Lancaster University, 8th–10th August 2019
Conference Venue: Management School Lecture Theatre 4
Theodora Goss’s Athena Club series uses neo-Victorian monster mashup to interrogate contemporary identity politics. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), the first book in the series, chronicles the adventures of the daughters of famous ‘mad scientists’ from Victorian literature, and their eventual formation of the …
Slow Lacerations: Time in Tissue Transfer Fantastika How do we show history, money, and surgical and pharmacological change intersecting with bodies? How do we express the times of transplantation, the temporalities of its many dimensions impacting human tissue and flesh and kinship? This paper considers recipient experience and of harvestee vulnerabilities and networks of predation that can feed …
Suspending Death, Reinventing Life My keynote argues that we are in the midst of a philosophical reinvention of what the idea of ‘life itself’ means in the context of biotechnology and its widespread commodification of biological entities and processes. This situation requires new biopolitical figures through which to theorize the social and political risks because …
“So he made us, demi-gods, to stand beside him… The mere fact of me frightens me sometimes.” (Abnett, Horus Rising, p134-135) Over the past 30 years, Games Workshop’s iconic ‘Warhammer 40,000’ setting has centred around a key narrative conflict set in the 31st millennium: the era known as the Horus Heresy, involving two sides of …
Long established as a relocation of sexual intercourse, the bloody feeding of the vampire is obviously its most iconic and embodied behaviour. How then do the authors and directors of the ever-popular children’s vampire story negotiate the clear inappropriateness of such consumption? Examining a range of recent television and film texts, such as Count Duckula, …
Following the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), science fiction narratives focused on alien visitors to Earth become more popular and prolific than they had been since the 1950s. Invasion films experienced a particular resurgence, with many films borrowing their basic narratives from the science fiction films …
Through dissolving human-machine boundaries, the ‘cyborg’ challenges traditional conceptions of embodiment. Thus, identifying a singular conception of what it means to be human may become increasingly impossible within a contemporary, cyborg-infused reality. The term cyborg has been appropriated within a mixture of utopian and dystopian accounts to describe various hybrid bodies; Haraway’s (1991) visions of …
Once I asked my father what he’d do if he found out I was a changeling. Without hesitating, he said “Kill you. Find my real daughter” This paper consists of a series of semi-autobiographical anecdotes, like the one above, interspersed with more direct analyses of the queerness and transhumanity of entities deemed non- or sub-human …
JY Yang’s Tensorate novellas, comprising The Black Tides of Heaven (2017), The Red Threads of Fortune (2017) and The Descent of Monsters (2018), explore a world with a very different attitude towards concepts of gender. Featuring a diverse cast of characters of a variety of different genders, the series takes a fundamentally intersectional approach to …
The later novels and short stories in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series are notable for their dramatic shift in tone, narrative voice, and subject matter compared to earlier entries. The novels Tehanu (1990) and The Other Wind (2001), and the short story collection Tales from Earthsea (2001), all participate in radical revisions of the …