Titles of Interest – Religion in Science Fiction: The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a Genre

0 | November 19th, 2014 | Posted in religion, science fiction, Titles of Interest

51p9gosa8JL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Religion in Science Fiction: The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a Genre by Steven Hrotic (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

Religion in Science Fiction investigates the history of the representations of religion in science fiction literature. Space travel, futuristic societies, and non-human cultures are traditional themes in science fiction. Speculating on the societal impacts of as-yet-undiscovered technologies is, after all, one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction literature. A more surprising theme may be a parallel exploration of religion: its institutional nature, social functions, and the tensions between religious and scientific worldviews.

Steven Hrotic investigates the representations of religion in 19th century proto-science fiction, and genre science fiction from the 1920s through the end of the century. Taken together, he argues that these stories tell an overarching story-a ‘metanarrative’-of an evolving respect for religion, paralleling a decline in the belief that science will lead us to an ideal (and religion-free) future.

Science fiction’s metanarrative represents more than simply a shift in popular perceptions of religion: it also serves as a model for cognitive anthropology, providing new insights into how groups and identities form in a globalized world, and into how crucial a role narratives may play. Ironically, this same perspective suggests that science fiction, as it was in the 20th century, may no longer exist.

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Titles of Interest – Holy Sci-Fi! Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect

1 | November 19th, 2014 | Posted in religion, science fiction, Titles of Interest

51Dzhi4kieL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Holy Sci-Fi! Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect by Paul J. Nahin (Springer, 2014)

Can a computer have a soul? Are religion and science mutually exclusive? Is there really such a thing as free will? If you could time travel to visit Jesus, would you (and should you)? For hundreds of years, philosophers, scientists, and science fiction writers have pondered these questions and many more.

In Holy Sci-Fi!, popular writer Paul Nahin explores the fertile and sometimes uneasy relationship between science fiction and religion. With a scope spanning the history of religion, philosophy, and literature, Nahin follows religious themes in science fiction from Feynman to Foucault, and from Asimov to Aristotle.

An intriguing journey through popular and well-loved books and stories, Holy Sci-Fi! shows how sci-fi has informed humanity’s attitudes towards our faiths, our future, and ourselves.

By the author of the popular books “Time Machines” and “The Science of Radio”

Discusses the opinions and writings of philosophers and scientists (Pascal, Hume, Nietzsche) and science fiction authors (Arthur C. Clark, C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov)

Draws connections between science fact, science fiction, philosophy, and theological debate over the past five centuries

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Call for Papers – ‘The Company of Wolves’: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives—Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans

0 | November 19th, 2014 | Posted in call for papers, conference, shapeshifter, werewolf

dore‘The Company of Wolves’: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives — Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans

Conference, University of Hertfordshire, Sept 3rd-5th 2015: Call for Papers and Panels

Wolves have long been the archetypal enemy of human company, preying on the unguarded boundaries of civilisation, threatening the pastoral of ideal sociality and figuring as sexual predators. Yet, in their way, with their complex pack interactions, they have served as a model for society. Lately, this ancient enemy has been rehabilitated and reappraised, and rewilding projects have attempted to admit them more closely into our lives. Our company with wolves has inspired fiction from Ovid, through Perrault and the Grimms’ narrators, to Bram Stoker and Kipling; and, more recently, to Angela Carter, Neil Jordan, Anne Rice, Marcus Sedgwick and Glen Duncan.

The Open Graves, Open Minds Project was initiated in 2010 with the Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture conference and reconvened for the Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium in 2012. We turn our attention now to creatures not strictly undead but which haunt the peripheries of the vampire— werewolves and shapeshifters. Such beings have served in narrative fiction to question what humanity is; weres tend to reveal the complex affinities and differences between our existence as linguistic, social subjects and our physiological continuity with other animals. They also draw our attention to questions of hierarchy and sexuality, to the instinctive, and to what extent our conceptions of these are ideological.

Werewolves, along with vampires, have recently become humanised, even romanticised, as identity politics became mainstream and the Other assimilated. The ancient paradigm of Beauty and the Beast lives on in paranormal romance. And just as the vampire figure both conditions the shape of the subgenres it dwells in and draws other genres into its sphere, so fictions about werewolves, wild humans, and human-animal relationships also invoke questions of genre and intertextuality. Thus, we are also interested in other narratives and discourses such as beast fables, taxonomies, human metamorphoses, and stories of feral children and those raised by animals which question the boundaries between animal and human.

Amidst concerns about our relationship with nature, in a culture informed by Romanticism and a post-Enlightenment doubt about the centrality of humanity, contemporary fictions often turn to the animal, and to transitions between animal and human (particularly the werewolf and kindred figures) to interrogate what is special about our species. In her werewolf paranormal romance, Shiver, the YA author Maggie Stiefvater quotes Rilke: ‘even the most clever of animals see that we are not surely at home in our interpreted world’. This perhaps captures our amphibious nature and raises the kind of questions we are interested in.

The conference will explore human social existence and its animal substrate, and the intersection between the human and the wolfishly bestial as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine the cultural significance of these themes in all their various manifestations. As with the initial OGOM conference, from which emerged a book and a special issue journal, there will be the opportunity for delegates’ presentations to be published.

The conference organising committee invites proposals for panels and individual papers. Possible topics and approaches may include (but are not limited to) the following:

* Werewolves, lycanthropy, and shapeshifters
* Feral and wild children
* Language, culture, and nature
* Instinct and agency
* Animal studies and humanist perspectives
* Phenomenology and the philosophy of language, mind, and body
* Animality and sociality from Hobbes through Rousseau to Darwin
* Narratives of the Grimms, Perrault, Kipling, Angela Carter, Neil Jordan, Anne Rice, Maggie Stiefvater, Glen Duncan, Marcus Sedgwick
* Genre, intertextuality, and narratology
* Young Adult and children’s fiction
* Urban fantasy and paranormal romance
* TV, film, and other media
* Folklore and anthropology
* Fables, fabliaux, and fantasy
* The Gothic, fairy tale, and myth
* Sexuality and romance
* Species, ‘race’, identity, and taxonomy

Abstracts (200-300 words) for twenty-minute papers or proposals for two-hour panels should be submitted by 31st March 2015 as an email attachment in MS Word document format to all of the following: Dr Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk; Dr Bill Hughes, bill.enlightenment@gmail.com; Kaja Franck, k.a.franck@googlemail.com

Please use your surname as the document title. The abstract should be sent in the fol-lowing format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) Abstract. Panel proposals should include (1) Title of the panel (2) Name and contact information of the chair (3) Abstracts of the presenters. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by April 2015

The programme features Neil Jordan and plenary talks from Sir Christopher Frayling on ‘Angela Carter’, Dr Catherine Spooner on ‘Wearing the Wolf’, Dr Stacey Abbott on ‘The Sound of the Cinematic Werewolf’, Dr Sam George on ‘Wolf Children’ and Dr Bill Hughes on ‘Werewolves and Paranormal Romance’. There will be contributions from novelists Marcus Sedgwick and Glen Duncan (tbc) together with special guests. OGOM PhD students, Kaja Franck and Matt Beresford, will present papers on their current research involving werewolves. Delegates will have the opportunity to visit unique places associated with our theme, and to actually ‘walk with wolves’.

For more information, contact Dr Sam George at s.george@herts.ac.uk.

The conference is organised by the University of Hertfordshire, UK http://www.herts.ac.uk.

Click here to see details of the Open Graves, Open Minds book
Our website is at: http://www.opengravesopenminds.com and our blog, with updates on the conference and project, is at:openmindsopengraves.wordpress.com

For more information, contact Dr Sam George at s.george@herts.ac.uk.

The conference is organised by the University of Hertfordshire, UK http://www.herts.ac.uk.

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Titles of Interest – Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror

0 | November 17th, 2014 | Posted in horror, Titles of Interest

51kg6DdepcL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror (McFarland, 2013), edited by Aalya Ahmad and Sean Moreland

This groundbreaking collection of new essays presents critical reflections on teaching horror film and fiction in many different ways and in a variety of academic settings–from cultural theory to film studies; from women’s and gender studies to postcolonialism; from critical thinking seminars on the paranormal to the timeless classics of English horror literature. Together, the essays show readers how the pedagogy of horror can galvanize, unsettle and transform classrooms, giving us powerful tools with which to consider interwoven issues of identity, culture, monstrosity, the relationship between the real and the fictional, normativity and adaptation. Includes a foreword by celebrated horror writer Glen Hirshberg.

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Titles of Interest – It Happens at Comic-Con: Ethnographic Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon

0 | November 17th, 2014 | Posted in Comic Con, comics, Titles of Interest

978-0-7864-7694-7It Happens at Comic-Con: Ethnographic Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon (McFarland, 2014), edited by Ben Bolling and Matthew J. Smith

This collection of 13 new essays employs ethnographic methods to investigate San Diego’s Comic-Con International, the largest annual celebration of the popular arts in North America. Working from a common grounding in fan studies, these individual explorations examine a range of cultural practices at an event drawing crowds of nearly 125,000 each summer.

Investigations range from the practices of fans costuming themselves to the talk of corporate marketers. The collection seeks to expand fan studies, exploring Comic-Con International more deeply than any publication before it.

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Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination exhibit

0 | November 16th, 2014 | Posted in Gothic horror, terror

Open until Tuesday, 20 Jan 2015

Two hundred rare objects trace 250 years of the Gothic tradition, exploring our enduring fascination with the mysterious, the terrifying and the macabre

From Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Stanley Kubrick and Alexander McQueen, via posters, books, films – and even a vampire-slaying kit – experience the dark shadow the Gothic imagination has cast across film, art, music, fashion, architecture and our daily lives.

Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Gothic literature challenged the moral certainties of the 18th century. By exploring the dark romance of the medieval past with its castles and abbeys, its wild landscapes and fascination with the supernatural, Gothic writers placed imagination firmly at the heart of their work – and our culture.

Iconic works, such as handwritten drafts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the modern horrors of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and the popular Twilight series, highlight how contemporary fears have been addressed by generation after generation.

Terror and Wonder presents an intriguing glimpse of a fascinating and mysterious world. Experience 250 years of Gothic’s dark shadow.

See more here.

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Forthcoming Interview with David Lee Fisher on “Nosferatu”

0 | November 7th, 2014 | Posted in horror, independent horror films, Nosferatu, vampire

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Have you heard about the forthcoming independent horror film Nosferatu that will star Doug Jones? TheoFantastique will be interviewing the director David Lee Fisher soon. Take a look at the trailer and consider getting involved in their Kickstarter campaign to finance this film.

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The Harvard Crimson and the value of artistic representations of gore

0 | November 1st, 2014 | Posted in art, horror

The painting SATURN by the Spanish artist GOYA.The Harvard Crimson has an interesting essay posted titled “The Aesthetics of Horror: an investigative essay into the value of artistic representations of gore.” After beginning with a considertaion of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes’ painting “Saturn Devouring His Son,” the analysis begins. Here’s an excerpt from this thoughtful piece:

In other words, is it permissible to show something that inspires horror for its own sake? How committed are we to art for art’s sake, to the abolition of artistic boundaries? There is a modern desire to be near-absolute about the freedom granted to artists, a sincere wish for intellectual consistency and an old-fashioned fairness: one might not always like good art, and condemning something merely because it violates our mores or preferences seems petty.

Yet life rarely cuts so cleanly. Can art for art’s sake be a true guiding principle—or, more specifically, horror for horror’s sake? Yes it can; but as horror shows us, it may demand things of us that we are not willing to concede.

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Ex Machina

2 | October 30th, 2014 | Posted in artificial intelligence, robotics, science fiction

As reported by ScreenCrush.com:

‘Ex Machina’ is the directorial debut of Alex Garland, the talented screenwriter of ’28 Days Later,’ ‘Sunshine,’ ‘Never Let Me Go’ and ‘Dredd.’ With a resume like that, we can’t think of anyone better suited to helming a small and (seemingly) smart science-fiction drama like this. Color us intrigued.

Here’s the official synopsis:

“Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an internet-search giant, wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate of the company’s brilliant and reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Upon his arrival, Caleb learns that Nathan has chosen him to be the human component in a Turing Test – charging him with evaluating the capabilities, and ultimately the consciousness, of Nathan’s latest experiment in artificial intelligence. That experiment is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a breathtaking A.I. whose emotional intelligence proves more sophisticated, seductive––and more deceptive––than the two men could have imagined.”

‘Ex Machina’ is set to open on April 10, 2015.

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Titles of Interest – Body, Soul and Cyberspace in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

0 | October 26th, 2014 | Posted in cyberspace, science fiction, Titles of Interest, virtual reality

9781137399403.inddI am on my way back home from a symposium at Baylor University in Waco, Texas on faith and film. I enjoyed many of the presentations and sessions, including one on science fiction. One of the presenters was Sylvie Magerstädt, Senior Lecturer in Media Cultures at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She presented a paper that distilled some of her discussion in her book

Body, Soul and Cyberspace: Virtual Worlds and Ethical Problems
Palgrave MacMillan, 2014

Body, Soul and Cyberspace explores how recent science-fiction cinema addresses questions about the connections between body and soul, virtuality, and the ways in which we engage with spirituality in the digital age. The book investigates notions of love, life and death, taking an interdisciplinary approach by combining cinematic themes with religious, philosophical and ethical ideas. Magerstädt argues how even the most spectacle-driven mainstream films such as Avatar, The Matrix and Terminator can raise interesting and important questions about the human self and our interaction with the world. Apart from these well-known science fiction epics, her analysis also draws on recent works, such as Inception, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Aeon Flux, Total Recall (2012), Transcendence and TRON: Legacy. These films stimulate an engaging discussion on what makes us human, the role memory plays in understanding ourselves, and how virtual realities challenge the moral concepts that govern human relationships.

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