International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

• Mainstream Hollywood vs. Global SF Cinema
• SF Comics and Manga
• SF Anime and Animation
• SF on the Internet and the World Wide Web
• Multimedia “dispersed” SF narratives
• Fandom, Cosplay, Mashups, and Remixing
• Broadcast and Cable SF Television
• SF Videogames
• World’s Fairs, Theme Parks, and other “Material” SF Media
• Short-form SF film
• Afrofuturism
• SF and/in Music
• SF Idiom and Imagery in Advertising
• Webisodes and TV Games
• SF Art and Illustration

The conference will also feature the fourth Science Fiction Studies Symposium on the topic of “SF Media(tions),” with speakers Mark Bould, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and Vivian Sobchack. Keynote speakers and special guests will be announced as they are confirmed; see the conference website at <http://eaton.ucr.edu> for periodic updates.

Conference sessions will be held at the newly remodeled and centrally located Riverside Marriott Hotel, with rooms at a reduced conference rate ($109). For more about the hotel, see their website at <http://www.marriott.com/hotels/ hotel-information/travel/ralmc-riverside-marriott>. A block of rooms will also be available at a discount ($139) at the historic Mission Inn Hotel and Spa two blocks from the Marriott: <http://missioninn.com>. Rooms in both hotels are limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Abstracts of 500 words (for papers of 20-minutes in length) should be submitted by September 14, 2012. We also welcome panel proposals gathering three papers on a cohesive topic. Send electronic submissions to conference co-chair Melissa Conway at <Melissa.Conway@ucr.edu> with the subject heading: EATON/SFRA CONFERENCE PROPOSAL. Please include a brief bio with your abstract and indicate whether your presentation would require A/V. Participants will be informed by December 1 if their proposals have been accepted.

Gothic Technologies/Gothic Techniques

Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association, 2013 August 5 – 8, 2013: University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College, University of London), Professor Fred Botting (Kingston University), other Keynotes TBA

Recent Gothic studies have foregrounded a plethora of technologies associated with Gothic literary and cultural production. Its presence is witnessed in how techno-science has contributed to the proliferation of the Gothic: the publishing and print culture disseminating Gothic texts, eighteenth-century architectural innovations, the on-line gaming and virtual Goth communities, the special effects of Gothic-horror cinema.

One question raised by these new developments concerns the extent to which they generate new Gothic techniques. How does technology generate a new Gothic aesthetic? We are particularly interested in addressing how Gothic technologies have, in a general sense, produced and perpetuated ideologies and influenced the politics of cultural practice. However, we also want to reconsider the whole idea of what we mean by a Gothic ‘technique’ which arguably underpins these new formations of the Gothic. To that end we invite papers that question not only what we might constitute a Gothic aesthetic from the eighteenth century to the present day, but how that is witnessed in various forms such as the Female Gothic, models of the sublime, sensation fiction, cyberpunk as well as the various non-text based media that the Gothic has infiltrated. We also invite proposals which address how various critical theories help us to evaluate either these new technological trends or critically transform our understanding of the intellectual space occupied by earlier Gothic forms. Papers which explore the place of science, writing, and the subject are thus very welcome.

We thus seek to explore how Gothic technologies/Gothic techniques textualize identities and construct communities within a complex network of power relations in local, national, transnational and global contexts.

Papers exploring any aspect of Gothic technologies/Gothic techniques in writing, film and other media are welcome. Topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Gothic Architecture and Technology
• Printing, Publishing and Gothic Disseminations
• Terror, Terrorism, Technology
• The techniques of philosophy – the sublime
• Colonizing Technology and Postcolonial Gothics
• Technology of Monsters
• Gothic Art
• Enlightenment Gothic and Science
• War, Violence, Technology
• (Neo)Victorian Gothic
• Gothic poetry
• Gothic Bodies: Modifications, Mutations, Transformations
• Weird Science, Mad Scientists
• Staging the Gothic
• B-movies, Laughter and Comic Gothic
• Demonic Technologies / Demonizing Technology
• Theorising the Gothic
• Gothic Geography – mapping the Gothic
• Cloning, Duplicating, Doubling
• Hybrids, Cyborgs and Transgression
• Digital Gothics and Uncanny Media

Abstracts (350 words max.) for 20 minute papers may be submitted to IGA2013@surrey.ac.uk<mailto:IGA2013@surrey.ac.uk> . The submission deadline is February 1, 2013. We also welcome submissions for panels (consisting of three papers) that address specific topics.

The Maester’s Chain:  Essays on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

Edited by: Dr. Susan Johnston, Associate Professor of English, University of Regina

Dr. Jes Battis, Assistant Professor of English, University of Regina

“A master forges his chain with study, he told me.  The different metals are each a different kind of learning, gold for the study of money and accounts, silver for healing, iron for warcraft.  And he said there were other meanings as well.”

George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire (1991-), has produced a constellation of intertext:  fan fiction, merchandise, artwork, graphic novels, and an acclaimed HBO television program.  Many would argue that the series diverges from traditional epic fantasy, in its preoccupation with the grim realities of a medieval world.  Martin’s ambiguous treatment of the supernatural, and his interest in the radical failure of chivalry, has made A Song of Ice and Fire unique among fantasy texts.  The success of HBO’s Game of Thrones has created new fan communities, possibly reinvigorating the genre as a subject of critical inquiry, although there are significant differences between the source-text and its recent adaptation.  Game of Thrones has also received as much criticism as acclaim, largely due to its presentation of sexuality and violence.

We aim to collect a diversity of essays on the world of Westeros and its characters.  Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Adaptation
• Animals (dire wolves, shape-shifting, animal consciousness)
• Artwork
• Childhood
• Chivalry, monarchy, and other power structures
• Disability and/or monstrosity
• Fan communities and texts
• Food and cultures of consumption
• History and national myth-making
• Knowledge networks (maesters, ravens, print culture)
• Languages (Old Valyrian, Dothraki, Braavosi, and others)
• Literary antecedents (fantasy traditions, classical and medieval influences)
• Magic and the supernatural
• Race and ethnicity
• Religions (monotheism, polytheism, other treatments of the sacred)
• Sexualities (reproduction, queerness, eunuchism, prostitution, incest)
• Songs and mummery

The submission deadline is December 15, 2012.  Abstracts (500 – 1000 words, in .doc or .docx format) should be emailed to:

susan.johnston@uregina.ca
jes.battis@uregina.ca

Completed chapters (20-25 pages, double-spaced) are due April 15, 2013.

Call for Papers

For a special issue on “Science Fictions” Studies in the Novel seeks critical responses to the genres of SF.  Essays would consider debates within SF’s various communities of genre and affiliation, as well as across these communities, with an emphasis on the SF novel or writings of any kind by noted SF novelists. Submission deadline is September 1, 2014; all questions and submissions should be directed to studiesinthenovel@unt.edu.

Guest Editor:  Farah Mendlesohn, Professor and Chair of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, author of Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan 2008), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003).

Postmodern Theory, Science Fiction and Race

In Science Fiction Culture, Camille Bacon-Smith comments that: “…when the ethnographer asks the question, ‘What does postmodern culture look like?’ the obvious place to find the answer is the science fiction community.” As a genre that embraces the impossible, science fiction/fantasy is fast becoming recognized as a genre well suited to demonstrate the cultural contradictions postmodern theory highlights.

Postmodern Theory also problematizes the idea of race, exposing it as a constructed aspect of identity. However, ethnic American authors have consistently written postmodern and science fiction/fantasy texts that challenge or question notions of racial identity in order to draw attention to issues of racial representation. This panel seeks to make connections between postmodern theory, racial identity and the genre of science fiction/fantasy in order to draw conclusions about the future of race in a postmodern culture.

Submissions can address (but are not limited to) any of the following: Representation of race in postmodern texts and/or science fiction/ antasy texts, postmodern theory and the science fiction/fantasy genre, ethnic American contributions to postmodern theory and/or
science fiction/fantasy.

By June 30, 2012, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words via email as a word document to: joysanchez@mail.usf.edu.

Call for Chapters:
On the Highway to Hell and Back: Critical Essays on the Television Series Supernatural

One-page Abstracts Due June 20^th, 2012

First complete draft (15-20 pages plus works cited) due by September 20^th, 2012.

Supernatural, now in its seventh season, has gained a cult status and has spawned comic books, novels, fan fiction, and an assortment of companion books.  Like other cult TV shows before it, such as The X-files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel, part of the series’ success lies in the way it combines plot and character with serious investigations of folklore, myth, religion, psychology, and family dynamics.  Supernatural’s story arcs have dealt with, and commented on, issues as diverse as fan culture, sexual orientation, father/son conflict, the changing nature of the U.S. family, and the Apocalypse.  This collection of critical essays will be thematic in nature, focusing on the social, psychological, philosophical, religious and mythic themes of the series.  Specifically it will examine how the series addresses horror in a postmodern context through character and story as well as the recurring use of symbols and plot devices such as the music, cars, the crossroads, biblical texts and religious icons.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Representations of mythic and folkloric themes: fairy tales, non-Western folklore, urban myth/legend, shape shifters
• Representations of religious themes: God/gods, angels, demons, Satan, Book of Revelations, Western and non-Western religious themes etc
• Monsters and the monstrous in Supernatural
• Gender and sexuality
• Representations of mortality: personifications of Death, reapers, ghosts
• Family: fathers/sons, mothers, family/domesticity as safety, family as danger/curse  hunting as “family business.”
• Post-modernist themes: self-referential humor, the writer as God, representations of fans and fanfiction in the series
• Literary themes: Dracula, Biblical stories, vengeful spirits, the woman in white
• Music in Supernatural: original soundtrack and Dean’s “car tunes”

Please contact Susan A. George (sageorge13@yahoo.com) and Regina Hansen (rhansen@bu.edu) with questions or brief description (no more that 50 words) of your topic and a current CV before submitting an abstract.  One-page Abstracts Due June 20^th, 2012.  First complete draft (15-20 pages plus works cited) due by September 20^th, 2012.