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Seminar - 20th November 2017, Mark Bould

On the 20th November Mark Bould (UWE Bristol), winner of the 2016 SFRA Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award for critical contributions to the study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, will be visiting to give a seminar and answer questions on his work. Please fill out the form below to register attendance and allow sufficient catering.

Location: PS0.17a (Physical Sciences)

Format:

12:30 - 13:00 - Lunch

13:00 - 14:00 - Seminar

Making Habitable Worlds in the Late Anthropocene: District 9 (Blomkamp 2009) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014)

Central to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1993-96) is the proposition that terraforming the red planet is not merely about biophysical engineering processes, such as increasing atmospheric density, increasing oxygen levels and unlocking water. To make Mars a home to humans also requires new economic, political and social systems – systems that must be extended back to a climate-ravaged Earth to “areoform” it into full human habitability. This paper will sketch in a history of sf narratives about humans terraforming other worlds and aliens xenoforming the Earth, before turning to a pair of recent ‘second contact’ narratives about the arrival of aliens in Africa that pose questions about the habitability of our own world in the era of catastrophic climate destabilisation.


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