(Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon

Abstract

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. 157 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Earth Day was first celebrated in the United States on 22 April 1970. It now mobilizes citizens and communities worldwide, representing the first massive expression of public concern with the ecological sustainability of our planet and launching the modern global environmental movement. As much of the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, our symposium, “(Re)thinking Earth,” aims to bring together plural perspectives under the collaborative interdisciplinary model of the environmental humanities. We invite papers on a range of topics that may include nature writing over time and space, global voices in ecopoetics, affect and ecocriticism, climate change in contemporary fiction, reimagined pastoral landscapes, space and scale in environmental writing, agro-ecological storytelling, the anthropocene, representations of environmental science in literature and film, the climate change crisis in visual culture, ecomedia and environmental science, climate change in utopian and dystopian literature, postcolonial and indigenous representations of environmental collapses, sf/fantasy and environmental crises, film and televisual representations of climate change, environmental ethics, and environmental education/literacy. Submit a 250-word...