Guest Scholar: Gary K. Wolfe (Roosevelt University, USA)
Over the past decades, the speculative genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy, have decisively spread out from literature to thrive in a multitude of new media. Readers have become users, taking part in the creation of fantastic worlds and interacting with their stories. They have also taken on the role of consumers, driving an industry of books, films, TV series, comics, and games worth billions of any given currency unit around the world. And speculative literature—traditional novels and short fiction—is still going strong, morphing into new forms, each generation of authors offering new constellations of settings and character types. In this shifting landscape of stories, one thing seems clear: moving beyond the mundane and the everyday is turning into the new norm.
The Archipelacon Academic Track aims to bring together a wide range of scholarly perspectives on the speculative and the fantastic. Proposals for scholarly papers from any academic discipline that seek to examine, interrogate, and expand research related to any aspect of the fantastic, for any age group, in any medium are welcome. We hope for a broad, interdisciplinary discussion on the many ways in which genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and horror take its readers, users, and consumers beyond the boundaries of the actual. With the location of Archipelacon in mind, we would particularly welcome scholarship related in some way or another to the Nordic or Baltic region.
Papers will be allowed a maximum presentation time of 20 minutes. Submit a 500-word proposal and a bibliography that demonstrates your critical and theoretical approach to: [email protected]
Archipelacon, a four-day celebration of the fantastic in the arts, is next year’s big event in the Nordic countries for everyone interested in science fiction and fantasy. Archipelacon will offer you several programme tracks with presentations, panels and lectures on all aspects of science fiction and fantasy, as well as the guests of honour George R.R. Martin, Johanna Sinisalo and Karin Tidbeck. The main language will be English, but there will be programme tracks also in Finnish and Swedish. The academic track is organised in cooperation with Finfar.
Mariehamn is easy to get to via frequent, cheap and comfortable cruise liners from several places in Finland and Sweden, including Stockholm and Helsinki. You can also fly to Mariehamn via Stockholm, Helsinki or Turku. For more information, see http://www.archipelacon.org/.
If you have any questions about the Archipelacon Academic Track:
Merja Polvinen, PhD, University of Helsinki, [email protected]
Stefan Ekman, PhD, University of Gothenburg, [email protected]