mainly concerned with the 19th and early 20th century, one can helped the economy and would have been a fac- find a number of uchronic texts trying to intro- tor in crushing the barbarians, slavery being the duce new technologies and sciences to the supposed reason for this lack of developpement. Roman Empire, either in its historical context Yet most often the writers of such alternate or in descriptions of its evolution past its histor- history seem to have little to no knowledge of ical downfall. This is in part due to the relative historical debates on the place of machinery and popularity of ancient engineers such as Hero of technology in the Roman economy, and the work Alexandria, whose description of steam-powered of scholars such as Andrew Wilson is not taken marvels open the tantalizing question of what if into account in their thinking. This is also in oppo- they had been transformed into operational ma- sition to discourses in a similar uchronic context chinery. about the economy of the Confederate States of Elements such as the fall of the Roman Em- America and the importance of slavery, where pire are often linked to the use, or lack thereof, modern scholarship has been more efficient in of technology, especially mass production tech- reaching the general population. nologies in uchronic texts—the underlying idea Instead, old economic theories inherited from being that more means of production would have ideological debates from the mid-20th-centu- KARIN LINGNAU ry still inform the views of most writers and of SCIENCE, FICTION, AND their readers about the ancient economy. This (ECOLOGICAL) REALITY: THE USE ACADEMY OF MEDIA ARTS COLOGNE lack of knowledge is also reflected in the lack of OF GAME ENGINES AS AN ARTISTIC PANEL A3: PERFORMING WORLDS consideration for the importance of the Indian TOOL IN THE CONSTRUCTION SR24.K2, DEC 6, 3PM Ocean trade for the Roman Empire, among other OF EXTRAPOLATED REALITIES issues. In her transmedia installation project No habrá The present paper will thus aim to map Roman servicios ... (2016), artist Nieves de la Fuen- technology and economy in alternate histories of te Gutiérrez explored ecological and ethical various authors from Lyon Sprague de Camps, questions relating to the industry of mineral up to recent timelines and discussion threads extraction by using gaming and installative el- published on the site alternatehistory.com. Nov- ements. Based on her personal connection to els by authors such as Robert Silverberg and the history of mining in a certain region of Spain, Sophia McDougall will also be examined, as will scientific and historic events and facts create some non-sf historical novels, all with the goal the background for a general reflection on this of identifying trends and bias that may also be topic. The personal stories and images of local present in other science fiction contexts. people merge with research of NASA simulations of resource mining on Mars to create a complex possibilities to communicate within and through narrative about the extrapolation of geopolitics contemporary imagery and content. The artist into a science fiction scenario and the critical re- herself intervenes with her work in a live radio flection on exploitation and the abuse of natural feature by manipulating the virtual landscape in resources, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial. real time on stage. Different expanded formats show further As I will show, this work exemplifies the use explorations and angles of her approach. For of game worldbuilding and science fiction-based example, a publication which fuses real-world thinking in an artistic context without prioritiz- photography with game engine-generated im- ing one over the other. This application of sci- ages to produce collages and sequences of ence-fictional thinking can serve as a method to landscape photography, mars rover selfies and understand and reflect contemporary societies screenshots, thereby blurring the distinctions of and realities. their physical and digital origins and addressing the materiality of virtuality. Fictional and nonfic- tional elements merge into a state of immediate fuzziness, questioning perceptions as well as the SARAH LOHMANN A UTOPIA WITHOUT US: ECOFEMINISM, novels do so by setting up utopian worlds that THE ANTHROPOCENE, AND THE can, in fact, be described as examples of self-or- UTRECHT UNIVERSITY PARADOX OF THE NONHUMAN UTOPIA ganizing and self-optimizing systems which are PANEL E1: GREENING SF Building worlds does seem to necessitate the only capable of functioning as flat hierarchies SR34.K3, DEC 7, 3PM building of hierarchies—however, this appears to without top-down government and leadership especially be the case for the earliest examples systems. of utopian literature, such as More’s genre-defin- And yet, feminism is no guarantee for univer- ing text and Plato’s Republic, as well as tradition- sal equality in 20th-century literary utopias. In al socialist utopias of the late 19th century by the novels such as Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a likes of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edward Bella- Spacewoman (1962) and Sheri S. Tepper’s The my. On the other hand, the feminist utopian vi- Gate to Women’s Country (1988), discriminatory sions of the 1960s and 1970s that Tom Moylan gender essentialism is maintained through an has dubbed “critical utopias” by authors such as inversion of privilege. Moreover, and perhaps Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ, seem by their more interestingly from a philosophical per- very nature to usurp traditional hierarchies in spective, some feminist utopian texts, such as their pursuit of utopian equality. Some of these Memoirs and Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986), display both clearly hierarchical struggle to construct such a thing—or whether and ethically dubious relationships between the we are always necessarily bound by our limited inhabitants of utopia and the nonhuman com- anthropic viewpoint and lack of understanding munities they either explore or co-habit utopia beyond the confines of our own species. Con- with—be they aliens, nonhuman animals, or the versely, does our destructive and all-consuming utopian environment itself. influence on Earth in the Anthropocene mean Paradoxically, these ethically inconsistent that the only utopia that counts as such for our narratives came about during the rise of ecologi- nonhuman co-inhabitants must be one that in cal awareness in the late 20th century, along with fact includes no humans at all, as envisaged by its intersectional significance in relation to femi- Alan Weisman in The World Without Us (2007)? nism—a fact which Slonczewski herself went on And are we even capable of fully imagining such to note and lament with regard to Ocean. This a world? raises the question, then, of whether it is, in fact, Exploring the utopian limitations of Memoirs possible for humans to fully conceive of a utopia and Ocean in particular and drawing on Lori that is also non-hierarchical and utopian for all Gruen’s work on animal ethics, Mick Smith’s de- its nonhuman members when even ecofeminists fense of radical ecology through the critique of sovereign power, and Val Plumwood’s ecofemi- dred (1979). Deploying emergent worlded and nist thoughts regarding the inevitability of an- energized reading practices that examine the thropocentrism, I will in this paper attempt to activist “resistive and world-(re)fashioning” (to disentangle the notion of utopia from its hierar- use Claire Westall’s expression), my research chy-laden human roots, thereby investigating the explores how what I describe as speculative possibly profound significance of a nonhuman world-fictions debunk what Imre Szeman has utopia—and why this is something we would even called the “bad faith of the present” that “we want to consider. can continue to be who we are now” under dif- ferent work/energy systems. To that end, this TOM LUBEK IMAGINING BEYOND PETRO- paper suggests that Butler’s novel roots neo- CULTURAL ANGST: WORLD- liberal capital’s production of a racialized “sur- UNIVERSITY OF YORK ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN plus humanity” as Cheap Labour (Davis 2006) PANEL G2: BEYOND PETROMODERNITY II: OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED in the material legacies of the capitalist technics ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURES This paper will present a case study drawn from of enslavement. In doing so, it stages a coming SR34.D2 (SKYPE), DEC 8, 3.30PM my ongoing doctoral research; a world-ecologi- to world-ecological consciousness which begins cal reading of Octavia E. Butler’s SF novel Kin- the important work of opening imaginative spac- es from which alternative futures properly atten- sex, gender, and sexuality from homo- or transex- tive to what Jason Moore has called the “singular ual humans to gender-fluid or even genderless metabolism of humanity-in-nature,” might be aliens. contemplated. This presentation will focus on the represen- tation of gender in Star Trek, suggesting new per- CHRISTIAN LUDWIG “WHAT ARE LITTLE BOYS MADE OF?” spectives on gender in science fiction in general REPRESENTATIONS OF SEX AND and, more specifically, on how examples from UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION KARLSRUHE GENDER BEYOND THE BINARY IN THE the Star Trek universe can enrich a gender-sen- PANEL B4: SEX & GENDER STAR TREK UNIVERSE AND THEIR sitive EFL classroom in the 21st century. Thus, it SR24.K3, DEC 6, 5.30PM POTENTIALS FOR THE EFL CLASSROOM is surprising that Star Trek only plays a marginal Science fiction writers have for a long time ex- role in EFL classrooms (if at all), especially con- plored and revised conventional notions of gen- sidering the firm place films and TV shows have der. While this may be especially true for women established in foreign language learning environ- writers or female characters, speculative fiction ments around the world. and science fiction have increasingly extended Against this background, the aim of this pre- the idea of gender, today including all forms of sentation is to report on the results of a small- scale classroom project which was conducted step, the students discussed how Star Trek re- in the context of a seminar on teaching science flects on the concerns, beliefs, and anxieties of fiction and fantasy literature. Considering the our (past as well as present) society. During the sheer number of Star Trek series and films, span- main part of the project, students engaged with ning more than fifty years, the study was limited selected illustrations of sex- and gender-related to the analysis of three Star Trek spin-offs of The issues in the episodes. These included, but were Original Series (1966–69)—The Next Genera- by no means limited to, traditional and alterna- tion (1987–94), and Deep Space Nine (1993– tive gender roles, the lack of sex/gender, as well 99), and Voyager (1995–2001). In the context of as androgynous, hermaphroditic, and transgen- the exploratory learning project discussed in this der forms and ways of life. By engaging with the talk, students from the University of Education examples, students gained the opportunity to Karlsruhe, Germany, showed selected episodes decode and address gender issues from an out- and scenes from the aforementioned series with sider’s insider perspective. The talk will conclude students from a lower secondary school in Ger- with sample responses to the project by both the many, exploring the multifaceted ways of world- university as well as students. building in the Star Trek franchise. In a second JERRY MÄÄTTÄ MINIMALIST WORLDBUILDING AND literary works of the decade. SF POETRY: THE NEOLOGISMS, Within a few weeks, Martinson had enough UPPSALA UNIVERSITY NAMES, AND ALLUSIONS OF poems to include them in Cikada (1953) as ”Sån- PANEL C2: WORDS & WORLDS HARRY MARTINSON’S ANIARA gen om Doris och Mima” (“The Song of Doris and SR34.D2, DEC 7, 9.15AM In October 1953, as he was reading the page Mima”). The 29 cantos were, however, soon ex- proofs for his latest collection of poetry, Cikada, panded into the 103 cantos of the full-fledged Swedish author, poet, and future Nobel laureate epic Aniara (1956), which tells the entire story of Harry Martinson started to recite science fic- its eponymous spacecraft, headed for Mars with tion poetry to his then-wife Ingrid. In the same colonists from an Earth on the brink of nuclear year, science fiction had been launched on the war, but which, after a near-collision with an as- Swedish book market as a distinct new genre, teroid, drifts off into space, with its increasingly and Martinson’s poems showed some uncanny desperate crew and passengers seeking com- resemblances to one of the books that had just fort in various forms of art, entertainment, sex, been published in Swedish, Ray Bradbury’s The and religion. Martian Chronicles (1950), which Martinson Even though Harry Martinson’s Aniara is would later claim as one of the most important one of the most canonical works of 20th-centu- ry Swedish literature, adapted numerous times depict, how do they go about it, and what details (into operas, musicals, music albums, a graphic and clues as to its history, cultures, and languag- novel, and with a film adaptation underway) and es are we really given in Martinson’s frequent still being taught in schools, very few studies neologisms, fanciful names, and their contem- have actually related it to science fiction other porary, often linguistic, allusions? And, perhaps than in passing. Most scholarly readings tend even more crucially, how minimally is it possible to view Martinson’s neologisms as mostly word to construct a convincing, living sf world, and play, and his science-fictional elements are most with what granularity is this really achievable in often interpreted symbolically or metaphorical- science fiction poetry? ly—with the spaceship Aniara standing for Earth, and its AI or supercomputer, the Mima, seen as MONSTERS IN THE FORECOURT: GRAHAM MACDONALD a symbol for the arts. SF’S GAS STATIONS AS UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK But what if one were to take Martinson’s FUTURE ENERGYSCAPES PANEL G2: BEYOND PETROMODERNITY II: worldbuilding seriously, and look at Aniara from This paper will focus on how sf worlds prove a ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURES a purely science-fictional point of view? What significant critical fulcrum for imagining a world SR34.D2, DEC 8, 3.30PM kind of far-future world do the cantos of Aniara beyond petromodernity. It will do so by engag- ing with a crucial space where the powerfully sf world capable of informing debates over en- affective experiences of petrotopia are pro- ergy’s utopian and dystopian prowess; the mis- duced—and reproduced—by the image-work of guided promises of retrofuturism; the futuristic energy infrastructures: gas stations. As enabling violence of past and future forms of automobil- and culturally resonant sites bearing both lumi- ity. It has also registered as a fantasy world of nous promise and foreboding ecology, service petro-nostalgia and mourning for a fallen petro- stations figure as threshold worlds throughout culture, conveying some of the speculative fan- copious examples of the (post)oil imaginary. My tasies—and problems—of the post-oil imaginary paper will track a number of examples available as presently conceived. The paper will ultimately in sf fiction, film, and visual culture, and demon- consider these scenes as—consciously or oth- strate how their rendering of this crucial world of erwise—problematizing any notion of a happy the petroleumscape can be interpreted as gen- return to the kind of experience identified with erative zones for considering energy futures. the futurological waves of petromodern culture Populated by cyborgs, vampires, weird mon- in the twentieth century, its exuberance replaced sters, and humans struggling in a world of An- by the “dread” aspects embedded within the thropocene disorder, the forecourt becomes an apocalyptic immanence of a high-carbon society and its climate breakdowns. Despite the consid- worldbuilding appeal. erable PR work of energy capital and its oil-vest- ROBERA MAIERHOFER ed features to maintain the semiotics of oil (but THE REAL AND THE IMAGINED: also, now, renewables and the future conception SPECULATIONS ON AGE AND AGING UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ of highway infrastrcuture) within a bright tech- AS A HUMAN CONDITION PANEL G3: AGE & AGING no-utopianism, these dystopic realms of oil’s Representations of science fiction universes SR34.K2, DEC 8, 3.30PM enduring monsters generate considerable drag. question in radical ways prevalent assumptions, They continue to imbue petroinfrastructure with such as our confidence in science and prog- an unshakably dark ecological aesthetic, but ress, presumptions about the place of (wo)man they remain crucial terrain to engage. Nowhere, in the order of nature, and the acceptance of then, is this struggle between two visions of a fu- exploitation of others on various levels. When ture with and without oil better registered than in Ursula Le Guin was announced as the recipient the image-world of the service station. In order to of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to fully imagine an energyscape beyond petromo- American Letters in 2014, the National Book dernity, I argue that we need better understand Foundation in America emphasized the power the service station’s enduringly monstrous of science and fiction “to challenge readers to consider profound philosophical and existen- IMPERIAL WORLDING: ADVENTURE E. LEIGH MCKAGEN tial questions about gender, race, the environ- NARRATIVES, EMPIRE, AND BRAVE VIRGINIA TECH UNIVERSITY ment, and society.” In her essay “The Space NEW WORLDS IN STAR TREK: VOYAGER PANEL G2: STAR TREK II: Crone” (1976), Le Guin suggests an old woman In her recent book Staying With the Trou- BEFORE DISCOVERY as “an exemplary person” to explain to friendly ble (2016), Donna Haraway argues that practic- SR34.04, DEC 8, 3.30PM aliens from the fourth planet of Altair the human es of worlding are significant in our current era condition as a constant form of transformation of environmental crisis—she often repeats that in order for them to understand “the nature of it matters what stories we tell other stories with, the race.” In my paper, I will pay tribute to Le and therefore it matters what worlds we tell oth- Guin’s theoretical considerations of existential er worlds with, especially through the stories we challenges and “the incredible realities of our tell. This paper will use Haraway as a starting existence” in terms of gender and age. Imagin- point to explore the world building of Star Trek: ing different worlds allows us—in reference to Voyager (1995–2001) and argue that, though Le Guin’s definition of selfhood—to understand set adrift and removed from their home in the Al- the matrix of time and experience and our own pha Quadrant, the crew of Voyager imposes their impermanence. imperial Federation/Starfleet directives and practices, ultimately enabling our imagination of building through the interaction between the a fully functioning American empire anywhere in crew and numerous individuals and civilizations the galaxy. in their seven years spent in the Delta Quadrant I will begin this analysis by exploring how to explore how the crew (and audiences) gradual- Voyager functions as a dual adventure/imperial ly gain familiarity with their new world to demon- narrative. I draw on Martin Green’s exploration strate how the actions taken by the Voyager crew of how classic adventure narratives were fun- reinforce, recreate, and re-inscribe imperial Fed- damental to the British imperial project in the eration policies and practices through the “lost age of New Imperialism and served as the “en- in space” adventure narrative. These practices ergizing myth of empire.” Edward Said expanded of worlding matter, since this story ultimately this diagnosis to other kinds of stories (including projects the ruins of American post-Cold War Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park [1816]), noting Empire and imperial politics and culture into the that these stories were fundamental to the ac- far reaches of outer space. tualization of empire in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries as the “imagination of empire.” I will then explore instances of Voyager’s world- LISA MEINECKE MY OWN HUMANITY: (POST-) and thus tentatively examines the boundaries of HUMANIST WORLDINGS IN humanism and the liminal space between hu- UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE man and machine. His brother Lore is less firmly PANEL F3: HUMANS AND/AS Gene Roddenberry’s decided (and occasionally rooted in the federation’s anthropocentrism and ARTIFICIAL CREATURES stubborn) humanism is indubitably the ideolog- in turn problematizes Data’s narrative: if the SR34.04, DEC 8, 9AM ical foundation for all incarnations of Star Trek. posthuman is physically and logically superior, Its humans not only share universal cultural the legitimacy of universal humanism is called traits and values, but they are characterized as into question. The monstrous collectivity of the overall just and righteous creatures. They have Borg again stands fundamentally opposed to the collectively overcome negative social and polit- core of Star Trek’s ideology: The Borg are mind- ical patterns, such as violence and greed, and less, voracious, ahistoric, and hive-like, they dis- are now driven by curiosity and the desire to be- solve any individual subjectivity. come better. Introducing the posthuman allows This paper will trace and contextualize post- for this narrative to become contested in a vari- humanist narratives in the Star Trek universe ety of ways. The android Data desires to be more in order to zero in on sites of contested (post-) human in order to fit into his social environment humanities where the ideological structures at the root of the franchise are questioned and the as an appendage to the core game mechanics boundaries between the human and the techni- in contemporary video games. A rare exception, cized Other starts to blur. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst (2016) puts players in the shoes of a female courier runner and asks them DIETMAR MEINEL RUNNING A NEOLIBERAL to sprint, jump, glide, and climb through a high- WORLD: MOVEMENT IN SPACE tech metropolis of the near future to deliver infor- UNIVERSITY OF DUISBURG-ESSEN AND CORPORATE DYSTOPIA mation at the highest possible speed. PANEL C1: MOVEMENT IS KEY IN MIRROR’S EDGE CATALYST My paper will address experiences of space SR34.K1, DEC 7, 9.15AM From Pong (1972) to Pac-Man (1980), from with particular attention to how the game scripts Space Invaders (1978) to Donkey Kong (1981), urban environments via movement, level design, video games have always been about move- gameplay mechanics, and narrative elements ment in (virtual) space. While navigating a digi- to build a dystopian world. In maneuvering the tal world continues to be an essential feature urban surveillance landscape of a futuristic of modern-day first-person shooters, open- global city, players experience space as neither world games, competitive fighting games, and 19th-century flaneurs nor 20th-century drivers or MMORPGs, movement in space mostly functions 21st-century digital urbanites. Instead, the video game fantasy of an able, female body seam- spatial topographies in digital texts, this paper lessly traversing a hyper-modern landscape aims to contribute to the “eclectic atlases of invites questions about the nature of the city space” and the (im)possibilities of video games of the future and its layering of private, public, to envision urban scenarios of the future. and commercial places, transitional spaces, and non-places. As Mirror’s Edge Catalyst tells THAT “MOST SEVERE EVIL”: LOREDANA MIHANI a story about resistance against totalitarian cor- THE QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ porate control, my presentation will examine not PERIL OF SOCIAL ESTRANGEMENT IN PANEL F5: ROGUES THREE only the scripting of urban space through the (in) MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN SR34.K3, DEC 8, 9AM ability to move therein but also the intimate links Brian Aldiss identified Mary Shelley’s Franken- to its vision of a neoliberal self and political re- stein (1818) as the “origin of the species” that volt. I will argue that Mirror’s Edge Catalyst builds is science fiction. This paper will analyze the a dystopian world and its (possible) end by im- novel’s central concern with the relevance of mersing players in digital experiences of space social community in the individual’s life and the via movement by mediating older, contemporary, detrimental effects of pursuing a type of scientif- and emerging forms of urbanity. In looking at the ic achievement which leads the individual away from affectionate bonds with their fellow beings sympathy provided by one’s affections, and that In order to highlight the novel’s implied worl- it can be pursued in isolation from one’s social dview and norms, the paper will address the community. Frankenstein’s downfall, therefore, three different yet intertwined narrative layers is a result of his stepping over the moral and so- (that of the scientist Victor Frankenstein, the cial order, where what is initially conceived with creature/“monster,” and of Captain Walton) that a benevolent intention, turns into an egotistical make up the novel. I will suggest that Shelley pursuit aimed at glorification of the self, rather condemns a kind of quest for knowledge which than at the social fulfillment of the larger com- carries individuals increasingly away from so- munity. ciety and frustrates their thirst for social love. Through the comparison of different charac- However, Frankenstein does not uncritically con- ters, through the novel’s allusions to the myth demn the use and achievements of science; it of Prometheus and John Milton’s Paradise seeks to convey a more nuanced message, as Lost (1667), and by situating it within the larger the flaw in Victor Frankenstein’s (and Captain historical-philosophical setting of 19th-century Walton’s) thinking lies in assuming that the quest British Romanticism, this paper will interpret and for knowledge is a greater good than the love or reflect on the aesthetics of sociality proposed and defended consistently throughout the novel. mentioned, “we are drawn to the weird, because These concerns, feeding into ideas of how real it is showing us something about ourselves.” On life and scientific pursuit can meet, at times hap- the other hand, the increased sense of global pily, and other times in contradiction with each political, social, and climate crisis constitutes an other, are ever more pressing and important to essential factor for emotional discomfort and ex- discuss in today’s highly scientific and techno- istential distress, leading humans to a constant logical world. quest for liberation through personal gnosis. There is a desire to connect with a human truth, EFTYCHIA MISAILIDOU REJECTING REALITY: WHAT THE a journey of self-discovery. NONHUMAN HOSTS OF WESTWORLD This talk will look at the case of West- INDEPENDENT TEACH US ABOUT THE ETERNAL world (2016–), as its main heroes, the nonhu- PANEL F3: HUMANS AND/AS QUEST FOR SELF-DISCOVERY man hosts of the theme park, roam into the ARTIFICIAL CREATURES What can a fantasy world reveal about our true contours of freedom. In this futuristic society, SR34.04, DEC 8, 9AM selves and our sense of identity? Science fic- humans go into the park to engage in activities tion tends to intensify our fascination with the not acceptable in the real world. They are drawn mysteries of our mind and soul. As an essayist to Westworld like Philip K. Dick was drawn to the notion of a false world: by the idea that our reality of: “There is only me. And I think when I discover is somehow an illusory one and only Westworld who I am, I’ll be free.” can reveal to you who you really are. Yet, it is the SABRINA hosts, tortured and killed by humans time and CAPTAIN’S LOG: EXPERIENCING again, who experience the true quest for free will. STAR TREK’S UNIVERSE FROM MITTERMEIER While constantly (re-)living the traumatic events THE CAPTAINS’ POINT OF VIEW INDEPENDENT they are programmed into believing that are ac- “Captain’s Log”—this phrase marks the begin- PANEL B1: STAR TREK I: DISCOVERY tually happening to them. They feel pain, both ning of many Stark Trek episodes. Whether it is SR34.D2, DEC 6, 5.30PM physical and emotional, and even when their one of the Enterprise class ship’s captains (Kirk, memories are being wiped, they still remember. Picard, Archer), Captain Janeway, or Command- Does it matter that their pain is simulated? er (later Captain) Sisko, it is usually their logs What makes you feel alive? Belonging to the hu- which provide viewers with a narrative frame. man race or feeling and remembering pain? Do- While some episodes, particularly in the later lores, the protagonist host, demonstrates that series, stray from this template, it is usually the she is experiencing her memories as a kind of highest-ranking officer’s point of view from which awakening. She does not care what she is made the stories are told. It thus could be argued that these characters set the tone for each series (who is later revealed to be an impostor from the and consequently immensely contribute to Mirror Universe). worldbuilding in the Star Trek universe. In my presentation, then, I want to look at how The newest installment in the franchise, Dis- these central characters quite literally steer the covery (2017–), is the first show that has shifted narrative point of view across series (focusing on the point of view to a different character, the First Discovery) and thus highlight how the Star Trek Officer (and later mutineer) Michael Burnham. franchise interweaves character- and worldbuild- However, I would argue that while Michael re- ing. mains the narrative’s moral compass, the series’ captains very much still set the tone. The show’s TRANSNATIONAL WORLDBUILDING: APARAJITA NANDA two-part pilot episode reflects the strength and CREOLIZED FUTURES IN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY optimism of Captain Philippa Georgiou, echoed OCTAVIA BUTLER’S LILITH’S BROOD PANEL F4: POST-/ in the last two episodes by the resilience of Act- From Heidegger to Malmgren the “worlding” proj- TRANS-/NONHUMAN WORLDS ing Captain Saru, while the rest of the season’s ect looks at a creation of a world that is stratified SR34.K1, DEC 8, 9AM feeling of uneasiness and overall darkness re- and required adept navigation on the part of its sult from the presence of Captain Gabriel Lorca inhabitants in order to survive. For Heidegger “worlding” is reserved for humans only and he The Oankali justify their mission by stating that goes on to specify that “plants and animals have the humans need to be rid of their Human Con- no world; they belong […] to the […] environment tradiction—a combination of intelligence and into which they have been put.” In other words, hierarchical thinking—and accept a genetic elim- nonhuman entities are denied powers of world- ination of the violent trait to produce a creolized building. third identity. This third identity, a product of Octavia Butler’s science fiction trilogy Lilith’s the human/animal interface, birthed of human Brood (1987–89) debunks Heidegger’s ideas intelligence and alien-animal connectivity to all by proposing a unique world-building project species (as Oankali interbreed with all living be- possible only by a hybridization of two species, ings) is Butler’s only hope for the creation of a the alien, animal-like Oankali and the humans. sustainable universe. Butler’s text opens in the wake of a human-led This paper furthers this concept of a hybrid nuclear apocalypse where the Oankali, a entity as it offers a reading of Butler’s third iden- gene-trading alien species, rescue the few sur- tity based off Hindu philosophy— a philosophy viving humans to interbreed with them to create built on the concept of a Life Force that flows a superior breed of Human-Oankali constructs. through humans, animals and plants emanating from and going back to its essential source in immense fictional worlds that draws people in? Godhood—and some of its seminal texts, the Ve- After decades of expansion, many have become das and the Upanishads. It expands the concept so complex and contradictory that they require of worldbuilding by opening up a conversation fan-made guides to outline the easiest points between Western and Eastern philosophy—a of entry. Yet their continuing popularity speaks conversation possibly exclusive to a science fic- to the satisfaction of desires that our current tion world. models for thinking about fictional worlds cannot quite account for. Star Trek, of course, is a prime RIA NARAI BOLDLY GOING: TRAVELING TO example. FICTIONAL WORLDS THROUGH In this paper, I will suggest that there is a UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG IN-UNIVERSE REFERENCE TEXTS pleasure in inhabiting a fictional world that drives PANEL C1: MOVEMENT IS KEY When it comes to understanding how fans con- fans to engage with these vast story universes. SR34.K1, DEC 7, 9.15AM struct and inhabit the vast story universes of Their vastness and complexity is their appeal science fiction, our existing theoretical frame- (Jenkins 2009; Johnston 2015), as it mimics our works for narrative and textual analysis are sadly experience of inhabiting our own vast, complex, lacking (Kelleter 2017). What is it about these real world. This pleasure is separate from the pleasure of engaging with a narrative—how else lar textual effects and readerly pleasures, such can we explain the existence of non-narrative, as: a blurring, dissolving, and playing with of in-universe reference texts, such as the Hidden the boundaries between the texts, the fictional Universe Travel Guides Star Trek: Vulcan (2016) world, and the real world; and a literalizing of the and Star Trek: The Klingon Empire (2017), which idea of “travelling in fiction.” utilize the travel guidebook genre to allow fans This paper ultimately seeks to contribute to a to “travel” to the fictional worlds of the Star Trek greater understanding of fans’ desires to inhab- universe? it the fictional world of Star Trek, and other vast Through textual analysis, with an emphasis story universes, by suggesting new models for on reader experience, I will examine how these thinking about fictional universes which account in-universe reference texts position the reader for the desire for a world without story. in relation to the fictional world. I will focus on the way in which these texts’ structure of dual address—to a fictional narratee who inhabits the Star Trek universe and to an implied reader who is a Star Trek fan—makes possible particu- MANUELA NEUWIRTH BEAM ME INTO BEING? STAR TREK’S verse. As Alan N. Shapiro argues in his Star Trek: NOVA OF (DIS)APPEARANCE AND/ Technologies of Disappearance (2004), these UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ AS THE EXISTENCE AND ESSENCE technologies are largely instruments of disap- PANEL A4: COHERENCE OF A COHESIVE MULTIVERSE pearance and reappearance. It is in this act, AND DECOHERENCE If Martin Heidegger sets art apart from his un- Shapiro argues, that a self-reflexive investigation SR24.K3, DEC 6, 3PM derstanding of “technology” (i.e., the anthropo- of the self and transformation from object to sub- centric view of the world existing for humans to ject takes place. consume), the present paper investigates tech- This paper will argue that the representation nology in the true sense of the word as a consti- of nova (and especially accidents such as in tutive part of worlding one of the most popular The Original Series’ “The Enemy Within” [1966] artistic sf creations—the television franchise Star and The Next Generation’s “Second Chances” Trek. Multiple publications on the physics behind [1993]), by self-reflexively considering its own Star Trek’s futuristic technologies are testament worldbuilding, attains the “capability of institut- to the central role such nova as the transporter, ing its own real” (Shapiro 19), thereby creating a Holodeck, Universal Translator, and warp drive cohesive multiverse. play in the creation of a feasible Star Trek uni- ELENA-BRINDUSA WORLD(ING) TRANSITIONS IN the mysterious antique shop where Julia and HARUKI MURAKAMI’S 1Q84 Winston found an illusory haven. In 2084, the NICOLAESCU AND BOUALEM SANSAL’S religious totalitarian regime is defied by Ati who UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST 2084: THE END OF THE WORLD perceives the “cracks” in the system and tries to PANEL E4: ONTOLOGIES This paper will discuss various instances of bor- escape, to look for a “mythical Border.” In 1Q84, AND EPISTEMOLOGIES I der-crossing in novels which broadly deal with the Metropolitan Expressway has an emergen- SR34.D2 (SKYPE), DEC 7, 3PM the same dystopian setting, that of a tightly cy stairway in 1984, the year of the narration, controlled society. Both 1Q84 (2009–10) and but no one in 1Q84, an alternative chronotope 2084 (2015) showcase the influence Orwellian the protagonist Aomame enters without being themes still exert upon contemporary fiction writ- aware and where she is constantly watched by ers. The transitional space fraught with ominous a Big Brother. A possible modulation of ethical symbols was used by Zamyatin in We (1924): the and aesthetic distances can thus be rendered by Ancient House was the place were the protag- the presence of the passageway. In other words, onists consumed their love and also the space liminality contributes to the creation of worlds that preserved the remnant of the old world. It in various ways, for readers can accordingly in- inspired Orwell, who in 1984 (1948) created fer the existence of an alternative possible uni- verse similar to the “salient worlds” described tive fiction that treats African-American themes by Thomas Pavel in his seminal book Fictional and addresses African-American concerns in Worlds (1986). the context of twentieth-century technoculture— and, more generally, African-American significa- HUGH O’CONNELL THE DIALECTICS OF AFRICAN- tion that appropriates images of technology and FUTURISM BETWEEN SF a prosthetically enhanced future.” While Dery’s UNIVERSITY OF WORLDBUILDING AND inaugural work has been influential in setting MASSACHUSETTS, BOSTON NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT the agenda for Afrofuturist studies over the last PANEL F1: AFROFUTURISM Afrofuturism has recently enjoyed a well-de- 20-plus years, a newer generation of critics and SR34.D2, DEC 8, 9AM served surge in critical attention from critics both artists, including Noah Tsika and Nnedi Okorafor, within and outside of the academy. However, one have begun to bristle against such explicit Amer- of the often unremarked aspects of Afrofuturism icentrism. is its grounding in Americentric experiences and This paper will attempt to limn a discourse discourses. Indeed, this unintentional Amer- of African-futurism, foregrounded in the recent icentricism can be traced back to Mark Dery’s explosion of African science fiction since 2010, 1994 theorization of Afrofuturism as “specula- drawing especially on the Ivor Hartmann-edit- CHRIS PAK ed volumes of African SF (2010–), the Ayodele MODELING WHAT COULD BE: SCIENCE Arigbabu-edited Lagos_2060 (2013), and Nnedi FICTION’S ENVIRONMENAL FUTURES SWANSEA UNIVERSITY Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014). More specially, Science fiction can be seen as a modelling en- PANEL G4: ONTOLOGIES it will focus on sf coming out of Nigeria as one of terprise, in which the worlds that are portrayed & EPISTEMOLOGIES II the most prominent sites of production and con- function as models of or for the future. What SR34.K1, DEC 8, 3.30PM tent for this new boom in African sf. Significantly, kind of model, however, is science fiction, and as Lagos serves as the neoliberal financial and what kinds of modelling activities and practices commercial center for Nigeria and western Af- do they portray? This presentation builds on re- rica, it provides a rich source of inspiration for search conducted as part of the digital human- the utopian and dystopian dialectics of the Afri- ities project, “Modelling Between Digital and can-Futurist imagination. My paper will examine Humanities: Thinking in Practice,” and my own African-futurism as mediated through the com- research into science fiction’s environmental plex dialectical interaction of sf world-building futures to delimit the boundaries of a research alongside neoliberal developmental schemes, project designed to tackle these questions. thus marking the distinctiveness of African-fu- turism as a critical concept. ANIA PALUCH MÉTIS FUTURISM: ROSALIE FAVELL in sf introduced a more complex representation AND MÉTIS IN SPACE SET THEIR for mixed identities, connecting themes of con- CARLETON UNIVERSITY PHASERS TO DECOLONIZE THE temporary mixed-race issues and correspond- PANEL D5: INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGIES SCIENCE FICTION UNIVERSE ing them with the fictional cyborg characters. SR34.K2, DEC 7, 11.45AM Science fiction is a seemingly borderless genre Cyborgs are symbols of societal fears of mixing of media, opening up possibilities of representa- peoples, races, religions, and languages; they tion and acknowledgment of various identities. are the threat of what may become of humanity, In fact, Daniel McNeil has stated that “there is when mixing bloodlines of historical and colonial always a super culture that allows for connec- enemies. To soften the “shock” of seeing some- tions outside ones’ Indigenous culture,” a kind one from a mixed background, representations of lingua franca, such as sf or popular culture. of mixed race characters in sf have been often Star Trek: The Original Series (1966–69) intro- whitewashed. duced Spock, a little “m” metis, or mixed-race In my paper, I will show the interconnections character—which for the 1960s, was a revo- between the aforementioned themes and issues lutionary identity to introduce in mainstream in relation to the work of Métis artist Rosalie American television. The depiction of cyborgs Favell in her series Plain(s) Warrior Artist (1999– 2003) and Cultural Mediations (2003–08) ogy (1970), these visions are only apparently alongside the experiences of podcasters Métis novel, as the authors utilize concepts that have in Space at the 2014 Montreal Comic Con. My been present in literature for ages. Vera Graaf, paper will explore how Favell uses popular cul- on the other hand, has emphasized the wealth ture, specifically fantasy and sf to address her of ideas sf writers employ (e.g. political state, mixed ancestry, and how podcasters Molly and corporate rules, empires, and state machinery). Chelsea address the lack of positive Indigenous Stanisław Lem, who wrote during the com- representation at the convention, and the invisi- munist era in Poland, is hardly considered to be bility they felt dressing up as Métis space aliens. a political writer, yet, in a number of his works he leans toward social and political commen- DAMIAN PODLESNY POLITICS AND SCIENCE FICTION: tary, such as in Eden (1958), Memoirs Found in THE POLITICAL WORLDS OF a Bathtub (1961), Mask (1976), and The Scene PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW STANISLAW LEM AND PHILIP K. DICK of the Crime (1982). Philip K. Dick stands some- PANEL B3: SF FROM THE Political visions have always played a paramount what in opposition to Lem due to his clear-cut po- FORMER EASTERN BLOC I role in science fiction. However, as Stanisław litical visions of oppressive realities, menacing SR24.K2, DEC 6, 5.30PM Lem suggests in Science Fiction and Futurol- social orders, the rule of syndicates, and police AGNIESZKA state in a vast number of his works, be it novels SITES OF CONTAMINATION, SITES OF or short stories. CONTAINMENT: LIMINAL SPACES AND PODRUCZNA Both writers, despite writing in two different PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE IN UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA political realities, and apart from many obvious LARISSA LAI’S SALT FISH GIRL PANEL G4: FROM THE differences, share some social and political One of the central concepts for both science MIDDLE TO THE FAR EAST ideas that emerge more or less powerfully in fiction and postcolonial studies is the notion of SR34.K3, DEC 8, 3.30PM their fiction. The aim of the paper is to draw from space. In particular, they seem to be interested the rich sf wardrobe of Stanisław Lem and Philip in spaces which elude boundaries and refuse K. Dick to explore their approaches to oppressive containment: spaces which exist outside or politics with reference to Graaf’s awe and Lem’s in-between. The exploration of liminal spaces complaints on the quality of political ideas in sf. in imaginary futuristic worlds finds a particular- ly useful realization in the works of postcolonial speculative fiction, which work to re-examine and critically address the ways in which science fiction narratives, rooted in the colonial ideals of expansion and conquest, have historically con- ceptualized places and spaces. the invasion of the periphery on the neo-colo- With that in mind, my paper will examine the nial center, which destabilizes the hegemonic sites of containment and simultaneous contam- order and contributes to the further blurring of ination which Larissa Lai represents in her novel boundaries between the inside and the outside. Salt Fish Girl (2002), emphasizing the transgres- Consequently, the durian fruit, which, due to its sive properties of those spaces existing in the nature, brings the colonial associations of repug- futuristic world of 21st-century British Columbia. nance and disgust with the Other, stands for the Employing postcolonial theory as well as theory transgressive forces of anti-colonial resistance of science fiction as the methodological frame- and serves a reminder of the subversive potenti- work, the paper posits that the liminal space of alities of liminal spaces as well as the impossibil- the Unregulated Zone actively resists its forced ity of complete eradication of all signs of alterity, containment and contaminates the neo-colonial which continue to seep through the cracks and space of technocratic order that is the city-state contaminate the hegemonic center. of Serendipity. Thus, in bringing the durian fruit from the Unregulated Zone into Serendipity, Mi- randa’s—the protagonist’s—mother facilitates ALEXANDER POPOV & HOW READERS WORLD: views is here handled and harnessed through THE POETICS AND ONTOLOGY OF an analysis of the scales at which worlds are VLADIMIR POLEGANOV WORLD CREATION AS NEGOTIATION apprehended. The paper will use ideas from SOFIA UNIVERSITY This paper will explore the role of the reader in McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red (2015), which ST. KLIMENT OHRIDSKI creating sf worlds. It will situate the discussion discusses worlds and worldviews as the encoun- PANEL E4: ONTOLOGIES within a coordinate system derived from ob- ter between labor and nature, themselves his- AND EPISTEMOLOGIES I ject-oriented ontology and modern ecological torically co-produced, and the different levels at SR34.D2, DEC 7, 3PM thought, but also from more assemblage-ori- which this occurs: the molar and the molecular. ented theorists like Donna Haraway. Worlds The translation of organizational models (met- are thus seen as heaps of objects that are with- aphors) between different levels and contexts, drawn and only ever partially accessible via their or the organization of knowledge, is seen as a appearances; worlds are ragged, incomplete, practice of negotiating between possible worlds; and information-lossy; but objects are also orga- nature and man are read as models as such, nized in complex (world) systems, which exhibit whose own metaphors need to be traced back novel and ever-emergent characteristics. to the origin of their production. This is perhaps This apparent discrepancy between the two akin to Fredric Jameson’s notion of “ontological realism.” Plan the Plan is Death” (1973), Octavia Butler’s Object-oriented philosophy thus liberates “Bloodchild” (1984), and Ursula Le Guin’s “Soli- worlds from established hierarchies because tude” (1994). In each of these texts, a radically it allows models from all kinds of sources and alien world is read through familiar apparati with scales to flow up, down, and sideways through specific material qualities (language, bodies, worlds; but worlds can also be seen as complex culture). Both the alignment and mismatch be- assemblages of objects when an observer tries tween model and modeled reality are important, to access a reality of a different scale—for this is as their interaction produces complex imagina- done via a set of interface models, an apparatus tive, rationalizing, and affective reactions in the for producing worlds out of reality. reader; the analyses will pay particular attention This paper will accordingly suggest that the to the scales at which the apparati operate as worlding apparatus is a set of models which are well. used to comprehend unknown worlds, filters Thus, we will suggest that the reader carries interposed between the reader and the other out a kind of labor against the text and against reality. We will exemplify our arguments through the reality implied by and beyond the text. three short works, James Tiptree’s “Love is the Worlds are created in that process of negotiation between models. Only in this conceptual dislo- scope, designed to facilitate creative play and cation can the unknown be made somewhat promote character immersion in tabletop role- knowable, but, conversely, this transposition of playing games. Since their earliest incarnations familiar apparati to unfamiliar settings cannot in 1970s and 1980s, roleplaying games have leave the reader completely the same, either. been about constructing and acting out fiction- She herself is worlded by the reading experience. al scenarios, set in pre-designed, simulated, or at times randomly generated settings, from the PAWEL PYRKA CRITICAL RULES: WORLDBUILDING, fantasy dungeon “crawls” of Dungeons & Drag- CHARACTER IMMERSION, AND ons (1974) through investigative play of Call of SWPS UNIVERSITY OF STORYTELLING THAT MATTERS Cthulhu (1981) to space exploration, trade, and/ SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES IN TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAMES or military operations of Traveller (1977). The fol- PANEL C1: MOVEMENT IS KEY IN THE DIGITAL AGE lowing decades brought numerous innovations SR34.K1, DEC 7, 9.15AM This presentation will explore the most im- into the world of role-playing (both to the mecha- portant aspects of cooperative narrative- and nisms of storytelling and to the cultural concerns worldbuilding, as well as discussing the key de- it reflected and reflects, respectively), along with velopments in system mechanics and thematic the challenges posed by the rising popularity of video-gaming (including cRPGs) and numerous character’s development and psychology (Call of other forms of entertainment media. And yet the Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade [1991]), current success of the 5th edition of “the world’s and finally the shift from “simulationist” gaming greatest roleplaying game” (as the D&D adver- to systems which enhance immersion, drama tising slogan states), reflected by its increasing and narrative (FATE and PbtA families of games). presence in mainstream media and the count- By tracing the practices of worlding and narra- less hours of recorded game sessions on Twitch tion, which in tabletop RPGs are inherently inter- and YouTube, seems to suggest a renaissance of twined and inseparable, and observing the grow- sorts for this once-niche hobby. ing impact of such practices on popular media The paper will examine the evolution of both and culture, the paper will argue that roleplaying mechanics and aesthetics of tabletop roleplay- is the kind of storytelling, worldtelling even, that ing games, including the departure from “dun- matters especially in contemporary digital age. geon” settings into broader and more complex worlds and universes (Runequest [1978] and Warhammer FRP [1986]), the change from “task force” party mentality to focus on individual JOOST RAESSENS COLLAPSUS; OR, os (2012–25) about the expected energy crisis HOW TO MAKE PLAYERS and the necessity of energy transition from fossil UTRECHT UNIVERSITY BECOME ECOLOGICAL CITIZENS fuel to alternative energy sources. On the basis PANEL F2: REGENERATIVE PLAY Contemporary game and play practices are in- of Collapsus’ underlying logical and dramatic SR34.K2, DEC 8, 9AM creasingly used not only to entertain, but also to models, this paper will discuss the differences make a difference at an individual, community, and similarities between the worlding practices and/or societal level. Ecological games are one used in science fiction-, futurology-, and scenario kind of such “games for change”—they not only planning-based game and play practices. seek to contribute to ecological thought but also This paper aims to offer a conceptual clarifi- to turn players into ecological citizens. cation of the strategies Collapsus uses to raise In this paper, I will examine how Collapsus: awareness about climate change and to change Energy Risk Conspiracy (2010) explores the pos- or reinforce players’ worldviews, beliefs, and val- sibilities of human future action. Collapsus is an ues. It will discuss how Collapsus makes people intermedial, game-like and playful ecological ex- reflect on the global, political, and cultural impli- perience. This online counter-discursive produc- cations of climate change and act accordingly. tion engages users with realistic future scenari- PAUL GRAHAM RAVEN “LET’S PUT FOSSIL FUELS BEHIND US”: osition, but examples to date are largely lacking TOWARD THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION in theoretical grounding and methodological & JOHANNES STRIPPLE OF SCIENCE FICTION AS A SANDBOX rigour. In establishing the theoretical bases for UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE this enterprise (and building in turn upon the & LUND UNIVERSITY This paper will make a case for the instrumen- foundational work on social futures by the late PANEL G2: BEYOND PETROMODERNITY II: talization of science fiction narrative production John Urry, among others), we aim at the same ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURES and critique as a rigorous and theoretically sub- time to greatly expand the potential of sf as a SR34.D2, DEC 8, 3.30PM stantiated methodology for the ethnographic tool for serious research on social futures, and exploration of speculative reconfigurations of so- also to critique its superficial deployment in the ciotechnical regimes. Or, more simply: we argue production of technoscientific propaganda and that the worldbuilding toolkit evolved by practi- boosterism. tioners and critics of science fiction may be fruit- By drawing out the parallels between the so- fully repurposed by social scientists seeking to cial-scientific concept of the “technoscientific reclaim the study of “futures” from the prevailing imaginary” and the sf-critical concept of the “sf technodeterministic hegemony. megatext,” we will demonstrate the ease with Sf-as-methodology is not a strictly novel prop- which the tools of both disciplines—construc- tive and deconstructive alike—might transfer nous futurism,” it certainly employs conventions across their already-porous boundaries with and strategies drawn from both in compelling minimal friction. We will draw upon cutting-edge fashion. Situating the printed text of Vela at the social-scientific research on sociotechnical tran- end of a long chain of storytelling and cultural sitions toward decarbonised societies as a case transmission that stretches across the divide study, and argue that sf can be more than a separating pre-contact Samoa from post-colo- handmaiden to hypercapitalism, serving instead nial contemporaneity, Wendt positions his poem as a sandbox within which alternatives to the as a grand post-colonial intervention into telling perpetuation of petromodernity might be pro- the history and evaluating the consequences of duced, critiqued, and refined. the colonization and Christianization of Samoa. Straddling genres, media, and cultures, Wendt JOHN RIEDER THE WAR OF THE WORLDS IN ALBERT explores the space connecting orality and print, WENDT’S ADVENTURES OF VELA divinity and humanity, myth and realism, ano- UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, MĀNOA Although Albert Wendt’s long verse narrative nymity and copyright, unfolding at every level of PANEL D5: INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGIES The Adventures of Vela (2009) is not adequately the text the effects of a centuries-long collision SR34.K2, DEC 7, 11.45AM described as either “science fiction” or “indige- between radically different worlds. LARS SCHMEINK In this presentation I will describe, in as much A FUTURE OF EXTERMINISM: CYBER- detail as the space allows me, the way Wendt PUNK’S COMMODIFICATION OF BODIES HAFENCITY UNIVERSITY HAMBURG stages this collision in his use of language, plot, In his book Four Futures (2016), Pete Frase de- PANEL C1: SCARCITY & ABUNDANCE genre, allusion, image, voice, and irony. In the scribes the possible future world shaped by au- SR34.04, DEC 7, 9.15AM process, Wendt achieves a blend of realism tomatization and scarcity, sticking to the concept and fantasy no less vivid than that achieved in of hierarchy and inequality, as a world shaped H. G. Wells’s paradigmatic rendering of colonial by exterminism. In this future, human lives (i.e., invasion in The War of the Worlds (1898), with their work and continued existence) become su- the difference being that instead of Wells’s sym- perfluous to the needs of the wealthy elite that pathetic imaginative representation of the vic- dominate society. They become commodities to tims of colonial invasion, Wendt accomplishes be traded or discarded as needed. It seems hard a fiercely anti-colonial Native truth-telling that to imagine such a future become a reality, but nonetheless finds its way in the end to an ethics recent cyberpunk fictions have managed to do of mourning and forgiveness. just that. The presentation will undertake a close reading of recent cyberpunk fictions, such as Ely- sium (2013) and Altered Carbon (2018) to show how the human body has become a commodi- norms, some boundaries seemingly just cannot fied object in the lives of the ruling elite. be crossed. One such line is heteronormativity, a rigid ma- ELISABETH SCHNEIDER A QUEERING THAT IS NONE: INTER- trix that not only prescribes a binary of gender, SEXUALITY IN ROBERT A. HEINLEIN’S but also sex and sexuality. Should “troubling” UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ “ALL YOU ZOMBIES—” elements of queerness come into play, they are PANEL E3: IMAGINING Science fiction promises its audiences uni- frequently relegated to the margins, demonized, NON-BINARY FUTURES verses of wonder, excitement, and endless and/or made invisible. Few science fiction sto- SR34.K2, DEC 7, 3PM possibilities. Facehuggers, warp drives, proto- ries dare to cross the invisible line of heteronor- molecules, lightsabers, time machines, sonic mative rules and regulations. Stories that cele- screwdrivers—everything is imaginable, nothing brate and foreground queerness are few and far impossible. That is, until seemingly unshakable between and themselves often niche products socio-cultural concepts come into play. Despite that find no place in the mainstream. More of- science fiction’s immense potential to transport ten than not, cultural products only toy with that us into a realm of the (im)possible, of stories that invisible line—and then immediately take a step transgress, subvert, or even transform societal back, repudiating any intention of violating what is seen as an unshakable fact of nature. What atives are upheld throughout the story will give such stories end up accomplishing is a further an insight into how the societal discourse around ostracism of those already marginalized—and a intersexuality is structured and implemented— re-inscription of heteronormative boundaries. and how it can be instrumentalized to uphold For example, at first glance, Robert Heinlein’s that which it troubles. time-travel short story “All You Zombies—” offers INDIANA SERESIN a progressive representation of intersexuality. At THE WORLD(S) THROUGH second glance, however, it is only all too emblem- DELANY’S EYES: PERCEPTION, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE atic of how intersexuality is treated in fictional as DISTORTION, AND INVENTION IN PANEL E3: IMAGINING well as in real-life environments. The protago- THE MOTION OF LIGHT IN THE WATER NON-BINARY FUTURES nist’s intersexuality stays firmly rooted within a Samuel R. Delany’s autobiography The Motion of SR34.K2, DEC 7, 3PM binary sex system, a system that is never once Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing troubled. Science fiction’s transgressive possibil- in the East Village (1988) is, more than anything ities are never realized; instead, mechanisms of else, a portrait of its author’s consciousness. the genre are used to reinforce heteronormative Looking and seeing are the central tropes of imperatives. Shedding light on how these imper- the text, and—as the title denotes—metaphors of light, reflection, and refraction serve to fore- ing of other worlds into the fabric of reality cor- ground Delany’s perception in the narrative. responds with current meditations on black te- Much of the existing scholarship on Motion pos- leology in the work of theorists such as Michelle its the book as an account of Delany’s identity M. Wright and Tavia Nyong’o. Delany’s account in an ontological sense, marvelling over Dela- of how he uniquely invents/perceives other ny’s account of his life as a black, gay, dyslexic, worlds within his own present reality, meanwhile, straight-married man. Such readings underem- provides a new perspective on the debate trig- phasize the “Science Fiction Writing” dimension gered by the artist Martine Syms’ critique of of the autobiography, particularly Delany’s med- Afrofuturism in The Mundane Afrofuturist Man- itations on how he perceives and invents other ifesto (2013). Reading Motion as an account of worlds through distortions of his surroundings. science-fictional world-perception provides a Combined with its fragmented structure, Mo- new angle through which we can consider fan- tion’s consistent references to light and vision tasies of utopia and escape as responses to an unravel the world as a cohesive totality while anti-black world. illuminating flashes of other worlds within what Delany calls “the texture of the real.” This weav- JASMINE SHARMA “DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR FUTURE”: reality of the Positron Project. This feminist read- PHALLIC DECEPTION AND TECHNO- ing will draw on the works of science and tech- INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEXUAL AGENCY IN MARGARET nology theorists like Donna Haraway and Sandra PANEL F3: HUMANS AND/ ATWOOD’S THE HEART GOES LAST Harding, theorists on “body criticism” like Eliz- AS ARTIFICIAL CREATURES This paper will investigate the politics of decep- abeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, mobilizing it to- SR34.04 (SKYPE), DEC 8, 9AM tion in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Heart Goes ward the postfeminist dimension. Philosophies Last (2015). The novel traces the unsettling jour- of Michel Foucault, Giles Deleuze, and Felix ney of an unemployed couple whose quest for Guattari will enlighten my argument with critical a better life is frustrated by false promises and insights on the discourses of power and hege- mechanizations of insidious elements. Situated mony within technocracy. In the end, my paper within a landscape of identity confusion and mis- will discuss the manipulation of technology and leading information, female characters Jocelyn its devastating effects on the defrauded individ- and Charmaine pose a threat to the phallic dom- uals. It will unravel the latent forces of resistance inance, orchestrated and practiced by those in in Atwood’s dystopia and unmask the politics of power. Both the female characters dismantle the pretentiousness within its speculative structure. technocratic scandal and expose the underlying ANDREW SHEPARD THE HISTORY OF LIONS: played a major role in promulgating the notion CHARLES SAUNDERS’ IMARO AND of Africa as “the Dark Continent.” In response, STANFORD UNIVERSITY THE REVISIONIST LOST RACE TALE black authors working in the speculative tradi- PANEL F1: AFROFUTURISM Critics such as Everett Blieler and John Rieder tion have taken it upon themselves to provide SR34.D2, DEC 8, 9AM have identified lost race fiction as an important counternarratives—visions in which Africa gets antecedent for the speculative genres as we to be something other than the savage counter- know them today. Unfortunately, the genre can part against which the West favorably compares also be held responsible for a number of per- itself. nicious ideas which continue to persist in the One such author is Charles Saunders, whose science fiction and fantasy tales of our own era, Imaro tales transport the “sword and sorcery” among them: Eurocentrism, xenophobia, and a fantasy of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber to tendency to romanticize the project of empire. a secondary world setting inspired by sub-Saha- The image of Africa and its peoples, in particular, ran Africa in a variant that he has dubbed “Sword have suffered considerably due to such ideas, and Soul.” The Imaro stories thus face the chal- as the colonial romances of authors such as lenge of conjuring a fantastical vision of Africa H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs have unconquered by colonialism or slavery while also maintaining a recognizable connection to the cy is to ignore the aesthetics of creation. For a continent as referent. writer, this is the opportunity to create the sweep In this paper, I will examine this tension as it and scope of history, culture, and geography. The surfaces in the debut Imaro tale “City of Mad- creation relies heavily on the assumption of a ness” (1974)—a story which satirizes the lost vast backstory, yet that backstory may be largely race subgenre so ubiquitous to early sf and fan- unexpressed as the unfolding of the world must tasy by highlighting the racist logic underpinning be subordinate to traditional plot elements, and its narrative conventions. the story cannot slow to admire the view. Each world detail must do double or triple duty and im- JONATHAN E. SHIPLEY WORLD BUILDING: ply more than it says in order to move the story THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS along. INDEPENDENT As a writer and writing teacher of speculative fic- For example, lighting in itself, whether by PANEL A2: WORLDBUILDING tion, I am bound to worldbuilding, a staple of the candle, electricity, or some method unknown BEYOND STORYTELLING science fiction and fantasy genres that extends to modern science can imply a pre-industrial, SR34.K1, DEC 6, 3PM to all speculative genres. To reduce the creation post-industrial, or futuristic technology. In a of worlds to a construction exercise of consisten- short work, that one detail may be enough to es- tablish the technology of the setting, or as Mar- tive writing, and the skill of worldbuilding is one ion Zimmer Bradley establishes in her Darkover more tool in the arsenal of aspiring writers. series (1958–96), interlocking details can ex- press a more complex culture that is both pre-in- WORLDING GENDER IN ELIZABETH SHIPLEY dustrial and futuristic. The double art of imagin- URSULA K. LE GUIN AND ANN LECKIE KARLSRUHE UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION ing broadly but writing sparsely is the heart and Ursula K. Le Guin and Ann Leckie are two em- PANEL B2: URSULA K. LE GUIN the art of world building. To do it well, the writer inent examples of feminist sf writers who use SR34.K1, DEC 6, 5.30PM has to construct a dense alternative universe worldbuilding of a monumental order, re-defining in imagination, then deconstruct the concept the genre of space opera by spanning huge peri- down to specific details that still convey the full ods of time across space as a backdrop to create sense of world. Add in too many details and they thought experiments about gender. encumber the story; too few and the setting is The mad king of Karhide on the planet Gethen unconvincing. in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Balance between the wide and the nar- fears “a nation of monsters” when encountering row is the goal. Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the First Mobile Genly Ai from Earth, for Ai is not only Craft (1998) addresses many aspects of effec- exclusively male but also continuously male, and thus a monster for the very differently gendered no gender markers. This causes confusion and Gethenians. Gender is one of the greatest obsta- misreadings among the characters as well as cles to his diplomatic mission, not least because for readers, who by reading are forced to world of Ai’s dangerous predilection to interpret behav- a space in which gender is not. By producing ior of an otherly gendered people through binary and holding that absence over an entire trilogy, gender stereotypes. In this novel, Le Guin set out Leckie makes visible the essential role language to “eliminate gender,” but in the end gender is plays in our perception of gender in the world. constantly trouble. This talk will compare how these works by The question of what is human is also a ma- Le Guin and Leckie demonstrate the practice of jor theme of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilo- enduring a world without binary gender and the gy (2013–15), narrated by a long-living, almost way language, in for example the concern with immortal posthuman, a former human enslaved pronouns, is an inseparable aspect of worlding and merged with the consciousness of a sentient gender or its absence. ship, who has been part of a long series of inter- galactic wars and planetary conquests. In the native language of the narrator’s world, there are PATRYCJA I CAN FEEL A GREAT AGE ENDING: of such storytelling is the site of mythmaking in AN ECOCRITICAL READING the game—mythmaking concerning the Void and SOKOLOWSKA OF THE DISHONORED SERIES its representational deity. In Dishonored, the UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA Even though the video game series Dishonored Void fulfills the function of an alternate plane, PANEL E1: GREENING SF is easy to classify in terms of its video game seemingly an afterlife of sorts, and with imag- SR34.K3, DEC 7, 3PM genre (a mix of stealth and action-adventure), ery of all-encompassing water, floating whales, it is harder to pin down the genre of its narra- non-Euclidian angles, and destroyed buildings, tive. Consisting of elements characteristic of it opens the narrative to an ecocritical reading. fantasy, dystopian science fiction, and weird Moreover, elements of said imagery are carried fiction tropes, Dishonored (2012) as well as its over to multiple locations of the game’s core sequel (2016) construct an intricate environ- plane, reinforcing this reading. Thus, through the ment of a steampunk-like world of 19th-century use of an ecrocritical framework, I will discuss faux-London which depends on distilled whale oil the ways in which the Dishonored series system- to function. The narrative relies heavily on envi- atizes its lore, that is, the practices and beliefs ronmental storytelling and utilizes multiple ways of the world’s inhabitants, and the resulting di- of conveying the story to the player. One strand egetic elements which can be interpreted as a metaphor for the anxieties in the Anthropocene. tures of this alternate reality, and one that is in- fluential in establishing it as the morally corrupt MAREIKE SPYCHALA MOTHER OF THE FATHERLAND: one of the two universes, has been its depiction GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE of gender roles and sexuality. This has also been UNIVERSITY OF BAMBERG MIRROR UNIVERSE IN TOS AND ST: DSC one of its most criticized features because of PANEL B1: STAR TREK I: DISCOVERY In a heavily foreshadowed move, Star Trek: the reliance on generic tropes like the “Captain’s SR34.D2, DEC 6, 5.30PM Discovery (2017–) takes its characters into the Woman,” a tendency to overtly sexualize female Mirror Universe during the second half of its characters, and the repeated connection be- first season. This alternate reality, which pres- tween morally ambiguous or downright evil ac- ents the universe as it would look if the ideals tions and “deviant” sexual behavior. of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet This paper will argue that Discovery avoids were inverted, has been a recurring narrative lo- and maybe even upends such tropes in the ep- cation in the franchise since its introduction in isodes set in the Mirror Universe. Indeed, it en- “Mirror, Mirror” (1967) during The Original Se- acts a critique of gender norms, and especially ries’ (1966–69) second season. toxic masculinity, by contrasting characters like From its inception, one of the prominent fea- Captain Philipa Georgiou, Michael Burnham SARAH STANLEY and Sylvia Tilly with their (absent) Mirror coun- PERFORMING ALPHAVILLE: terparts, the Emperor of the Terran Empire and HIGH-TECH ARCHITECTURE INDEPENDENT their (former) Captain Gabriel Lorca. Thus, while MEETS TECH-NOIR IN THE PANEL C4: ROGUES ONE gender remains an important factor in construct- FUTURIST METROPOLIS SR34.K3, DEC 7, 9.15AM ing and contrasting the Prime from the Mirror “A book of philosophy should be in part a very Universe, Discovery avoids and even reverses particular species of detective novel, in part a some of the narrative tropes that earlier itera- kind of science fiction. By detective novel we tions of the franchise have been criticized for, mean that concepts, with their zones of pres- and, simultaneously, explicitly includes intersec- ence, should intervene to resolve local situa- tional feminist perspectives in the hopeful future tions,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Difference and that Star Trek has prided itself on representing Repetition (1968), which could well describe since its inception. Godard’s Alphaville, a fictional metropolis found within the new high-tech area of Paris. The future had arrived, yet inhabiting it required a certain amount of detective work via cinema to be un- derstood. Tech-noir of the 1980s shares a direct legacy Today, we can still ask, “How does it feel to in- with the territory laid out in Alphaville (1965), yet habit older industrial infrastructures, century-old the mixing of detective pulp fictions with sf ar- underground systems, 19th-century architecture rived in the post-war years, yet had never made it and city plans, alongside Futurist architectures into tech-noir until Alphaville in 1965. While film emerging in cities?” The building of unique ar- noir draws upon the lights and signage of the city chitectural worlds often create class-based hier- at night, Godard adds an in-depth history of cin- archies, as the classic sf film Metropolis (1927) ema and its technology, while exploring the ten- shows. The new structures emerging in Paris sions of Cold War-era rocket testing of the arms during the 1960s, such as buildings dedicated to and space race. Wernher von Braun, the former new communications technologies and jet flight, German Nazi scientist who directed rocket devel- did indeed resemble visions from outer space. opment in America, began to write science fic- Godard had foreseen the ways global cities de- tion, Project Mars: A Technical Tale, and hosted pend upon these futurist architectures as brand- a series of TV shows with the Disney Channel, ing functions of the capitalist city, and the link in an effort to sell his manned space stations to these designs continue to share with space flight orbit the moon and even Mars. and space vehicles. Architects began engaging in sf worlds early on with the novels by Jules various mainstream cinema and TV properties. Verne, related to visions of new transportation While academia frequently observes this trend infrastructure built with the same materials and as a commercial strategy, it also needs to be profiles as trains, automobiles, airplanes and explored in its ideological implications when it rocket ships. Godard’s unfolding of the shadows shifts from the absolute individual at the heart of of these urban film histories provide a vehicle to a narrative to an assembly of characters who re- show how these forms have emerged once again late to one another. To this end, the paper takes in architecture designs of the past two decades. the MCU as its prime example for examining nar- rative, commercial, and ideological strategies of JONATAN STELLER BUILDING A COMMON UNIVERSE: inclusion that go into setting up and maintaining NARRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, AND a transmedia universe with a focus on building LEIPZIG UNIVERSITY IDEOLOGICAL STRATEGIES IN THE blocks that allow both future production teams PANEL A1: FRANCHISING MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE and fans to develop a wealth of stories. SR34.D2, DEC 6, 3PM Inspired by Marvel Comics’ print strategy, the suc- On the narrative level, Marvel Studios’ prod- cess of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–) ucts keep the entire range of studio depart- has brought the practice of universe building to ments busy by adhering to the dominant blend of sf and fantasy elements in blockbuster fiction. tions such as S.H.I.E.L.D. serve as rigid hierar- At the same time, they tap into young directors’ chies against which various collective agents sensibilities and different film genres such as develop. Sf elements in particular allow to ne- spy thrillers and heist movies to avoid audience gotiate ideals such as relational agency, prob- fatigue. lem-solving, and democratic resistance, and On the commercial level, Marvel Studios suc- call up the body of ideas propagated in DIY/ cessfully manages to weave its cinema and TV prosumer/maker communities that responds output into a brand narrative where both content well with audiences since the 2008 economic and form of films such asIron Man (2008) and crisis. In the turn towards interconnected story- Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) is attributed telling, the representation of small collectives to the studio. Through a collaborative process as gravitational centers provides various entry among directors and writers, the studio has points of audience identification and builds out emerged as a hub-like structure that success- peer-to-peer interaction as an alternative to the fully designs and produces various high-budget “professional” hierarchies propagated as the im- franchises for different output channels. perative in Western countries within the neolib- On the ideological level, fictional organiza- eral paradigm. KATIE STONE THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD: the reader of sf. Like Shori, Butler’s readers are NOVELTY AND AGE IN unable to draw upon their past experiences in BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON OCTAVIA BUTLER’S FLEDGLING order to orient themselves in the world she has PANEL G3: AGE & AGING The opening passages of Octavia Butler’s Fledg- created. And yet this fact does not necessitate a SR34.K2, DEC 8, 3.30PM ling (2004) describe the awakening of her pro- repudiation of knowledge as a potential tool for tagonist, who has no memory of life prior to that world-discovery, as evidenced by the fact that moment. Forced to begin life again from a posi- much of the novel is spent in tracking Shori’s tion of absolute ignorance, she discovers that research into the vast body of learning the cen- her name was Shori Matthews and she has the turies old Ina have amassed. It is, therefore, the appearance of a ten-year-old human girl but has very ignorance of both Shori and the sf reader in fact lived for over fifty years as a member of which provides a catalyst for their subsequent Butler’s science-fictional vampiric species, the acquisition of knowledge and the questioning of Ina. This paper will explore the ways in which presumed truths which that brings with it. Shori’s position as a child—despite her age the By drawing attention to Butler’s insistent re- Ina, due to their long lifespans, still consider her iteration of Shori’s position as a child and her to be a child—connects her experience to that of attendant epistemological insecurity, this paper JANIN TSCHESCHEL will argue for the significance of childish igno- A WORLD WITHIN US: DENIS rance in the construction of the sf reader more VILLENEUVE’S ARRIVAL OPENS UNIVERSITY OF BONN generally. Philosopher Ernst Bloch—whose writ- AN OUTER SPACE OF NEW EXPERIENCE PANEL C4: ROGUES ONE ing has often been connected to sf’s utopian Denis Villeneuve’s movie Arrival (2016) gives us SR34.K3, DEC 7, 9.15AM potential, most prominently by Darko Suvin—has an insight into a science fiction world unknown stressed the radical implications of the child’s to us which, to draw on Simon Spiegel, never- “relentlessly curious” approach to novelty. While theless represents a possible extension of our the need for curious questioning in the face of already existing one. This “throwness” (as Heide- science-fictional novelty has since been empha- gger calls it) into a world that may not (yet) be sized throughout sf criticism, it has rarely been physically justifiable is always a throwness into framed in relation to childhood. This reading of another corporeality. For this reason, cinema Fledgling, therefore, will re-center the child with- and especially sf universes become a realm of in that critical discourse; arguing that, in both experience of the unknown and impossible to their ignorance and their curiosity, the sf read- the recipient (see Casetti). er’s experience within the many worlds of sf is Against this backdrop, the paper discuss the that of a child. ways in which Arrival creates a corporeal experi- ence that immerses the spectator in the unac- into our innermost being by creating a holistic quainted sf world. In Arrival, the medium of lan- corporeal experience for its viewers. In this con- guage and its logogrammatic mediation plays a text, the paper will show how the movie works major role. The movie functions as a door opener synaesthetically as well as through circular nar- to another universe, but also to a new world with- ration to remediate a new level of consciousness in our human selves, namely, an unidentified lev- that is bound only to the causality of events, but el of consciousness that allows the protagonist not to the linearity of time. to remember her future. By placing a changed AGNIESZKA perception at its center through learning a new WORLD RE-BUILDING: language, the film metareflexively refers to itself ESCHATOLOGICAL THOUGHT IN URBANCZYK as a medium of experience that can bring about THE SCIENCE FICTION GENRE JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY a different perception of the world surrounding AS EXEMPLIFIED BY STAR TREK PANEL G1: STAR TREK II: the spectator. It leads us out of our own self, con- Darko Suvin linked the science fiction genre to BEFORE DISCOVERY fronts us with the unknown, with extra-terrestrial variations on utopia. According to him, a work SR34.04, DEC 8, 3.30PM life, with a new language comprehension, a relat- belongs to the sf genre if it conveys the creator’s ed change in consciousness and brings us back criticism of their contemporaneity translated into an image of a reality that is different but sci- rationalist series, although it is also a document entifically plausible. Thus, sf allows recipients to of the paradoxes the science fiction genre faces. see their environment as shaped by history and, Even as the creators of the series consistently therefore, open to criticism. According to Suvin, depreciated theist religions, negated the tran- only the laws of science are unconditional in sf. scendent, and strived to naturalize the supernat- A project like this, making the historical material- ural, they were unable to escape the eschatolog- ism its primary paradigm, excludes the presence ical paradigm. The show suggests that growing of any religious and metaphysical rules embed- social injustice, eugenics, and a world war are ded into the created world. inevitable. The subsequent establishment of a The genre, nonetheless, is based on an inher- utopia built on the ashes of civilization is made ently religious thought and Star Trek serves as a possible at least partially by an intervention of great illustration of this phenomenon. Although otherworldly beings with superhuman abilities. the series would be dismissed by Suvin as an This is hardly surprising considering the recip- example of space opera, its creators did use rocal relationship between utopia and millenar- cognitive estrangement as a primary narrative ianism, yet it does undermine the didactic and device. Star Trek is widely considered a deeply parenetic dimension of the project. The human agency in Star Trek is replaced by catastroph- which includes both special and quasi-special ism and awaiting for a rebirth which cannot be vocabulary coined by the texts’ authors. Qua- achieved on our own. This tension between the si-special vocabulary describes virtual reality, declaratively rationalist and materialistic para- an imaginary fantastic world which is based on digm on one hand, and its underlying millena- scientific assumptions. My paper will put particu- rianist narrative on the other is crucial to the lar emphasis on the peculiarities of the semantic whole genre, especially its iterations that take structure of terminology used in science fiction place in the future. texts. The paper will describe the main ways of semantization of quasi-special vocabulary units NADIIA THE SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES determined by their interaction with other lexical OF SPECIAL VOCABULARY layers. The variety of ways of semantization of VILKHOVCHENKO USED IN SCIENCE FICTION quasi-special vocabulary allows the author’s cre- LVIV POLYTECHNIC This paper will focus on characteristic features ativity to create an imaginary world. This special NATIONAL UNIVERSITY and functions of special vocabulary (terminol- vocabulary, I will suggest, shapes the genre of sf. PANEL C1: WORDS & WORLDS ogy) used in science fiction. The linguistic pic- SR34.D2, DEC 7, 9.15AM ture of this world is based on a concept system AURÉLIE VILLERS HOW THE WORLD OF ALASTAIR Just as classical in its form, the diegesis be- REYNOLDS’ REVELATION SPACE gins in medias res, in so far as, except for the UNIVERSITY OF PICARDY IS BEING BUILT: REVEALING date given, no explanation is presented as to PANEL C3: SCARCITY & ABUNDANCE WHAT THE STORY DOES NOT SAY how humanity managed to get the stars. This SR34.04, DEC 7, 9.15AM From its opening, Revelation Space (2000) is as feels all the more puzzling as some cities and enticing as it is mysterious. Like many science planets evoke places on Earth (Yellowstone, for fiction stories, it relies on mystery to keep the instance). When the BDO and the mystery of the reader entertained, a technique redolent of both plot keep the reader focused on the future of the the detective novel and the classical short sto- diegesis, the in medias res beginning is making ries with an twist ending. Such is the mystery of him constantly wonder about the past of the the disappearance of an alien race, the Amaran- diegesis so the current estranged situation can tins, on a newly colonized planet. Uncovering a make sense. Worldbuilding, in science fiction megalith—thus hinting at the classical Big Dumb stories, is then mostly done in parallel. It is up Object topos—Daniel Silveste, the main char- to the reader to make up for the missing bits and acter, sets on a quest that will keep the reader thus to make cognitive sense of the estranged hooked until the end. universe he is plunged into. In a very revealing manner, Revelation Space clearly explains that the crew has been inhabit- relies heavily on what Gérard Genette termed a ing it for a very long time. It typically makes the “paralipsis”: information the narrator knows but reader wonder what could have happened be- does not impart to reader. It can be seen as the fore the diegesis. contrary to the typical didactic passage where This paper therefore means to show to what the novum is lengthily explained to the reader degree the missing information, the paralipses, so he can make logical sense of the book’s uni- are constitutive of the world the author is build- verse. The paralipsis serves to hide “scientific” ing, keeping the reader not simply focused on explanations that would be too tricky to handle, the diegetic present he is telling, but also actively of simply signaling gaps in the world/story for the seeking its future and its past, so he can make reader to logically fill, whether they be explained this world whole. later or not. Thus, for instance, the first descrip- SANJA VODOVNIK tion of the damaged ship Ilia Voylyova, another HAVE AI, WILL PERFORM UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO main protagonist, is traveling in mentions the This presentation will explore dramaturgical pos- PANEL A1: PERFORMING WORLDS dangerously destroyed levels of a ship she does sibilities of staging sf in the theater, looking at SR24.K2, DEC 6, 3PM not even appear to know that well, while she plays and productions in which humans perform intelligent robots and robots perform intelligent tion on US television. From featuring the first humans. It will be an attempt at interacting with kiss between a black woman and a white man technology, trying to convince it to play a part in on network television during a time of racial a conference presentation. It will be a test run tension and featuring the representation of a for establishing a connection with an inhuman main character with disability in The Next Gen- co-actor. Yes, and? A game of following scripts eration (1987–94) to a woman in the captain’s and algorithms written by humans, embodied by chair in Voyager (1995–2001) and showing an humans and machines. An experimental journey African American single father as lead character through the landscapes they create and inhabit. in Deep Space Nine (1993–99); and finally giving the franchise its first visibly gay couple inDiscov - JENNIFER VOLKMER BUILDING THE FUTURE WITH THE ery (2017–). All these examples are testament BUILDING BLOCKS OF TODAY: to the franchise trying to show a progressively UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH HOW THE ZEITGEIST INFLUENCES more inclusive future. However, worldbuilding PANEL B1: STAR TREK I: DISCOVERY STAR TREK’S VISION(S) OF THE FUTURE does not only happen through inclusion of cer- SR34.D2, DEC 6, 5.30PM The Star Trek franchise has seemingly always tain aspects, but also by the omission of others. been at the forefront of minority representa- While science fiction is usually about showing the future, it is always rooted in the present, and sion content, to better understand the changes often carries over the same biases and prob- between the different iterations of the franchise. lems to its world building. This can be seen for ANNA WARSO example in minor and background characters, WORLDING RESISTANCE: and in clothing choices that make up large parts THE WOMAN’S PLACE AND SWPS UNIVERSITY OF of worldbuilding, especially in visual media. Sim- THE OPPRESSIVE STATE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES ilarly, there had been earlier efforts to include This paper will look at the worlds of Edmund PANEL B3: SF FROM THE queer characters on Star Trek. Wnuk-Lipiński’s Apostezjon trilogy (1979–89) FORMER EASTERN BLOC I This talk thus aims to explore the futures that and Juliusz Machulski’s Sexmission (1983). Both SR24.K2, DEC 6, 5.30PM are imagined through worldbuilding in the Star texts are meant to critique the dystopian realities Trek franchise by representation and lack of of an authoritarian state, the latter in the form representation, particularly focusing on the pro- of a satire that has since enjoyed a cult status cesses behind the scenes. Looking at the impor- in Poland, the former offering an arguably more tance of diversity in the writers’ room, general nuanced reflection on the environments, institu- structural changes in the TV landscape, and also tions and mechanisms of a totalitarian regime at the differences that streaming brings to televi- and the way they are coordinated to subdue the SIMON WHYBREW agency of the individual. In both cases, the pro- TRANSITIONING INTO THE FUTURE? tagonists’ increased vulnerability (resulting from AFFECTS OF TRANS-BECOMING IN UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ an induced memory loss or prolonged hiberna- CONTEMPORARY SF SHORT STORIES PANEL E3: IMAGINING tion) provides an entrance into the strange terri- Since the 1960s, cisgender authors of science NON-BINARY FUTURES tories the mapping of which becomes a structur- fiction have imagined worlds in which trans SR34.K2, DEC 7, 3PM al device largely driving the development of the identities have taken the form of a futuristic or narrative. The main focus of the proposed paper, alien mirage. The recent publication of two col- however, will be to investigate how the setting lections of sf short stories by trans authors rep- of these anti-totalitarian tales actually reestab- resents a significant challenge to this legacy of lishes and reinforces several oppressive hierar- trans erasure. In this paper, I will study the re- chies, including the patriarchal and often misog- sistant potentialities of three of these stories— ynistic framing of the female agency, typical of Gwen Benaway’s “Transition,” Tobi Hill Meyer’s the anti-feminist attitudes continuously present “Self-Reflection,” and “Treasure Acre” by Everett in the Polish political discourse and social land- Maroon. I will show that their exploration of the scape both before and after the transformation affective experience of trans-becoming chal- of 1989. lenges their predecessor ahistoricity and offers resistant visions of trans lives that challenge tra- in some way palpable an impossibly complex ditional, teleological narratives of transgender totality and further, locating the subject within identity. it—the very essence of worlding, and a job that traditionally understood “realism” fails at. It fails, RHYS WILLIAMS MAKING WORLDS FOR according to Amitav Ghosh, because of neces- THE END OF THE WORLD sary limits it deploys in order to “world” realis- UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW The transition from fossil fuels to renewables is tically, limits upon time and space which make PANEL D2: BEYOND PETROMODERNITY I: urgent. a static background of precisely the entangled ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURES Beyond the technological and economic ne- and shifting nature/culture of climate change, SR34.K1, DEC 7, 11.45AM cessities of transition, there is a need for believ- and christens this “believable.” How, then, do able and persuasive narratives which take us sf and the other fantastic genres overcome this from where we are now to where we need to be. blinkered focus, and can they do so in a “believ- Firstly, the realities of climate change and human able” way? Which is to say, they can “world,” but responsibility for it need to be sufficiently world- can they “world” this world? Secondly, visions of ed: the links need to be made and affectively felt alternative worlds–again, affectively and cogni- by all. This is a question of rendering visible and tively persuasive and believable–need to be ren- dered in such a way as to give us something to visibility. This has been seen time and again in aim at, a sense of what we might achieve, and everything from literature to comic books and, what might be required to get there; alternative of course, especially Hollywood. We become energy futures need to be sufficiently “worlded.” used to specific roles, starting with the fairy tale This paper considers the extent to which science tropes of the Fairy Godmother and the Wicked fiction, and specifically transmedia world build- Witch. Fantasy expands on these roles with ing in the science fictional mode, is capable of the Buxom Innkeep and the Wise Old Crone, such “worlding” work, given the genre’s intimate along with stronger representation from Ursula relationship with the dominant petro-culture that Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, and, of course, birthed it, and asks whether such “worlding” it- the wonderful parodies of these women in Terry SYLVIA self might not be considered a symptom of pet- Pratchett’s Discworld (1983–2015). Young Adult SPRUCK WRIGLEY ro-capital’s excesses, unsuitable literature for a novels go a step further, killing mothers in their renewed and renewable future. prime in order to allow the hero or heroine free INDEPENDENT rein. PANEL G3: AGE & AGING THROW GRANDMA OUT THE AIRLOCK The good news is that science fiction has SR34.K2, DEC 8, 3.30PM As women get old, they gain a superpower: in- successfully sidestepped many of the tired old tropes. Instead we have an entirely new set of pages of Pyotr Soykin’s popular periodical The tired old tropes to explore. Does immortality al- World of Adventures (Mir priklucheniy) in the late ways begin before wrinkles set in? Are there any 1900s and was used as a signifier of H.G. Wells’ lesbians over 50? These and other pressing is- The War of the Worlds (1898). Later, the genre sues will be considered in this stern look at sci- name was applied to a wider range of writers and ence fiction authors ranging from Isaac Asimov was recognized by readers. to Linda Nagata. In my presentation, I will argue that science fiction played an important role in constructing ARTEM ZUBOV CONSTRUCTING THE CULTURAL its readers imaginary: it projected certain ways IMAGINARY: FACTORY WORKERS of social mobility and provided the audience LOMONOSOV MOSCOW READING SCIENCE FICTION with discursive patterns to interpret techno- STATE UNIVERSITY IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA logical progress. The early readers of science PANEL D3: SF FROM THE As a popular genre, science fiction emerged fiction were urban factory workers—young men, FORMER EASTERN BLOC II in the Russian literary market in the early 20th “temporary bachelors,” who left villages and SR34.04, DEC 7, 11.45AM century. The Russian term for science fiction— moved to big cities in search of better life. In late nauchnaya fantastika—first appeared on the 19th-century Russia, factory workers became a new social group distinguished from more tra- nized evening classes for the employees) and ditional urban classes. Unlike the aristocracy, radical thinkers who hoped to awaken the class merchants, peasants, and manual workers who consciousness of the proletariat. had strong connections with their farmsteads For its readers, science fiction functioned as or estates, factory workers lived in cities during success stories. Young and adventurous inven- the whole year—changing jobs, moving from one tors, the usual characters of scientific novels factory to the other they plunged into the urban published in Russian periodicals, became the environment with its professional opportunities, role models for factory workers and represented temptations, and popular culture of entertain- the ideas of social mobility. The latter was sup- ment. They were the first technical specialists: ported by non-fictional publications in various work with factory equipment required some magazines and newspapers where inventionism level of literacy and technical education. Unlike was recognized as an honest way to fame and other lower-class workers, industrial workers wealth. embraced the idea of self-education which was Workers’ daily routine was inseparable from popular at that time and was widely advertised, technical equipment which fast lost its enchant- paradoxically, by both factory owners (who orga- ment. Not solely a mode of literary writing, but also a mode of thinking, science fiction was an amplifier of imagination, thought experiment in abstract thinking, and—as a popularizer of sci- ence, Yakov Perelman called it—exercise for the mind. The genre, thus, helped grasp the chang- ing dynamics of technological modernity and gave discursive models of talking about tech- nology to writers and revolutionary thinkers orig- inated from the working class such as Semen Kanatchikov and Alexey Gastev whose autobiog- raphies I will examine closely in my presentation. Partners:

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