“A room without books is like a body without a soul,” remarked the first century AD Roman philosopher Cicero.  Well, apparently anyway.  He was anti-embezzlement – a good thing – and I’m sure he loved his books too.

ESA RN-18 mid-term conference, Turin, Italy, 10-12/9/2020 We live in times of deepening economic, political, social, ideological and ecological crises that are expressed in widespread precarious labour, the commodification of (almost) everything, the rise of new nationalism, populism and authoritarian forms of capitalism, and ecological destruction.

Editors: Karrȧ Shimabukuro and Wickham Clayton On first consideration it may not seem like “nostalgia” and horror and slasher films have any clear connections. Usually nostalgia is applied to events and experiences that have a pleasant connotation, even if these pleasant feelings are a result of a rose-tinted view of the past.

Cultures of Authenticity: A two-day interdisciplinary symposium hosted by the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (CRCC), Loughborough University, 6 ^th -7 ^th May 2020

Edited by Professor Richard J. Hand (University of East Anglia) & Professor Mark O’Thomas (University of Greenwich)   We are seeking chapters that engage with the television series American Horror Story created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk.

Broadcasting, Reloaded.

Premiering in May 2015, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot (USA Network), tells the story of a cybersecurity engineer/computer hacker, who is recruited by a cyber-anarchist movement called ‘fsociety’. The movement’s mission: to eradicate all consumer debt through destroying the data records held by the fictional conglomerate, ‘E Corp’. Over the course of the series, we follow the show’s protagonist, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), who, as we learn,

The current outbreak of Coronavirus is certainly scary, and very serious for those affected by it. But thank goodness it is not, so far, anything like as apocalyptic as the global pandemic that formed the premise for Survivors (BBC 1975-7). In it, the Welsh science fiction screenwriter Terry Nation imagined an accidental spillage of a new strain of a flu-like virus in a Chinese laboratory.

Gosh – aren’t there a lot of books about Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996, 2005-)? Admittedly, that’s a thought which I had recently when standing looking at a wall in Galaxy 4, a shop in Sheffield that for 26 years has been specialising in the sale of Doctor Who -related merchandise to the world in general and my wife and myself in particular, but, nevertheless, you suddenly realise how the sheer volume of volumes – even for a

Call for Chapter Proposals: The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane, and Donna McCormack (eds). The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities will be a key intervention, analysing and exploring the fruitful intersection between science fiction and the field of the medical humanities.

Ecstatic Truth V: The Age of the Absurd 27-28th April 2020 (in conjunction with Under_the_Radar, Vienna) plus 29th April – Under_the_Radar symposium, Vienna Call for papers deadline: 16th February 2020 Ecstatic Truth is an annual symposium that explores issues arising from the interface between animation (in all its forms) and documentary (conceptualised very broadly as […]