Changing the Climate: 4th Utopias Conference

Changing the Climate: 4th Utopias Conference invites papers from scholars, writers and others interested in the interplay between ecology and ecocriticism, utopia, dystopia and science fiction.

This conference will directly address the questions of dystopia and catastrophe with special reference to a problem that increasingly haunts our imaginings of the future, that of actual or possible environmental catastrophe. As Jameson himself wrote in The Seeds of Time: ‘It seems … easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’. Hopefully, this conference will play some small part in changing that particular climate of opinion.

Its keynote speakers will be:

• Tom Moylan, author of Demand the Impossible (1986), Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000) and Dark Horizons (2003)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Antarctica (1997) and the Science in the Capital Trilogy – Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007).

Full information on submitting papers and registration is available on the conference site.