Locating Fantastika: An Interdisciplinary Conference, 8 July

Another conference at Lancaster University this year, where I'll be presenting on ideas that I researched while working on a book chapter for an interdisciplinary publication focused on space policy. You can read about the conference at its blog. Here's my abstract:

The Independent Entrepreneur and the Terraforming of Mars

Science fiction (sf) has pioneered exploration into the practicalities, politics and ethics of space colonisation since H.G. Wells first imagined the Martian colonisation of Earth in his 1898 classic The War of the Worlds. While space colonisation is framed in the context of a Martian colonisation of space, writers such as Jack Williamson in his Seetee stories have considered the impact of the human colonisation of space and the mining of antimatter in the Kuiper Belt by entrepreneurs working outside of governmental institutions or sanction. This tradition continues in sf narratives of terraforming, in works such as Michael Allaby and James Lovelock’s 1984 The Greening of Mars, in which the colonisation of Mars is initiated by an individual able to marshal the resources and finances that would allow him to operate outside of the confines of institutions unable to assess or respond to the changes that increasing access to space might entail for their daily practice.

I explore the tradition of the entrepreneur who engages in the terraforming and colonisation of space. How does sf portray such entrepreneurs throughout the tradition of the terraforming narrative, and what are the moral and ecological implications of such an individual’s willingness to modify planets for human habitation? Works such as Jack Vance’s 1947 “I’ll Build Your Dream Castle”, Frederick Turner’s epic terraforming poem Genesis (1988) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy (1992-1996) will be considered for the philosophical and (eco)political questions these works raise. How does sf portray the relationship between the individualist entrepreneur and the wider community or nation that they belong to? How do representations of the terraforming and colonisation of space reflect humankind’s stance toward nature when that nature is conceived of in cosmological terms as the whole of the universe?