Stapledon's STAR MAKER on Radio 4

Moshsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, chose Wirral-born Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker to talk about on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on Wednesday 24th April as part of its "Cultural Exchange series" . Front Row's website illustrates the discussion with a photograph of Stapledon and this image of Stapledon's "Timeline" showing the billions of years covered by the book. Images were supplied by Special Collections and Archives from the Olaf Stapledon Archive.

ALEX COX TO DIRECT BILL, THE GALACTIC HERO?

Alex Cox, director of REPO MAN, SID AND NANCY, and the extraordinary sf version of THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY has launched a Kickstarter appeal to raise funds (US$ 100,000)  for the film of Harry Harrison's BILL THE GALACTIC HERO  to be made by students at the University of Colorado film studies programme. Alex was working on a script for the film with Harry Harrison before Harry's death. Alex Cox will direct the film.

If anyone wants to become a media "angel" this looks like a worthy project to support.

Details are on http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alexcoxfilms/alex-cox-directs-bill-the-galactic-hero

Midwich Dayout

MIDWICH DAYOUT is a one-day event celebrating the 1960 film "THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED" based on the novel by John Wyndham, THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS (1957).

Appearing will be several members of the original cast and crew of the film  including BARBARA SHELLEY (Anthea Zellaby) and MARTIN STEPHENS (David). There will be a talk on VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED  and Wyndham's abandoned "sequel" MIDWICH MAIN by Andy Sawyer of the University of Liverpool.  The "Dayout" will take place on Sunday, 19th May in LETCHMORE HEATH, Hertfordshire - the village where much of the location shooting was done for the film.  Tickets are £25.00. More details on hthttp://www.midwich-village.co.uk/index.html

The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction

The first issue, containing pieces by Farah Mendlesohn, Rob Latham, Lisa Yasek, Veronica Hollinger, Brian Attebery and Chris Pak is now online at http://eatonjournal.ucr.edu/.

"The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal hosted by the University of California at Riverside, affiliated with the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Studies. The journal is run by graduate student editors, with scholarly review provided by an interdisciplinary executive board made up of SF scholars, research librarians, and archivists. This diverse editorial pool reflects the Journal’s mission of fostering an interdisciplinary conversation, bringing literary scholars together with the archivists whose work assembles, curates, and makes meaning within archives. Putting these disciplinary voices into discussion within the pages of the journal fosters innovative research and incisive scholarship in the field of SF studies." The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction  is edited by Jeff Hicks and Josh Pearson.

A new phd possibility:

Interdisciplinary Scholarship

Deadline April 18th 2013

Topic: The Human Face in Contemporary Anglo-American Culture.

Principal Supervisor(s): 
Name: Adam Piette (Professor of Modern Literature) and Fabienne Collignon (Lecturer in American Literature)

Co-supervisors:
Name: Paul Hatton (Professor of Bioengineering & Health Technologies), School of Clinical Dentistry

This project is directed at exploring the portrayal of the human face in Anglo-American culture, with a specific focus directed at science fiction film and fiction from H.G. Wells on to the present day. Of particular interest are man-machine amalgamations; the editors of the Cyborg Handbook (1995) identify a wide range of cyborg technologies as, for example, restorative, normalizing, reconfiguring, enhancing, degrading. Rather than focus on the whole (cybernetic) organism, what this project seeks to do is to home in on the face as locus of expression and affect, and to trace its modifications at hand of such cybernetic technologies, often concerned with facial sensory extensions like eye enhancements; the development of aural capabilities. The project is, however, further interested in exploring related technologies—genetic engineering, cross-species experimentation, plastic surgery, grafting and implants, teeth interventions—in order to address the politics of these processes. In their search for body utopia, the development of man into superman, these procedures are haunted by the spectres of fascism: what biopower is at work in bio-engineering? A further premise of the study is the erasure of distinctions between science fiction and the present moment: contemporary culture is science fiction. Hence any investigation into the human face as impact zone of techno-fantasies will be alert to the overlapping narratives of perfection and plasticity between science, science fiction/horror, and utopia. By investigating the portrayal of the human face in contemporary film and media, this also explores the societal use of medical, dental, and cosmetic interventions in the development of a “perfect” face, demonstrating some of the more unusual or worrying aspects of the human obsession with beauty (and at the same time relating this to what the media portrays as beautiful and— more challenging—how and why the current model was arrived at and where it is going). There is a potential translational aspect of this research in the areas of sales & marketing, cosmetics, and the media industries, providing future opportunities for knowledge exchange, collaboration and consultancy. This project is interested in exploring the power relations at work in the portrayal of the technologized and plastic human face in contemporary Anglo-American culture. What cultural codes exist in the fluid ‘text’ of the face in the 20th and 21st Centuries and how are they challenged in or perpetuated by contemporary culture? A considerable amount of work has been done on the cyborg body, but a study remains to be conducted to focus exclusively on facial technologies of enhancement and modification. In the process, it will investigate the cultural norms that dictate ‘beauty’, the desire for self-modification through technology, and the mechanisms expected to be constitutive of an elusive ideal: the ‘perfect’ face.

Expressions of interest are welcome from candidates from a variety of disciplines – we are looking for enthusiastic, lively and committed students with projects focussing on any of the aspects covered in the above. If you have any queries about your project idea or suitability, please contact Fabienne Collignon (f.collignon@sheffield.ac.uk).

How to apply

Interdisciplinary Scholarships provide an annual bursary of c. £13,590, Home/EU tuition fees and a contribution to research expenses. application.

Applicants should apply through the University's online application system. Applications should contain a research proposal that fits with the above project as well as a 500 word statement as to why you are interested in undertaking a PhD in this area.

Any queries about this Scholarship please contact Harriet Godfrey (h.godfrey@sheffield.ac.uk)

 

The Life and Work of Jane Webb Loudon

Women & Science in the Nineteenth-Century: Science Fiction and Science Education
Leeds Trinity University College 27th-28th June 2011

Call for Papers

Jane Webb Loudon (1807-1858) is a neglected figure of interest to a range of research areas including women’s professional writing, the promotion of science and women’s education and speculative fiction. She is best known for The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and Gardening for Ladies (1840). The conference intends to explore the life, work and example of Jane Webb Loudon in the context of women and science in the nineteenth century. It therefore seeks papers from various disciplinary perspectives on fictional and non-fictional contributions by women to the formation of popular scientific awareness during the nineteenth century.
We welcome proposals for contributions on the following topics:

Women’s Science Fiction Victorian Science Fiction Women & Scientific Research
Popular Science Jane Webb Loudon’s Circle Women’s Magazines
Visualising Social Change Botany and Horticulture Children’s Education
Women’s positions and voices within late Victorian science fiction 1850-1910
Nineteenth-century speculative writing Science & Social Reform
Scientific Writing & the Periodical Press Class & Entry to the Professions
Women’s Education and Science in Popular Fiction Women’s Gardening
Vivisection Represented in Women’s Writing Gender debates in Science Fiction

Keynote speakers, Matthew Beaumont, Alan Rauch, Andy Sawyer, Ann B. Shteir


First Call for Papers. Please send 500 word abstracts to arpfmail@yahoo.co.uk with the subject line Women and Science in the Nineteenth Century by August 1st 2010
Further details available at www.arpf.org.uk Follow us on www.twitter.com/arpfnews

Call for Papers: ‘Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comic Books’

Call for Papers: ‘Surrealism, Science Fiction, and Comic Books’

In his 1976 essay ‘Science Fiction and Allied Literature,’ David Ketterer wrote ‘it is rather surprising that the considerable affinity which exists between Surrealism and SF has not attracted more attention.’ This observation was repeated in 1997 by Roger Bozzetto and Arthur B. Evans, who lamented that the relations between Surrealism and science fiction ‘continue to be largely unexplored in SF scholarship,’ and that ‘there currently exists no in-depth study of SF and Surrealism.’ The points of contact and areas of overlap, along with the influences, differences, and antagonisms that lie between Surrealism, science fiction, and the related literature of the comic book will be explored in this conference to be held 22 January 2011 at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Such observations take on extra force when we consider Surrealism’s historical context, along with its literary and pictorial culture. Emerging in France between the two world wars, it was well positioned to receive the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells that initiated and defined the genre boundaries of early science fiction, along with the popularisation of the fourth dimension and the advent of the Theory of Relativity that such literature drew upon, whilst the writings of Alfred Jarry, Franz Kafka, and Raymond Roussel gave them a related comic, absurd, or fantastic perspective on the machine and technology. Indeed, Roussel’s boundless admiration for Verne was equalled by the similar veneration felt for Roussel by Marcel Duchamp and Roberto Matta, expressed in their art between 1912 and the 1940s. Furthermore, one of the most important figures in early French SF (and now almost forgotten), Jacques Spitz, was close to the Surrealists in the 1930s, and his books of the interwar years show a marked Surrealist tendency. In the 1940s, Matta’s work was affected more specifically by the worlds described in science fiction and also by comic books, which were a significant discovery for André Breton and the Surrealists in New York. Important to René Magritte’s art in the 1940s, comic books were also a key popular form for postwar Surrealism in Europe and America.
Because barely any scholarship exists on how far the art and writings of Surrealists in the forties and since were affected by SF and comic books, it is expected that postwar art and writings will form a significant strand of this conference (for instance, the writings of Malcolm de Chazal were described by their English translator as ‘science fictions’), as will the investigation of how the project to expand reality proposed by Surrealism in its imagery and poetry was extended by important SF writers such as Stanislaw Lem and J.G. Ballard, as well as for related novelists like Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Burns, and Thomas Pynchon.
Potential areas of exploration are:

• Surrealism, SF, and the imagery of spiritualism
• The comic book as a subversive accomplice of Surrealism
• Surrealism, physics, and fiction
• The spaces of Surrealist painting and the SF imagination
• Legacies of Surrealism in contemporary comic books
• The fourth dimension in Surrealism, modernism, and SF
• Surrealist and SF geographies
• The Gothic imagination in Surrealism, SF, and comics
• Futurity in Surrealism and SF
• SF and Surrealism in the postmodern novel

Paper proposals of about 250 words should be sent to gavin.parkinson@courtauld.ac.uk

The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 22 January 2011

Corrections/Expansions to Introduction to Plan For Chaos

Corrections and some expansions (particularly a revised endnote 22) now made to David Ketterer's introduction to Plan For Chaos.