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State of the Art: Science Fiction Histories (Perth, Western Australia, 22 & 23 March 2008)
CALL FOR PAPERS – STATE OF THE ART: SCIENCE FICTION HISTORIES
Perth, Western Australia, 22nd-23rd March 2008
In his recent history of the genre, Roger Luckhurst argues that the marginalisation of Science Fiction (SF) from the literary establishment helped readers and writers to identify its conventions. Fandom blossomed from this liminal space, its culture providing a unique history of the relations between texts and their readers. While fans were the first historians of SF, other communities have since established their own versions of the genre. The rise of national SF in countries such as Brazil and the old Soviet Union, China and Japan de-centre its Anglo-American bias. Feminist and queer writers work to unravel its phallocentrism and heterosexism. Histories of black and Aboriginalist fiction point out the political uses of the form. The genre has itself been shaped by its reception by these communities. In Anglo-American SF, the genre’s intimacy with fandom has transformed the way its fiction (and history) has been written. It is with a view to thinking through such developments that this symposium seeks work on what SF has been to different audiences at different times, on rewriting generic history to arrive at a better understanding of the state of the art today.
Papers are invited on the following or related topics:
[X] Histories of the SF community
[X] Intersections and interactions between fan and popular cultures, and between fandom and the general public.
[X] Political histories in SF, such as Marxist, anarcho-capitalist, etc
[X] Intersection of SF with feminist & queer theories
[X] Postcolonial approaches to SF
[X] National histories of SF
[X] Non-Anglo-American traditions of SF
[X] History of race in SF
[X] The collapse of genre: slipstream, new weird, etc
Sponsored by Curtin University of Technology, the symposium will be held as part of State of the Art: Swancon 2008, the National Australian convention of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
SPEAKERS
Swancon 33 guests of honour are:
[X] Ken McLeod (Scotland)
[X] Paul Cornell (UK)
[X] Glenda Larke
[X] Zara Baxter
Confirmed Speakers for the Symposium are:
[X] Mark Bould (The University of the West of England)
[X] Andrew Milner (Monash University)
[X] Sylvia Kelso (James Cook University)
[X] Stephen Dedman (University of W.A.)
SUBMISSIONS
Submissions are sought for both individual papers and panel presentations.
Papers –submit 300-500 word abstract
Panels – submit 300 word description of the panel theme and short abstracts / details of panel participants
PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
Selected papers from the symposium will be published in a special journal issue. To be considered for publication, draft papers must be submitted before the symposium.
DEADLINES
Abstracts due: December 7. 2007
Draft papers (for publication) due: March 14, 2008
CONTACTS
Sonia Marcon, Swancon Academic Stream
Darren Jorgensen, Media, Society & Culture, Curtin University of Technology
Helen Merrick, Media, Society & Culture, Curtin University of Technology
Email: sciencefictionhistories@gmail.com
Website: http://www.swancon.com/
The Simpsons Star Wars Opening
I gather this has been around for a month at least, but I thought this mash of The Simpsons and Star Wars by Rich Cando (of Dude Films fame) was too good not to share:
[Via]
Eight Things About Me (A Meme)
Chuck tagged me a few days ago with the Eight Things meme; although I’m generally fairly anti-meme, I’ve been enjoying a bit of back and forth with Chuck in his blog and on del.icio.us, so figured I could add one more procrastination on a writing day. Apparently, I have to start with rules …
Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.
Eight Facts about Me:
1. When I was in Primary School I won a Lego building competition; this is, without a doubt, my fondest memory of the first 7 years of education.
2. Apart from The Goonies, the film that rattled around my brain the most when I was a kid was called Explorers. I was fascinated how three boys could essentially make a spacecraft out of everyday junk (and a little piece of alien technology). In retrospect, this example of making something amazing from the bits and pieces others leave lying around resonates with some of the way I view the internet and participatory culture (and until I looked it up on IMDb to link to for this post, I hadn’t realised River Phoenix was one of the kids).
3. When I was twelve years old I joined Perth’s Doctor Who fan club, The West Lodge, which was my first proper immersion into fandom; I attend the local science-fiction convention in the following year (Swancon 14) but found the whole thing rather intimidating and didn’t get back to Swancon until seven years later when Neil Gaiman visited Perth as GoH in 1996.
4. I have re-read all six of Frank Herbert’s Dune books as a series at least twenty times since I was 14; I’ve been relatively unimpressed by the prequel novels in the past few years.
5. My sister and I both have PhDs and are the first members of our family to ever attend university at all. My sister is eighteen months younger, started her thesis a year after I did, but we both were officially given our PhDs at the same graduation ceremony.
6. Emily and I currently live less than 14 metres from Subiaco Oval, which is where Australian Rules Football attracts 40-45,000 people most weekends. Despite AFL being Australia’s national winter sport, I’ve never been to a Football game.
7. Until last Saturday I had never test-driven a car, having bought my only owned vehicle to date from my parents. On Saturday I test-drove a Prius which Emily and I are seriously considering buying despite the fact it will take us several years to pay it off.
8. In the proposal for my PhD thesis in 2000, the final chapter was supposed to look at the use of computer-generated imagery and special effects in nature documentaries as a case study of artificial culture where natural and technological meaning merged together. (It never got written because after that proposal both September 11 2001 and the Spider-Man films happened, and I used the latter to interrogate the cultural impact of the former.)
You’re It! I now tag the following people (hoping at least a few will play along): Jill Walker Rettberg (just getting used to writing that double barrel surname!), Christy Dena, David Silver, Nancy Baym (because fandom has a meme for a heart!), Mia Consalvo (who can sadly not follow the meme and call it ‘cheating‘), Jean Burgess, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Kevin Lim (who lives for these sort of connections!).
More LOL Theorists, Now with Self-Reflexivity!
I am more than litte pleased to see my two LOL Therorist Henry Jenkins pictures have come to Henry’s attention and he’s actually reposted them in his own blog!
Of course, that couldn’t possible be the end of the circle, so …
Make sure you continue to tune in to LOL Theorists for all the academic hijinx; or, if you’re really busy, perhaps just check out the Henry Jenkins channel! 🙂
The 4400 Goes Viral (Marketing)
The 4400 has taken to viral marketing dramatically in order to build the word before the upcoming fourth season of the TV show. According to AdWeek:
To promote the new season of The 4400 on USA Network, Campfire has created a wide-ranging interactive world consisting of 80 videos that run from 30 seconds to five minutes and six Web sites. […] The 4400 follows 4,400 people who are abducted, taken away and then returned to planet Earth. After their return, many of them discover they have superpowers. As the fourth season begins on June 17, the plot follows the development of a drug called Promicin: it gives the users superpowers, if it doesn’t kill them. Three different factions emerge around the drug: pro, anti- and neutral.
On YouTube, for example, one of the show’s stars, Billy Campbell, appears in character as Jordan Collier, advocating Promicin and the decrying the government’s attempts to ban the drug. Here’s Jordan Collier dispatch #3:
Elsewhere on the net, we can find the Promicin Power website, which argues that Promicin is the key to world peace and a sustainable relationship with nature. Here’s one example that looks like it could be have been a United Colours of Bennetton advertisement in a past life:
At the other extreme, there’s also Promicin Terror which sees the drug as the biggest threat to the US since Al Qaeda. Clearly building on the famous ‘Daisy‘ political ad of the 60s (which was recycled in the US debates about the War with Iraq), this is an example of a clip campaigning to ban the drug:
I quite enjoyed the last season of The 4400 and am heartened to see the show’s producers so actively embracing the potential of video-sharing and online word-of-mouth. The clips are a little over-produced, but given the state of a lot of TV advertising today, I’m sure they could easily be mistaken for the ‘real thing’.
Mary-Jane Watson … Likes to Wash Peter’s Spider-suit?!?
Marvel’s statues folk have really out-done themselves with these uber-sexist models of Mary-Jane:
As one would rightly imagine, there is considerable disappointment and outrage about this image. While comic books have never exact been modest in their representation of women (or men), this particular statue is ridiculously misogynistic and patronising, even by the standards of early comic books, let alone the twenty-first century. Nor, sadly, is this a unique case, evinced by more examples in ArcanaJ’s “Comics Industry Bullsh*t” Flickr set.
While such an image is clearly sexist, whatever the context, it’s doubly disappointing to see Mary-Jane, who has always been at least a strong, active figure in the comic books, reduced to the sexed-up laundry lady. The latest film, I guess, really doesn’t do much to argue with such a representation – there were moments, there, but MJ was a sadly under-developed character in Spider-Man 3. However, given the huge number of people, and especially kids, looking to find their heroes in comic-books and the films they inspire, this, and similarly images, really need to scrubbed out.
In a different way, Nancy Lorenz replies even more forcefully (and graphically) by showing how ridiculous Spider-Man would look in this pose!
[Via Falling Apart In Half Time]
Update (18 May, 9.45am): Boing Boing links to a post by artist Tom Hodges, a friend of Adam Hughes (who designed the MJ statue). Hodges post includes these comments:
Now I may be wrong, but ANYONE who complains about this piece obvious does NOT read Superhero comics. If you did, I’d consider you a hypocrite. I enjoy the Indie stuff (SiP and Lenore) but without Spider-man, X-Men and other comics, they wouldn’t exist. Do you think Terry Moore is offended by this piece? I HIGHLY doubt it!
That’s probably a fair point; most indie comics came into being on the back of the success of the superheroes comics (and funnies) in establishing comic books as a recognisable form of entertainment and (although more controversially, even today) art. Also, I think Hodges is right in that this statue is not an outlier, but rather representative of a large part of the way Marvel, DC, and many independent comic books, represent women and men. I did read superhero comics a fair bit when I was younger and occasionally pick up stuff at the moment (I enjoyed parts of Marvel’s Civil War and have been consistently impressed by the current Justice mini-series by Alex Ross et al). That said, I think that what this statue represents is the worst aspects of this tradition; I don’t think Adam Hughes should bare the blame for the conventions of much of the art in the superhero genre, but I do think his representation lacked subtlety enough to crystallize the sexist nature of many comic books, even today.
Hodges also suggests this statue may be ironic – pointing out that Mary-Jane in the comics is a far more successful supermodel. Even if that was the intention, I fear it’ll be lost on the majority of people who purchased the statue.
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