Diversity in Speculative Fiction – Sessions
Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention
Thursday 14 – Monday 18 August 2014, ExCeL London, UK
This is the full list of sessions with titles and panels in Loncon 3's "Diversity in Speculative Fiction" conference (academic programme track). The full schedule, including abstracts, is available as part of the Loncon 3 programme guides. Except where stated all of the sessions involve two or three fifteen-minute papers around a theme followed by a group discussion and Question and Answer session with the audience. Everyone is welcome to attend.
As well as a special session inspired by and involving the Guest of Honour John Clute, there will be two guest lectures provided by the Tolkien Society and the British Science Fiction Association. The Science Fiction Foundation are sponsoring a public reception.
This list is also available as a PDF.
Keynote Lecture
Affirmational and Transformational Doctor Who Fan Videos
Chair – Emma England
- Karen Hellekson
Special Sessions
Spin a Yarn, Add a Twist, Weave a Tale: Textile Crafts in Medieval London
(lecture with textile demonstration)
- Katrin Kania
Sherlock Holmes and Science Fiction
(multimedia lecture)
Chair – A J Hall
- Amy Sturgis
Why Are Alien Languages Inherently Human? An Experiment in Sound Symbolism
(live experiment with audience participation, followed by an explanatory talk)
Chair – Paul March-Russell
- Bettina Beinhoff
Roundtable Discussions
Children's Literature
Chair – Patricia Kennon
- Michael Levy
- Sanna Lehtonen
- Catherine Butler
- K V Johansen
The Bible and Speculative Fiction
Chair – Andrew Crome
- Frauke Uhlenbruch
- Hugh Pyper
- Chris Meredith
- Mat Collins
Paper Sessions
Approaches to World SF
Chair – John Kessel
- David Henley, "The Sci-Fi Universe Outside of English"
- Giulia Iannuzzi, "«Urania». Translations and fortunes of Anglo-American Science Fiction in Italy during the 1950s and the 1960s"
- Lejla Kucukalic, "Arabian Wonder: Science Fiction in the Middle East"
Reconceiving Representation in Theory and Practice
Chair – Sarah Dillon
- Garfield Benjamin, "The Many Impossibilities of Consciousness: Diversity and posthumanism in Rajaniemi"
- Paul Ballard, "'Trans as Alien' - Some problems with Transgender representation in Science Fiction"
- Jason Bourget, "'The idea of anarchism, made flesh': Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed and the Politics of Egalitarian Masculinity"
Medieval Influences and Representation in SFF
Chair – Shyamalika Heffernan
- Constance G. J. Wagner, "FRODO AND FARAMIR: Mirrors of Chivalry"
- K. A. Laity, "The 'Old Weird': Recognising the Medieval Roots of the 'New Weird'"
- Julie Hofmann, "The Year of the Fruit Bat, the Middle Ages, and the Long 19th Century"
Vampires and Identity
Chair – Margo Collins
- Deborah Christie, "From Out the Shadows: Vampires, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity"
- Anita Harris Satkunananthan, "Vampires, Hierarchies and Alternate Futures: Alaya Dawn Johnson's Re-envisioned Cultures"
Challenging Heteronormative Sexuality on Screen
Chair – Jude Roberts
- Bethan Jones, "'One does not simply wank into Whoredor': Contesting notions of gender and sexuality in SFF porn parodies"
- Ewan Kirkland, "Monogamy, Heteronormativity and Compulsory Heterosexuality in Recent Science Fiction Cinema"
Economy and Class in Literature
Chair – Jo L Walton
- Ali Baker, "Filthy Commoners: Social class in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy"
- Kate Wood, "Economic Systems of Speculative Fiction"
- Stanislaw Krawczyk, "The strange case of socialism and capitalism: Fantastic literature in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s"
Science Fiction in Latin America and Spain: Narratives of the Political
Chair – Gay Haldeman
- Silvia G. Kurlat Ares, "Marcelo Cohen and the Science Fiction Narrative as Canonical Literature. The Case of El Testamento de O´Jaral."
- Fernando Reati, "A SF Comic and the Archeology of the Argentine Authoritarian State"
- Victoria Carpenter, "Checking out of an Hexagon: Quest for Strings and Macrotext in Jorge Luis Borges' 'La biblioteca de Babel'"
Visual Horror, Gender and the Monstrous
Chair – Deborah Christie
- Emma James, "The demon-girl-next-door: How the themes of sexual normalcy and gender are explored in the novel Let The Right One In and its film adaptations"
- Line Henriksen, "The Curse of the Creepypasta: on monstrous encounters and posthumanist ethics in digital times"
- Moira O'Keeffe, "Gender Disparity in the Mad Sciences"
Digital Comics
Chair – Megan Waples
- Thomas Wellmann, "'Fraq on to your real': How Digital Comics lift the Body into Cyberspace"
- Lesa Syn and Benjamin Syn, "Excelsior into a Digital Age through Yves Bigerel"
- E. Scott Denison, "Design fiction as a means of creating cultural legibility for representations of the future and the implications of today's decision-making"
- David Sweeney, "'I Cannot March Up and Down Their Ranks...' Collecting, Reading and Owning Digital Comics"
Classics in Speculative Fiction
Chair – Julie Hofmann
- Frances Foster, "Lands of the Dead in Speculative Fiction"
- Sibylle Machat, "Ancient Philosophers as Characters in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Or: Plato and Julian the Apostate meet in the ruins of civilizations)"
- Liz Gloyn, "A Common Thread: Representations of the Minotaur In London"
Gods in US Fantasy Television
Chair – Frauke Uhlenbruch
- Alexander Millington, "Old Stories for Old Problems: Ares and Xena"
- Lisa Macklem, "These Aren't the Gods You're Looking For: Religion in Supernatural"
The Cold War in Russian and English Literature
Chair – Val Nolan
- Andy Sawyer, "Don't You Hear the H-Bomb's Thunder?"
- Mikhail Nazarenko, "The Time That Cannot Be Rewritten: Alternative Histories of the Soviet Era"
Mediated Boundaries
Chair – Jo L Walton
- Heather Urbanski, "Narratology of Science Fiction and Fantasy Franchises"
- Colin B Harvey, "Tink Talks! Transmedia Memory and Neverland"
- Pawel Frelik, "Subversive Moddernity—Fantastic Game Modification and Politics"
Representing Indigenous Cultures in Speculative Fiction
Chair – Ronald Meyers
- Christopher Kastensmidt, "Simone Saueressig and the Indigenous Epic"
- Maureen Kincaid Speller, "The Silence of the Indian: representations of indigenous North Americans in science fiction and fantasy"
- Gillian Polack, "Old cultures, new fictions: introducing three Indigenous Australian writers of speculative fiction"
Religion, Spirituality and the Occult
Chair – Paul March-Russell
- Claire Cornillon, "Spirituality and Syncretism in Pierre Bordage's Novels"
- Dominick Grace, "Phyllis Gotlieb's "Sunday's Child" and the Alien Apocalypse"
- Ronald Meyers, "Horrific Insinuations and Jose Saramago's Dabble in Occult in his Biblical Narrative, Cain"
Playing with Diversity: Games and Speculative Fiction
Chair – Esther MacCallum-Stewart
- Mika Loponen and Markus Montola, "Speculative Games: A Ludological Analysis of Fictional Games"
- Jaakko Stenros and Tanja Sihvonen, "Out of the Dungeons, onto the Meadows: Queer Representations in Role-Playing Source Books"
- Ashley Brown, "Elves are from Venus, Dwarves are from Mars: Diverse (sexual) relationships in speculative fictional worlds"
- Diane Carr, "Weird Spheres, Bursting Bodies and Peculiar Tools: Disability, Masculinity and the Monstrous in the Dead Space Series"
Playing with Science Fiction and Music
Chair – Andy Sawyer
- Audrey Taylor, "'Loserville': The Science Fiction Community Viewed from the Musical Theatre Stage"
- Daryl Ritchot, "'None of us are promised to see tomorrow/ And what we do is ours to choose': Art as a Tool for Social Change in Dystopian Music Videos"
Biotechnology in the New Wave
Chair – David Farnell
- Mary Irene Morrison, "Making Gender Trouble in New Wave SF: Sam Delany's Queer Cyborgs"
- Richard Ashcroft, "Weird Science, Weird Ethics: Biotechnology and Human Enhancement The Lens of M John Harrison's Signs of Life"
Science Fiction from the Outside
Chair – John Kessel
- Dan Smith, "Science Fiction and Outsider Art"
- Paul Graham Raven, "The rhetorics of futurity: scenarios, design fiction, prototypes, and other evaporated modalities of science fiction"
- Andrew Ferguson, "Zombies, Language, and Chaos"
Sex and Desire in Literature
Chair – Jude Roberts
- Caitlin Herington, "Blurred Boundaries: Lois McMaster Bujold, Alternative Gender Roles and Sexual Expression"
- Christina Scholz, "Alternative Forms of Desire, Sexuality and Relationships in China Miéville's fiction"
- Juliette Harrisson, "Sex, power and the idea of the 'beloved' in Robin Hobb's Tawny Man Trilogy"
Views of London
Chair – Paul March-Russell
- Andrew M Butler, "London Death Drives: The Destruction of London in SF Film"
- Dale Pratt, "'Dismantling the Impossible': London, Metafiction and Time Travel in Félix J. Palma's The Map of Time and The Map of the Sky."
- Tony Keen, "The Street Where You Live: Home Addresses in Fantastic London"
Gender and Sexuality in Young Adult Literature
Chair – Caitlin Herington
- Malin Alkestrand, "Queering the Magical - Different Approaches to Queerness in Contemporary Fantasy Literature for Children and Young Adults"
- Patricia Kennon, "Gender, Heteronormativity and the Body in David Levithan's Every Day"
- Sara Buggy, "'The Deadliest of all Deadly Things': Romance and the Contemporary Young Adult Dystopia"
Inhabiting Imagined Londons
Chair – Gary Ehrlich
- Jarrad Keyes, "'Welcome to the Virtual City': J.G. Ballard's Reconceptualization of London"
- Amy Butt, "At Home in the High Rise: Dystopia as Architectural Critique"
- Chris Pak "Terraforming and the City"
Imagining Britain
Chair – Tony Keen
- Suanna Davis, "Reading the British Isles in 21st Century American Speculative Fiction"
- Adam Welstead, "Imagining Intersubjectivities in Twenty-First Century British Dystopian Fiction: Maggie Gee's The Flood"
Sexuality, Film, and Fans
Chair – Bethan Jones
- Adam Scales, "Gay Horror Fans, Bloody-Disgusting and the Struggle for Legitimacy"
- Monika Drzewiecka, "'I Do What I Want, Thor!' Analyzing Loki-centric Slash Fanfiction And Its Relationship With Marvel Canon"
Reading Iain M Banks
Chair – Val Nolan
- Michael Morelli, "'I've seen things': Sex, Sexuality and the Subjectivity in Iain M Banks' Culture Series"
- Ivaylo R Shmilev, "From a Galactic War to a Hydrogen Sonata: Warfare and Ethics in the Culture Novels of Iain M. Banks"
- Jo L Walton, "All in a Day's Play: Science Fiction and Gamification"
Alternative Readings in British TV
Chair – Helen McCarthy
- Derek Johnston, "Before Quatermass: The Neglected Beginnings of British TV SF"
- Katharine Woods, "'It's a Nice Day to Start Again': Amy Pond and the Autobiographical Fantasy"
Battlestar Galactica Anniversary: Studying the Fans, Industry and Stars
Chair – Emma Anne James
- Mélanie Bourdaa, "Re-inventing the space opera as an endless universe: the case of Battlestar Galactica"
- Nicolle Lamerichs, "Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game: Revisiting the TV Show through Meaningful Play and Narrativity"
- Bertha Chin, "Subcultural celebrities: Battlestar Galactica actors and social media"
Please address any questions regarding the programme to Emma England (emma.england@loncon3.org).