Saturday, May 16, 2015

Fantastika Conference 2015


The Fantastika conference takes place at Lancaster University on 7-8 July 2015. There will be some thirty seven brief papers on a wide range of aspects of the fantastic in literature, film, music, folklore and new media, linked by a common theme of landscape and place.

Amongst the speakers are Audrey Taylor on Pastoral and Fantasy; Tim Jarvis on "Weird Fiction's Representation Praxes"; Stephen Curtis on “Moon Kampf: The Rise of the Lunar Nazi in Speculative Fiction”; Francesca Arnavas on “The Fantastic Worlds of the Alice Books and the Imaginary Mind”; Christina Scholz, on “‘Lost in the Back Yard Again’: Uncertain Landscapes in M. John Harrison".

There will also be Keith Scott on “From R’lyeh to Whitehall: Charles Stross and the Bureaucratic Fantastic”; Douglas Leatherland on “The Nomos of Fantasy: Natural and Artificial Boundaries in Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Le Guin’s Earthsea” and Kaja Franck on “Hunting the Last Werewolf: Ecology, Fantastika, and the Wilderness of the Imagination”. My own paper is on “Supernatural Landscape in British Ambient and Drone Music”.

The conference is free: simply email fantastikaconference@gmail.com to register.

Mark Valentine

5 comments:

  1. This looks like a fascinating conference, Mark. You won't be surprised to learn I'm particularly interested in the topic of your own paper!

    ReplyDelete
  2. hi Mark.
    this looks fab but no way i'm going to make it to Lancaster. Are we going to be able to read your paper anywhere afterwards.
    I shall certainly give the conference a shout out on my Wyrd Britain blog and it's fbook page though.
    peace
    ian

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, Brian and Ian. I'm glad you're interested in my talk as you will both be in it! Yes, I hope there will be some form of publication too. Mark

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. oh, how flattering.
      looking forward to it.
      would love to catch the Keith Scott paper too. the Charles Stross Laundry books are excellent silly fun.
      Ian

      Delete
  4. [...]“Fantastika”, coined by John Clute [...]

    Oh! Really?!?

    That term exists in the Polish, Hungarian, Russian &c languages since 1950.

    ReplyDelete