Conference Presentations by Glyn Morgan
Historical fiction has a long tradition of referencing real historical studies and facts, particu... more Historical fiction has a long tradition of referencing real historical studies and facts, particularly through authorial paratexts such as forewords and postscripts, in order to borrow a sense of historical legitimacy and contribute an aura of feasibility to its plots. This tradition is well established and well understood. Less clear is why alternate history novels utilise the same paratextual techniques.
My paper will examine the paratextual instincts of alternate history fiction. It will explore the heritage of these instincts and their varying impacts upon the texts versus their impact upon more conventional historical fictions; in doing so it will begin the process of categorising alternate history fiction and describing its relation to the literary corpus.
Understanding the paratextual instinct of alternate history is a crucial element in initiating a re-examination of the literature and beginning to comprehend the complex relationship between science fiction, alternate history fiction, historical fiction, and the historical record itself.
Crucial to this paper are works such as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation by Gerard Genette and The Historical Novel by Jerome de Groot; as well as novels such as Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream.
More recent alternate histories have bucked the trend of Britain as a glorious resister of Nazi a... more More recent alternate histories have bucked the trend of Britain as a glorious resister of Nazi authority and instead focused on the dirty underbelly of anti-Semitism and fascism in British society in the 1930s. My paper will analyse a series of novels which do just this: the "Small Change" series by Jo Walton; I will discuss how reading these novels, and others like them, encourage a re-reading of the historical narrative of time whilst at the same time inform our understanding of the present.
Book Reviews by Glyn Morgan
Call for Papers by Glyn Morgan
Sideways in Time is an Alternate History Conference to be held at the University of Liverpool - i... more Sideways in Time is an Alternate History Conference to be held at the University of Liverpool - in association with Lancaster University. This interdisciplinary conferences will bring together scholarship in science fiction, fantasy, historical and literary fictions, as well as historians and counterfactual thought-experiments, to discuss those fictional narratives that deals with alternate histories and parallel worlds.
We are pleased to announce Karen Hellekson, Adam Roberts, and Stephen Baxter as our keynote speakers. Karen Hellekson is a leading authority on alternate history fiction (The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, 2001). Professor Adam Roberts is a leading science fiction critic and also an award-winning author who employs alternate history elements into some of his fiction (most notably Swiftly, shortlisted for the 2009 Sidewise Award). Stephen Baxter is currently a judge of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, as well as being one of the former winners (“Brigantia’s Angels”, Voyage).
Despite a long and diverse history, alternate history has attracted surprisingly little scholarship. This conference will attempt to establish lines of communication which will rectify this deficit. It is hoped a selection of the essays presented at the conference will be made available as part of a published collection.
We are interested in papers analysing specific alternate history texts from all mediums including novels, cinema, comics and beyond. We also welcome broader papers on the various periods, subgenres, movements and modes of alternate history including steampunk, retro-futurism and more. Papers can be based on, amongst other things, theory, texts, cultural surveys, philosophy, and media studies.
Please submit a 300 word abstract to [email protected] along with a 50 word bionote by December 15, 2014.
http://sidewaysintime.wordpress.com/
Papers by Glyn Morgan
Interface Focus
In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but a... more In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but also to try and understand and anticipate what might come next. Sales and rental figures for works of fiction about pandemics and other disease outbreaks surged in 2020, but what can pandemic science fiction tell us about disease? This article surveys the long history of science fiction's engagement with disease and demonstrates the ways in which these narratives, whether in literature or film, have always had more to say about other contemporary cultural concerns than the disease themselves. Nonetheless, the ideas demonstrated in these texts can be seen perpetuating through the science fiction genre, and in our current crisis, we have seen striking similarities between the behaviours of key individuals, and the manner in which certain events have played out. Not because science fiction predicts these things, but because it anticipates the social structures which produce them (while a...
LA Review of Books, Oct 30, 2015
This article argues for the represtationabilty of the Holocaust, or rather, it advocates the inte... more This article argues for the represtationabilty of the Holocaust, or rather, it advocates the intention to represent. True representation is impossible and yet, despite the protestations of opponents such as Nobel prize winner Elie Wiesel, it is necessary. Due to the traumatic nature of the Holocaust, and the inability of those who have not experienced it to truly comprehend the terrors it entails, mimetic modes of representation are insufficient. As such, non-mimetic or fantastic modes have a vital role to play and this has been recognised from the earliest opportunity, as this article shall show. Non-mimetic Holocaust fiction begins in the camps themselves with Hurst Rosenthal's Mickey in Gurs (1941) depicting Mickey mouse as a prisoner of Gurs camp, later in 1944 Calvo et al. used barnyard fable imagery to depict France's role in the war and the brutal occupation. Both of these pieces act as precursor to the genre defining non-mimetic Holocaust piece: Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986;1991). All three of these texts use animal imagery and metafictionality to elaborate on the mimetic historical record in some manner. The article will draw to a conclusion by examining a fourth text, or more specifically a single character within a set of texts, Magneto from Marvel comics' The X-Men. Magneto stands as an example of fantastical fiction, in this case the superhero comic, appropriating the Holocaust to deepen and extend its own narrative, as opposed to Rosenthal, Calvo, and Spiegelman use of the fantastic to augment their Holocaust narrative. In doing so, Magneto's character offers us a different view point of the intersection between the visual fantastic and one of the most terrifying horrors on the 20th century.
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Conference Presentations by Glyn Morgan
My paper will examine the paratextual instincts of alternate history fiction. It will explore the heritage of these instincts and their varying impacts upon the texts versus their impact upon more conventional historical fictions; in doing so it will begin the process of categorising alternate history fiction and describing its relation to the literary corpus.
Understanding the paratextual instinct of alternate history is a crucial element in initiating a re-examination of the literature and beginning to comprehend the complex relationship between science fiction, alternate history fiction, historical fiction, and the historical record itself.
Crucial to this paper are works such as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation by Gerard Genette and The Historical Novel by Jerome de Groot; as well as novels such as Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream.
Book Reviews by Glyn Morgan
Call for Papers by Glyn Morgan
We are pleased to announce Karen Hellekson, Adam Roberts, and Stephen Baxter as our keynote speakers. Karen Hellekson is a leading authority on alternate history fiction (The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, 2001). Professor Adam Roberts is a leading science fiction critic and also an award-winning author who employs alternate history elements into some of his fiction (most notably Swiftly, shortlisted for the 2009 Sidewise Award). Stephen Baxter is currently a judge of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, as well as being one of the former winners (“Brigantia’s Angels”, Voyage).
Despite a long and diverse history, alternate history has attracted surprisingly little scholarship. This conference will attempt to establish lines of communication which will rectify this deficit. It is hoped a selection of the essays presented at the conference will be made available as part of a published collection.
We are interested in papers analysing specific alternate history texts from all mediums including novels, cinema, comics and beyond. We also welcome broader papers on the various periods, subgenres, movements and modes of alternate history including steampunk, retro-futurism and more. Papers can be based on, amongst other things, theory, texts, cultural surveys, philosophy, and media studies.
Please submit a 300 word abstract to [email protected] along with a 50 word bionote by December 15, 2014.
http://sidewaysintime.wordpress.com/
Papers by Glyn Morgan
My paper will examine the paratextual instincts of alternate history fiction. It will explore the heritage of these instincts and their varying impacts upon the texts versus their impact upon more conventional historical fictions; in doing so it will begin the process of categorising alternate history fiction and describing its relation to the literary corpus.
Understanding the paratextual instinct of alternate history is a crucial element in initiating a re-examination of the literature and beginning to comprehend the complex relationship between science fiction, alternate history fiction, historical fiction, and the historical record itself.
Crucial to this paper are works such as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation by Gerard Genette and The Historical Novel by Jerome de Groot; as well as novels such as Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream.
We are pleased to announce Karen Hellekson, Adam Roberts, and Stephen Baxter as our keynote speakers. Karen Hellekson is a leading authority on alternate history fiction (The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, 2001). Professor Adam Roberts is a leading science fiction critic and also an award-winning author who employs alternate history elements into some of his fiction (most notably Swiftly, shortlisted for the 2009 Sidewise Award). Stephen Baxter is currently a judge of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, as well as being one of the former winners (“Brigantia’s Angels”, Voyage).
Despite a long and diverse history, alternate history has attracted surprisingly little scholarship. This conference will attempt to establish lines of communication which will rectify this deficit. It is hoped a selection of the essays presented at the conference will be made available as part of a published collection.
We are interested in papers analysing specific alternate history texts from all mediums including novels, cinema, comics and beyond. We also welcome broader papers on the various periods, subgenres, movements and modes of alternate history including steampunk, retro-futurism and more. Papers can be based on, amongst other things, theory, texts, cultural surveys, philosophy, and media studies.
Please submit a 300 word abstract to [email protected] along with a 50 word bionote by December 15, 2014.
http://sidewaysintime.wordpress.com/
It's an excellent idea to gather a book of essays about the work of Adam Roberts. His novels are so various and brilliant that it's a pleasure to discuss them in depth, as it is with the work of any gifted artist following a singular path. This volume clarifies parts of Roberts' project while deepening mysteries elsewhere in it just what one wants from literary criticism. -- Kim Stanley Robinson
Adam Roberts has long been regarded as one of contemporary science fiction's most innovative, and overlooked, writers. Adam Roberts: Critical Essays makes an excellent intervention in addressing this critical lacuna, yielding productive insights into the startling inventiveness of his texts, their rich intertextuality, ludic playfulness, and, more recently, political response to a post-Occupy world. Roberts's novels and parodies themselves have much to teach us about the science fiction tradition, and these essays rightfully position his work as among the best of twenty-first-century writing in the speculative mode. --Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Roberts is at once the cleverest and wittiest of contemporary science fiction writers. This dazzling collection of essays shows how cleverness is his topic as well as his technique, and how his wit both mocks and accentuates the prodigious intelligence that marks every page of his work. I haven't read a more perceptive or entertaining tribute to a living author. --Dr Robert Maslen, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow
When the history of 21st-century science fiction is written, Adam Roberts will be remembered as this era's H. G. Wells. --Damien Walter, Writer, Columnist for The Guardian, Writing teacher.
Adam Roberts's fiction gives us an education in sf's history and traditions while he merrily deconstructs them. Add to that the way his criticism is laced with humour, and it's only appropriate that a collection devoted to his work should tease its subject a little. Even as they open up the suggestion that Roberts is one of our most important writers, these essays amuse as well as inform. If sf is to survive it's going to need more people like Roberts, and this collection tells us why! --Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Collections Librarian, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library