EVENT DETAILS

The Future is Here: California in Science Fiction Symposium

The Future is Here: California in Science Fiction A Symposium

Thursday, April 4, 2013 12:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Humanities Gateway 1030
University of California, Irvine

The West Coast of the US, and California in particular, has long been a source of inspiration for the SF imagination: the state's history offers a rich repository of utopian schemes, dystopian realities, collectivist experiments, and commercial and ecological catastrophes. During the Cold War and after California has represented the vanguard of technoscientific progress, free-market ideology, lifestyle libertarianism, and countercultural experimentation. California shares the seismic instabilities of the Pacific Rim and is integrated into the cultural and economic exchanges facilitated and regulated by global capital throughout the region. California exists in the larger cultural imagination as both a much-dreamed-of sphere of spiritual discovery and multicultural hybridity as well as a nightmarish realm of ecological disaster and race war. Join us for a lively discussion of these and other issues with SF writers, theorists, and critics.

12:00-12:30: Introductions by Jonathan Alexander
12:30-1:30: Oath of Fealty: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Gregory Benford on the classic novel about a surveillance community in Los Angeles
1:30-3:00: A State of Difference: Sheila Finch and Steven Barnes on writing gender and race in Californian SF 3:00-4:30: Breakout sessions: Writing SF (Workshop on Writing SF with Sheila Finch and Workshop on Writing SF with Steven Barnes)
4:30-5:00: Concluding Roundtable: The Critics & Theorists React: CA & SF? (Catherine Liu, UCI Film and Media Studies, Sherryl Vint, UCR English, and Matthew Wolf-Meyer, UCSC Anthropology)

Please RSVP at icruse@uci.edu by Monday, April 1, 2013.

Sponsored with a grant from the California Studies Consortium, the UCI Humanities Collective, and the UCI Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication.