Using Science Fiction's Worldbuilding to Imagine a Climate Changed
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Panels Seeking Participants
Panels Seeking Participants • All paper proposals must be submitted via the Submittable (if you do not have an account, you will need to create one before submitting) website by December 15, 2018 at 11:59pm EST. Please DO NOT submit a paper directly to the panel organizer; however, prospective panelists are welcome to correspond with the organizer(s) about the panel and their abstract. • Only one paper proposal submission is allowed per person; participants can present only once during the conference (pre-conference workshops and chairing/organizing a panel are not counted as presenting). • All panel descriptions and direct links to their submission forms are listed below, and posted in Submittable. Links to each of the panels seeking panelists are also listed on the Panel Call for Papers page at https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/panel-calls-for-papers/ • There are separate forms in Submittable for each panel seeking participants, listed in alphabetical order, as well as an open individual paper submission form. • In cases in which the online submission requirement poses a significant difficulty, please contact us at [email protected]. • Proposals for a Traditional Panel (4 presenters) should be papers of approximately 15 minutes-max each, with an approximately 300 word abstract, unless a different length is requested in the specific panel call, in the form of an uploadable .pdf, .docx, or .doc file. Please include your name and contact information in this file. • Proposals for a Roundtable (5-6 presenters) should be papers of approximately 10 minute-max each, with an approximately 300 word abstract, unless a different length is requested in the specific panel call, in the form of an uploadable .pdf, .docx, or .doc file. -
Climate Fiction
CLIMATE FICTION Instructor: Christopher A. Walker Course Number: EN/ES 337 Lecture: MW 2:30-3:45 in Miller 319 Office Hours: Mondays 4:00-6:00 (and by appointment) in Miller 216 Mailbox: Miller 216 Email: [email protected] Course Description Contemporary fiction is now investigating the possibilities and limits of story-telling in the era of global climate change. These works, referred to as “climate fiction” or “cli-fi,” explore humanity’s connection to- and impact upon Earth by asking questions such as: what will human and nonhuman communities look like after sea-level rise, desertification, and biodiversity loss remap our planet?; how might species evolve in response to ecological collapse?; what affects— melancholy, despair, hope—will eulogize a lost home-world? Reading cli-fi novels, short stories, poetry, and film, this course will situate our texts within the Environmental Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that combines scientific and cultural discourses about the environment with humanistic concerns for social justice. Working through the narrative conventions of the utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic genres, we will ask how cli- fi not only narrates impending disaster on a global scale but also strives to imagine a more just future, one that combines environmentalism and social equality. These texts will be paired with excerpts from philosophical and ecocritical writings which will aid our development of the humanistic methodologies needed to analyze and appreciate this new genre. Course Materials Items with an asterisk (*) on reserve in Miller Library. Books to purchase: (Available at The Colby Bookstore) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (ISBN 978-0-385-72167-7) (2003) * J. -
The Butterfly Phenomena: a Study of Climate Change on Barbara Kingsolver’S Flight Behaviour
© 2018 JETIR October 2018, Volume 5, Issue 10 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) The Butterfly phenomena: A Study of Climate Change on Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. Rejani G.S Research Scholar (Ph.D) (Reg.No.18113154012020) S.T Hindu College ,Nagercoil Affiliated to Manonmanium Sundaranar University, Abhishekapatti.Tirunelveli. Abstract Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour is a clarion call for the forestalled eco-apocalypse, climate change or global warming .Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Maggie Gees The Ice People, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and many other novels in the same vein are futuristic. Even though there is always imagination in fiction, Flight Behaviour does not focus on the aftermath of any global disaster. Rather it reflects the actuality of climate change and Monarch butterfly migration. It also focuses on the story of a young woman trying to change her life, and a deeply humane account of working people responding to the local effects of the global climate crisis. Kingsolver has carved a career from examining social issues in her novels, from economic inequality to environmentalism. Flight Behaviour portrays the inducement and consequences of climate change that forms the butterfly effect. The paper throws light on the enormous consequence of climate change and the ignorance of reality. Keywords - Climate change, Butterfly phenomenon , Futuristic, Global Warming and Environmentalism. Climate change is the defining challenge of our age. The science is clear, climate change is happening, the impact is real. The time to act is now. -Ban Ki-Moon Climate novel is an emerging literary genre that has caught much attention and popularity in recent years. -
Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and the Swan Book
Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book Chiara Xausa Department of Interpreting and Translation, University of Bologna, Italy Correspondence: [email protected] Peer review: This article has been subject to a Abstract double-blind peer review process This article analyses the representation of environmental crisis and climate crisis in Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright. Building upon the groundbreaking work of environmental humanities scholars such as Heise (2008), Clark (2015), Copyright notice: This Trexler (2015) and Ghosh (2016), who have emphasised the main article is issued under the challenges faced by authors of climate fiction, it considers the novels as an terms of the Creative Commons Attribution entry point to address the climate-related crisis of culture – while License, which permits acknowledging the problematic aspects of reading Indigenous texts as use and redistribution of antidotes to the 'great derangement’ – and the danger of a singular the work provided that the original author and Anthropocene narrative that silences the ‘unevenly universal’ (Nixon, 2011) source are credited. responsibilities and vulnerabilities to environmental harm. Exploring You must give themes such as environmental racism, ecological imperialism, and the slow appropriate credit violence of climate change, it suggests that Alexis Wright’s novels are of (author attribution), utmost importance for global conversations about the Anthropocene and provide a link to the license, and indicate if its literary representations, as they bring the unevenness of environmental changes were made. You and climate crisis to visibility. -
Worldbuilding in Tolkien's Middle-Earth and Beyond
KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online (ISSN 1868-2855) Issue 61 (May 2020) Worldbuilding in Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Beyond Dennis Friedrichsen Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen [email protected] Abstract: The field of worldbuilding in literary studies is experiencing a revitalization and it is therefore unsurprising that interest in Tolkien’s Middle-earth is renewed. Many aspects of Tolkien’s world have been analyzed and discussed, but it remains a relevant topic for both specific questions concerning Tolkien’s world and general questions concerning worldbuilding in literature. Sub-creating Arda , edited by Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger, makes a valuable contribution that expands on both theoretical areas, applies theories of worldbuilding to Middle-earth, and draws interesting parallels to other fictional worlds. Because the field of worldbuilding is incredibly rich, Sub-creating Arda is not exhaustive, but nevertheless makes significant contributions to contemporary academic problematizations of the field and will undoubtedly inspire new arguments and new approaches within the field of worldbuilding. How to cite: Friedrichsen, Dennis: “Worldbuilding in Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Beyond [Review of: Fimi, Dimitra and Thomas Honegger (eds.): Sub-creating Arda. World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work, Its Precursors, and Its Legacies. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2019.]“. In: KULT_online 61 (202o). DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/ko.2020.1034 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International KULT_online. Review Journal for the Study of Culture 61 / 2020 journals.ub.uni-giessen.de/kult-online Worldbuilding in Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Beyond Dennis Friedrichsen Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Fimi, Dimitra and Thomas Honegger (eds.). -
The Ultimate Guide to Worldbuilding: How to Write Fantasy, Scifi And
writersedit.com The Ultimate Guide To WorldBuilding: How To Write Fantasy, SciFi And RealLife Worlds Worldbuilding is so much more than just a framing device. It’s the very essence of any good fantasy or science fiction story, and the basis of a sense of place in other genres. Good worldbuilding lends an immersive richness to your writing, while also giving readers the information they need to understand characters and plotlines. Table of Contents 1 IMAGINARY WORLDS 1.1 Deciding on a starting point 1.2 Asking questions about your world 1.3 Drawing inspiration from real life 1.4 Where reality and fantasy collide 2 ALTERNATE REALITY 2.1 What if? 2.2 Belief and disbelief 2.3 Past, present or future? 2.4 Know your building blocks 2.5 The end of the world as we know it 3 ACTUAL LOCATIONS 3.1 Pack your bags 3.2 Do your research 3.3 Speak with your senses So, how exactly should writers go about building worlds in their fiction? To find out, we’ll break down the concept of worldbuilding into three main categories: ● Imaginary worlds – the construction of entirely fictional universes, found primarily in fantasy genres. ● Alternate reality – reimaginings of the details of our existing world; popular with writers of science fiction. ● Actual locations – the invocation of a real place in the world, utilised in novels with no elements of the fantastic. Let’s begin by entering the wondrous realm of fantasy fiction. IMAGINARY WORLDS Creating an imaginary world is one of the most complex types of worldbuilding. -
Anthropocene Monsters in Jeff Vandermeer's the Southern Reach
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies March 2017: 71-96 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2017.43.1.05 Brave New Weird: Anthropocene Monsters in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Gry Ulstein Faculty of Humanities Utrecht University, The Netherlands Abstract This paper investigates and compares language and imagery used by contemporary ecocritics in order to argue that the Anthropocene discourse contains significant parallels to cosmic horror discourse and (new) weird literature. While monsters from the traditional, Lovecraftian weird lend themselves well to Anthropocene allegory due to the coinciding fear affect in both discourses, the new weird genre experiments with ways to move beyond cosmic fear, thereby reimagining the human position in the context of the Anthropocene. Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy The Southern Reach (2014) presents an alien system of assimilation and ecological mutation into which the characters are launched. It does this in a manner that brings into question human hierarchical coexistence with nonhumans while also exposing the ineffectiveness of current existential norms. This paper argues that new weird stories such as VanderMeer’s are able to rework and dispel the fearful paralysis of cosmic horror found in Lovecraft’s literature and of Anthropocene monsters in ecocritical debate. The Southern Reach and the new weird welcome the monstrous as kin rather than enemy. Keywords Anthropocene, climate change, ecology, climate fiction, horror, weird, Jeff VanderMeer 72 Concentric 43.1 March 2017 The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. -
Climates of Mutation: Posthuman Orientations in Twenty-First Century
Climates of Mutation: Posthuman Orientations in Twenty-First Century Ecological Science Fiction Clare Elisabeth Wall A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English York University Toronto, Ontario January 2021 © Clare Elisabeth Wall, 2021 ii Abstract Climates of Mutation contributes to the growing body of works focused on climate fiction by exploring the entangled aspects of biopolitics, posthumanism, and eco-assemblage in twenty- first-century science fiction. By tracing out each of those themes, I examine how my contemporary focal texts present a posthuman politics that offers to orient the reader away from a position of anthropocentric privilege and nature-culture divisions towards an ecologically situated understanding of the environment as an assemblage. The thematic chapters of my thesis perform an analysis of Peter Watts’s Rifters Trilogy, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy. Doing so, it investigates how the assemblage relations between people, genetic technologies, and the environment are intersecting in these posthuman works and what new ways of being in the world they challenge readers to imagine. This approach also seeks to highlight how these works reflect a genre response to the increasing anxieties around biogenetics and climate change through a critical posthuman approach that alienates readers from traditional anthropocentric narrative meanings, thus creating a space for an embedded form of ecological and technoscientific awareness. My project makes a case for the benefits of approaching climate fiction through a posthuman perspective to facilitate an environmentally situated understanding. -
Dragon Magazine #236
The dying game y first PC was a fighter named Random. I had just read “Let’s go!” we cried as one. Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber and thought that Mike held up the map for us to see, though Jeff and I weren’t Random was a hipper name than Corwin, even though the lat- allowed to touch it. The first room had maybe ten doors in it. ter was clearly the man. He lasted exactly one encounter. Orcs. One portal looked especially inviting, with multi-colored veils My second PC was a thief named Roulette, which I thought drawn before an archway. I pointed, and the others agreed. was a clever name. Roulette enjoyed a longer career: roughly “Are you sure you want to go there?” asked Mike. one session. Near the end, after suffering through Roulette’s “Yeah. I want a vorpal sword,” I said greedily. determined efforts to search every 10’-square of floor, wall, and “It’s the most dangerous place in the dungeon,” he warned. ceiling in the dungeon, Jeff the DM decided on a whim that the “I’ll wait and see what happens to him,” said Jeff. The coward. wall my thief had just searched was, in fact, coated with contact “C’mon, guys! If we work together, we can make it.” I really poison. I rolled a three to save. wanted a vorpal sword. One by one they demurred, until I Thus ensued my first player-DM argument. There wasn’t declared I’d go by myself and keep all the treasure I found. -
Climate Change in Literature and Culture
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Oregon Scholars' Bank CLIMATE CHANGE IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE: CONVERSION, SPECULATION, EDUCATION by STEPHEN SIPERSTEIN A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2016 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Stephen Siperstein Title: Climate Change in Literature and Culture: Conversion, Speculation, Education This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Professor Stephanie LeMenager Chairperson Professor David Vazquez Core Member Professor William Rossi Core Member Professor Kari Norgaard Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2016 ii © 2016 Stephen Siperstein iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Stephen Siperstein Doctor of Philosophy Department of English June 2016 Title: Climate Change in Literature and Culture: Conversion, Speculation, Education This dissertation examines an emergent archive of contemporary literary and cultural texts that engage with the wicked problem of anthropogenic climate change. Following cultural geographer Michael Hulme, this project works from the assumption that climate change is as much a constellation of ideas as it is a set of material realities. I draw from a diverse media landscape so as to better understand how writers, artists, and activists in the global north are exploring these ideas and particularly what it means to be human in a time of climate change. -
Asfacts Oct19.Pub
doon in 2008. His final story, “Save Yourself,” will be published by BBC Books later this year. SF writers in- Winners for the Hugo Awards and for the John W. cluding Charlie Jane Anders, Paul Cornell, and Neil Campbell Award for Best New Writer were announced Gaiman have cited his books as an important influence. August 18 by Dublin 2019, the 77th Worldcon, in Dub- Dicks also wrote over 150 titles for children, including lin, Ireland. They include a couple of Bubonicon friends the Star Quest trilogy, The Baker Street Irregulars series, – Mary Robinette Kowal, Charles Vess, Gardner Dozois, and The Unexplained series, plus children’s non-fiction. and Becky Chambers. The list follows: Terrance William Dicks was born April 14, 1935, in BEST NOVEL: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robi- East Ham, London. He studied at Downing College, nette Kowal, BEST NOVELLA: Artificial Condition by Cambridge and joined the Royal Fusiliers after gradua- Martha Wells, BEST NOVELETTE: “If at First You Don’t tion. He worked as an advertising copywriter until his Succeed, Try, Try Again” by Zen Cho, BEST SHORT STO- mentor Malcolm Hulke brought him in to write for The RY: “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendi- Avengers in the ’60s, and he wrote for radio and TV be- um of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow, BEST SERIES: fore joining the Doctor Who team in the late ’60s. He Wayfarers by Becky Chambers, BEST GRAPHIC STORY: also worked as a producer on various BBC programs. He Monstress, Vol 3: Haven by Marjorie Liu and illustrated is survived by wife Elsa Germaney (married 1963), three by Sana Takeda, sons, and two granddaughters. -
NARRATIVE Directions in Econarratology
ENVIRONMENT New NARRATIVE Directions in Econarratology edited by ERIN JAMES AND ERIC MOREL ENVIRONMENT AND NARRATIVE THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE James Phelan and Katra Byram, Series Editors ENVIRONMENT AND NARRATIVE NEW DIRECTIONS IN ECONARRATOLOGY EDITED BY Erin James AND Eric Morel THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2020 by The Ohio State University. This edition licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: James, Erin, editor. | Morel, Eric, editor. Title: Environment and narrative : new directions in econarratology / edited by Erin James and Eric Morel. Other titles: Theory and interpretation of narrative series. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2020] | Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Collection of essays connecting ecocriticism and narrative theory to encourage constructive discourse on narrative’s influence of real-world environmental perspectives and the challenges that necessitate revision to current narrative models”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019034865 | ISBN 9780814214206 (cloth) | ISBN 0814214207 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814277546 (ebook) | ISBN 0814277543 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Environmental literature. | Narration (Rhetoric) Classification: LCC PN98.E36 E55 2020 | DDC 809/.93355—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034865 Cover design by Andrew Brozyna Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro for Ben and Freddie, my favorites From Erin for Grandmaman, an avid reader and early recommender of books From Eric CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION Notes Toward New Econarratologies ERIN JAMES AND ERIC MOREL 1 I. NARRATOLOGY AND THE NONHUMAN CHAPTER 1 Unnatural Narratology and Weird Realism in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation JON HEGGLUND 27 CHAPTER 2 Object-Oriented Plotting and Nonhuman Realities in DeLillo’s Underworld and Iñárritu’s Babel MARCO CARACCIOLO 45 II.