Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2021), and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the Managing Editor of Science Fiction Studies and editor of the book series Science in Popular Culture.
Keynote Lecture: Illiberal Science Fiction
May 10, 2025, 4:15-6 pm
This paper considers an influential example of sf we don’t see as science fiction, the technocratic plans of IT industry elites promoted under various names such as network states, charter or “freedom” cities, or ZEDEs (zones for employment and economic development). Like Victor Orbán’s celebration of illiberal democracy as a state that retains the formal features of democracy but hollows them out to promote instead autocratic forms that are hostile to egalitarian values of liberalism, these projects in futuristic governance are libertarian fantasies that draw from imperialist elements in the genre to present its LARPing scenarios as models for possible futures in which a “cognitive elite” is able to transcend the vicissitudes of materiality. This formal evocation of utopian high-tech sf is matched by a hollowed out reality in which these rhetorics will simultaneously produce dystopias for the rest of us, the formal shell of a transcendence sf utopia powered by an illiberal core of hierarchy, precocity, and intensified economic inequality. I argue that understanding the sf roots of these technocratic projects enables us to puncture their surface gloss of sf futurity and thus disrupt their seductive appeal.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on utopian possibility as it intersects with questions of aesthetic form, genre, temporality, political subjectivity, and post/inhuman agency – in literary as well as popular, cultural, and performative texts. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture, 1945-2020 (forthcoming). Caroline is currently writing her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe, which examines strangely hopeful moments of inhuman collaboration within the elemental contexts of the lithic, the mycological, the arboreal, and the hydrological. Alongside her academic research, Caroline is also Executive Director of the Open Library of Humanities, an award-winning publisher of humanities and social sciences journals. Her research has featured in a variety of places, including the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education, the Guardian, SFX Magazine, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3, BBC One South East, the Barbican Centre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Whitechapel Gallery, and the
Keynote Lecture: Sonic Apocalypticism: Learning to Listen in the Necrocene
May 9, 2025, 3-4:30 pm
This keynote considers speculations we don’t see. Science fiction media have traditionally drawn on electronic instruments to convey nonhuman or alien acoustic ecologies – we might think of Russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen’s invention of the theremin in 1920, which has featured prominently in SF soundtracks, or Sun Ra’s otherworldly blend of improvisational jazz, African percussion, and electronic keyboards in his collaborative Arkestra project. Jeff Wayne’s prog rock adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 The War of the Worlds (1978) is another iconic example, which employs synths and layered sound waves to convey the terrifying Martian invaders.
This lecture will explore a weirder series of science-fictional soundscapes that constitute what I term “sonic apocalypticism.” Recent experiments in biodata sonification have revealed a rich world of nonhuman interaction between plants and fungi. Using synthesisers to convert bioelectrical signals into sounds audible to the human ear, we can finally “hear” communications between living organisms. The converted sounds of plants and fungi suggest science fictional possibilities for worldmaking and collaborative survival. Whether it’s incorporating recordings of ice shelves collapsing, bird species on the brink of extinction, fungal-synth recordings, or the neopagan more-than-human performance of a band like Heilung (who prominently feature trees in their stage performance, as well as instruments soaked in their own blood), there are oddly utopian ciphers to be found in these works of sonic apocalypticism.Museum of London.
Sonia Fizek is a games and media scholar. She holds a professorship in Media and Game Studies at the Cologne Game Lab at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, where she also fulfils the role of the head of research. In the years 2016-2025, she served as a co-editor-in-chief of the international Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. In her latest book Playing at a Distance (MIT Press 2022), she explores the borderlands of video game aesthetic with focus on automation, AI and posthuman forms of play. Fizek’s current research concentrates on the environmental sustainability of video games. She is a principal investigator of “Greening Games. Building Higher Education Resources for Sustainable Video Game Production, Design and Critical Game Studies” (2021-2024, https://greeningames.eu), an international project on the sustainability of video games (2021-2024,) and a scientific lead in the EU Horizon project “STRATEGIES. Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries” (2024-2027, https://www.strategieshorizon.eu).
Keynote Lecture: Metaverse (Re)Visions – Speculative Frictions at Play
May 8, 2025, 3-4:30 pm
In an-over-one-hour-long vision video, “The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together” (2021) Mark Zuckerberg rolled out his manifesto for our digital realities, presenting the Internet of the future as an embodied space. A space of this kind is no longer just observed on a 2D surface. It is felt, preferably with all the human senses. This embodied vision of how we will be able to interact with the digital virtual content is the driving metaphor behind the Metaverse. However, this emphasis on the visual and sensed experience conceals aspects that are far more tangible. The underpinning logic of the Metaverse rests on developing, owning, and controlling the new natural-virtual habitat for the digital human. For what is really at stake is not of aesthetic dimension. It is not the affective side either that is going to revolutionize the way we play, work, and live. Upon closer inspection, the Metaverse is not a technology of the senses. At its core lie the material infrastructures that propel the metaphorical data clouds and the ownership of those. In other words, the focus on the embodied multi-sensorial virtual habitat conceals the material and the socio-economic conditions under which the new simulacrum of the 21st century is being developed.
Although packaged in a frictionless narrative of collaboration and affect, Metaverse is a leading example of a corporately constructed speculative fiction that rests on many frictions. In my talk, I will focus on three specific fields of friction: a) the ownership of tools and platforms b) the ownership of human data c) the ecological cost of global infrastructures. Hopefully, these frictions can help us map out a territory into which digital futures should not wander off if they are to speak the language of speculative critical design. My techno-cultural diagnosis is inspired predominantly by the work on Internet privatization (Ben Tarnoff), surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff), and technofeudalism (Yanis Varoufakis).