DAY ONE

Session One: Imagining New Worlds: What activists can and have learnt from sci-fi – Saturday, February 26, 2022, 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EDT
Moderated by Iain McIntyre with additional guests TBA
(Registration Link TBA)

Session Two: Bursting Through The Boundaries: Queering SF – Saturday, February 26, 2022, 12:30 pm PST / 3:30 pm EDT
Moderated by Rebecca Baumann with Meg Elison and Maitland McDonagh
(Registration Link TBA)

Session Three: Wild Seed: Reflecting on the work and impact of Octavia Butler – Saturday, February 26, 2022, 4:00 pm PST / 7:00 pm EDT
Moderator TBA with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and additional guests TBA
(Registration Link TBA)

Session Four: Final Programmes and New Fixes: A conversation with Michael Moorcock – Saturday, February 26, 2022, 5:30 pm PST / 8:30 pm EDT
Mike Stax in conversation with Michael Moorcock

DAY TWO

Session Five:The Forever War: Vietnam’s impact on sci-fi – Sunday, February 27, 2022, 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EDT
Moderated by Andrew Nette with Terry Bisson and Marge Piercy 
(Registration Link TBA)

Session Six: The Bridge of Lost Desire: A Conversation with Samuel Delany – Sunday, February 27, 2022, 12:30 pm PST / 3:30 pm EDT
Daniel Shank Cruz in conversation with Samuel Delany
(Registration Link TBA)

Session Seven:Ten Thousand Light Years From Home: Reflecting on the work and impact of James Tiptree Jr – Sunday, February 27, 2022, 2:00 pm PST / 5:00 pm EDT
Moderated by Lucy Sussex with Karen Joy Fowler and Jonathan Lethem
(Registration Link TBA)

Session Eight: False Dawns and Wandergrounds: Dystopia, Then and Now – Sunday, February 27, 2022, 3:30 pm PST / 6:30 pm EDT
Moderated by Nick Mamatas with Matt Bell, and Ann VanderMeer
(Registration Link TBA)

All events are free but required registration.

About Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985

Much has been written about the “long Sixties,” the era of the late 1950s through the early 1970s. It was a period of major social change, most graphically illustrated by the emergence of liberatory and resistance movements focused on inequalities of class, race, gender, sexuality, and beyond, whose challenge represented a major shock to the political and social status quo. With its focus on speculation, alternate worlds and the future, science fiction became an ideal vessel for this upsurge of radical protest.

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985 details, celebrates, and evaluates how science fiction novels and authors depicted, interacted with, and were inspired by these cultural and political movements in America and Great Britain. It starts with progressive authors who rose to prominence in the conservative 1950s, challenging the so-called Golden Age of science fiction and its linear narratives of technological breakthroughs and space-conquering male heroes. The book then moves through the 1960s, when writers, including those in what has been termed the New Wave, shattered existing writing conventions and incorporated contemporary themes such as modern mass media culture, corporate control, growing state surveillance, the Vietnam War, and rising currents of counterculture, ecological awareness, feminism, sexual liberation, and Black Power. The 1970s, when the genre reflected the end of various dreams of the long Sixties and the faltering of the postwar boom, is also explored along with the first half of the 1980s, which gave rise to new subgenres, such as cyberpunk.

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds contains over twenty chapters written by contemporary authors and critics, and hundreds of full-color cover images, including thirteen thematically organised cover selections. New perspectives on key novels and authors, such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, John Wyndham, Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Judith Merril, Barry Malzberg, Joanna Russ, and many others are presented alongside excavations of topics, works, and writers who have been largely forgotten or undeservedly ignored.

Sponsored by the City Lights Foundation