Invited speakers

Authors

Zoran Živković

Serbian author Živković, winner of the World Fantasy Award, is the author of more than a dozen books of stories, including The Library, Four Stories till the End, and Compartments. His stories walk the line between several genres – science fiction, fantasy, magic realism – and are generically unclassifiable.
 

Andreas Eschbach

Eschbach is among the most prominent authors of SF in Germany in recent times. An awardee of the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, the most prestigious prize for Science Fiction in Germany, multiple times, he is the author of several science fiction books, including Die Haarteppichknüpfer (translated into English as The Carpet Makers and published by Tor Books) and Jesus Video. He also edited Eine Trillion Euro, a collection of SF from the Eurozone.

Anil Menon

US based Indian Writer of SF, Menon is the author of the Beast With Nine Billion Feet and has published stories in most prominent SF magazines, including Strange Horizons, InterZone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Albedo One, Chiaroscuro, New Genre, Sybil's Garage and Apex World SF. He is a regular reviewer for Strange Horizons. Menon was instrumental in organizing the first workshop for Indian writers of science fiction in 2009, and has been active in promoting a new variety of SF with elements drawn from Indian social reality.

Claude Lalumière

Canadian writer Lalumière, author of The Door to Lost Pages and the acclaimed earlier collection Objects of Worship, blends fictional anthropology, cryptomythology and science fiction in his bizarre and eccentric stories. He has also edited several collections of Canadian fantastic fiction. He is the co-creater of lostmyths.net, which posts a new myth every week!

Jon Bing

Jon Bing is a Norwegian SF writer and law professor at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law (NRCCL) at the University of Oslo. He has written (many together with Tor Åge Bringsværd) more than 30 books of SF and is regarded as one of the pioneers of the SF wave in Norway.

Critics

Paul Andrew March-Russell

Dr Paul March-Russell teaches English and Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.  His publications include The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) as well as articles on, amongst others, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson and Joanna Russ. He is general editor of the "SF Storyworlds" series published by Gylphi.
 

Suchitra Mathur

Suchitra Mathur, associate professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, is a teacher-scholar working primarily in the fields of cultural studies and feminist literature with the Indian subcontinent as her area of specialisation. She teaches courses ranging from Postcolonial theory/literature to Science Fiction and Detective Fiction, while her research work extends to a study of graphic novels and Hindi cinema. She has published numerous papers on these topics and is co-editor of Reading With a Difference: Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).
 

Farah Mendlesohn

Farah Mendlesohn is Reader in Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of Middlesex, London. She is the author of Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), Diana Wynne Jones and the Children's Fantastic Tradition (2005), co-author of A Short History of the Fantastic (2009), and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Fantasy (2011). She won the Hugo in 2005.
 

Debraj Mookerjee

Debraj Mookerjee is Associate Professor of English Literature in Ramjas College at the University of Delhi. He is part of a core group of scholars who have endeavoured to include and nurture popular fiction studies in the University’s curriculum for English literature. He teaches and researches popular fiction forms, including Sci-Fi, Detective Fiction and Thrillers. He has published papers on the application of detective fictional strategies in the assessment of fiction (e.g., ‘Stein’s Presence in Lord Jim: More of Scorn than Schon,’ Yearly Review Number 6, December 1992, which seeks to establish Stien as Jewel’s father through detective analysis). He writes in popular journals in India, on topics such as the landscape of the future in urban India, the discourse of advertising and the shaping of the globalised and emergent Indian middle classes, and the impact of mass media in the process of social transformation, especially the often-difficult transition (both metaphorical and literal) from rural and semi-urban, to metropolitan India.

Mookerjee is also interested in investigating the transliteration of folk forms into the popular (especially through the medium of Hindi cinema). He has written variously on the subject, including a paper on ‘From Folk to Popular Tradition: An examination of Bhupen Hazarika’s Lyrics’ [especially their transformation into popular Hindi playback songs] (in Approaches to Literary Translation, University of Kashmir, 2002), examining how the popular often overwhelms the folk, which is an especially interesting phenomenon in India where the two often exist side by side. Apart from his academic work, Mookerjee also contributes to contemporary debates in India as a columnist. He writes regular columns for national newspapers like the Times of India, New Indian Express and The Pioneer, on subjects related to globalization, developmental issues, education, urbanization and the mass media.
 

Andy Sawyer

Andy Sawyer is librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool Library, Course Director of the MA in Science Fiction Studies offered by the School of English, Reviews Editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, and a widely-published critic and reviewer.

He has published essays on (among others) children’s/young adult sf, John Wyndham, Telepathy, Babylon 5, “Reverse-Time Narratives”, Ramsey Campbell, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Terry Pratchett. He co-edited the collection "Speaking Science Fiction" (Liverpool University Press, 2000) and was an Advisory Editor for and contributor to the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders edited by Gary Westfahl (Greenwood Press, 2005), and contributor to numerous other reference books on science fiction/fantasy, most recently The Blackwell Companion to Science Fiction, the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, and the Routledge Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction.

He recently co-edited (with David Ketterer) Plan for Chaos, a previously-unpublished novel by John Wyndham, and forthcoming is a book (co-edited with Peter Wright) on teaching Science Fiction as part of the Palgrave “Teaching the New English” series. He is the 2008 recipient of the Science Fiction Research association’s Clareson Award for services to science fiction.

Helge Jordheim
Helge Jordheim is at present academic director of the interdisciplinary research program Kultrans – Cultural Transformations in the Age of Globalization at the University of Oslo. He has his Ph.D. in German literature on the utopian novel in the 18th century. In 2007 he published the monograph Der Staastroman im Werk Wielands and Jean Pauls. He has written widely on political and utopian literature, mostly in the 18th century.  Furthermore, he has worked and published extensively on the history of concepts and especially on the works of Reinhart Koselleck and his idea of a multi-layered time. At the moment his main research projects concern conceptualizations of the world, both past and present.

Other speakers

Adam Dodd is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo, where he is working on microfaunae in early modern Europe.

Hallvard Haug is a PhD-student in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, working on science fiction and the ethics of human enhancement.

Margarida McMurry is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS), University of Oslo.

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Kultrans Ph.D. student at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS), University of Oslo.