This year we are so excited to welcome Dr. Christy Tidwell (South Dakota School of Mine & Technology) Dr. Jalondra A Davies (Writer and Scholar) as our 2022 Keynote Speakers!
Dr. Christy Tidwell
Christy Tidwell is Associate Professor of English & Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. She works at the intersection of speculative fiction, environmental humanities, and gender studies. Her work on science fiction has been published in Extrapolation (2011), Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology As Cure (2013), Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (2020), and Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction (2021), and she has written on ecohorror for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2014), Posthuman Glossary (2018), Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction (2020), Gothic Nature (2021), and Science Fiction Film & Television (2021). She is co-editor of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction with Bridgitte Barclay (Lexington Books, 2018), Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene with Carter Soles (Penn State University Press, 2021), and a special issue of Science Fiction Film & Television on creature features and the environment (2021, also with Bridgitte Barclay). In addition, she is Digital Strategies Coordinator for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and has written for public audiences at Horror Homeroom, Signal Horizon, Edge Effects, and Literary Hub.
‘Thinking Science-Fictionally: Worldbuilding in the Classroom’
Science fiction is not just entertainment, not merely something to passively absorb; science fiction is – perhaps should be – a practice as well. As adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, “science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together.”
However, I find that students have a hard time thinking beyond the world they already know. When reading or watching science fiction, they are willing to imagine along with the authors, but then they step back into the mundane world and leave the text’s speculation behind. They are often able to critique the world we live in but find it much more difficult to imagine – much less intentionally create – an alternative.
In response, I ask students to practice thinking science-fictionally through worldbuilding. What kinds of worlds can they imagine? And then, having imagined these new worlds, what kinds of worlds can they actually create? Using Marina Zurkow’s Investing in Futures, a set of cards created to help users “imagine future worlds (wild, impractical, idyllic, and utopian) and what it would be like to live in them,” I ask students to draw one card from each of several categories (economic system, government, food availability, climate, personal communication, information & learning, transportation, living conditions, health, work conditions, and shared values). Then they imagine a world formed by the details they draw. What is this world like? How did it develop? Is this a good world to live in? Depending on the class, they may then focus on telling a story set in that world, considering the infrastructure for cities in it, or connecting this future to current environmental issues, but they are asked to think as creatively as possible throughout. This gives students a chance to imagine a new world, one that is both connected to the world we live in now (through extrapolation) and wildly different from it (not limited by their sense of what is likely).
The first step to changing the world is seeing that it’s possible to do so. And envisioning new worlds is an act of imagination, speculation, science fiction.
Dr. Jalondra A. Davies
Dr. Jalondra A. Davis is a Black feminist artist-intellectual, merwomanist Melusine, and fierce warrior mama living near the beaches of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from University of California, Riverside with a designated emphasis in Science Fiction and Technocultures and a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. She has research on Black speculative culture published and forthcoming in the Museum of Science Fiction Journal of Science Fiction, Shima Journal, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and the Routledge Anthology of Co-Futurisms. Her scholarly book project in progress, Merfolk and the Black Aquatic focuses on mermaids, water spirits, and other aquatic-themed figures in African diasporic literature, art, and performance. She is author of the coming-of-age novel Butterfly Jar and she is at work on a mermaid novella. She blogs about special needs parenting on http://www.jalondradavis.com and posts about mermaids and self-care on Instagram as @mami_melusine. Jalondra currently works as a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Diego
Go Into the Water: Blackness and Merfolk in the Anthropocene
The mermaid is becoming a phenomenon in popular culture on par with, or surpassing previous obsessions with vampires and zombies, an avatar of nonhuman identification especially attuned to our current political crises around gender, resources, and the environment. Yet mermaid studies still largely focus on white mermaids and Western mermaid lore and ignore race. At times meditative, at times analytical, my talk proposes the Black mermaid as essential to any theorization of the mermaid as a potential challenge to heteropatriachy and the Anthropocene or as a method of self-actualization for marginalized people. I particularly focus on what I call Crossing merfolk, the concept of mermaids or aquatic hybrids as an afterlife for African people who jumped, or were thrown, or sank into the sea during the transatlantic slave trade.
This year, University of Liverpool’s very own Phoenix Alexander will host a Workshop for all to attend:
Sell Your Stories: Writing and Submitting SFF Short Fiction.
Dr. Phoenix Alexander
Dr. Phoenix Alexander is a queer, Greek-Cypriot author and scholar of sf/f, and the Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University of Liverpool, where he curates Europe’s largest catalogued collection of science fiction. An active member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), his short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Black Static, among others. His academic writing has appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, and is forthcoming in the edited anthology Queer Print Cultures (U Toronto Press, 2022).
Twitter: @dracopoullos
For the first time in 3 years, the CRSF team are delighted to announce the line up for 2 Round Table Discussions, featuring the following SSF authors:
Laura Jean McKay
Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe 2020) – winner of The Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2021. Laura is the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013) and works in the Creative Writing program at Massey University
Twitter: @laurajeanmckay
Vandana Singh
Vandana Singh is an author of speculative fiction, a professor of physics at Framingham State University, Climate Imagination Fellow at ASU, and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. She is the author of two short story collections, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2014) and Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018), the second of which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2014, she travelled to the Alaskan North Shore to create a case study on climate change for undergraduate education as part of a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Her work on a justice-centered, transdisciplinary conceptualization of the climate crisis is part of a recent volume from UNESCO, Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action: Toward an SDG 4.7 Roadmap for Systems Change. Her short fiction has been widely published, including most recently in the anthologies The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volumes 1 and 2. She was born and brought up in New Delhi, India, and now lives near Boston, Massachusetts.
Twitter: @singhvan
Website: http://vandana-writes.com/
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series, the Echoes of the Fall series, and other novels, novellas and short stories including Children of Time (which won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2016), and its sequel, Children of Ruin (which won the British Science Fiction Award in 2020).. He lives in Leeds in the UK and his hobbies include entomology and board and role-playing games.
Twitter: @aptshadow
Website: https://shadowsoftheapt.com/
Sue Burke
Sue Burke’s most recent novel is Immunity Index, published by Tor. She also wrote the duology Semiosis and Interference, and has published short stories, poems, and essays. As a result of her time living overseas, she is a literary translator, working from Spanish into English.
Website: https://sueburke.site/
Twitter: @SueBurkeSpain
Aliya Whiteley
Aliya Whiteley’s novels and novellas have been shortlisted for multiple awards including the Arthur C Clarke award and a Shirley Jackson award. Her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Strange Horizons, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction. Her latest novel, Skyward Inn, has just been published in paperback. More information can be found at her website: https://aliyawhiteley.wordpress.com.
Twitter: @AliyaWhiteley
Gareth L. Powell
Gareth L. Powell writes science fiction about extraordinary characters wrestling with the question of what it means to be human. He has won and been shortlisted for several major awards, including the BSFA, Locus, British Fantasy, and Seiun, and his Embers of War novels are currently being adapted for TV. You can find him on Twitter @garethlpowell
Chana Porter
Playwrite and Author.
Chana Porter is a novelist, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and co-founder of the Octavia Project, a STEM and fiction-writing program for girls, trans, and gender non-conforming youth from underserved communities based in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel The Seep was an ABA Indie Next Pick, Open Letters Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book of 2020, a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Times (UK) Best Sci-fi Book of 2021. Her next novel The Thick and The Lean will be out from Saga Press in spring 2023. She lives in Los Angeles. Pronouns: she/they
https://www.chanaporter.com/plays.html
(photo by Peter Bellamy)
Adam Roberts
SF writer, critic and historian.
Adam Roberts is the author of 23 science fiction novels, many short stories and a number of critical and non-fiction books, including The Palgrave History of Science Fiction (2nd edition 2016) and H G Wells: a Literary Life (2020). He is a professor in English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is FRSL. His most recent novel, The This (Gollancz 2022), is a pulp-sf novelisation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Workshop Sell Your Stories:
Writing and Submitting SF/F Short Fiction
In this one-hour workshop, author and librarian Phoenix Alexander will share strategies and resources for conceptualizing, writing, and submitting short fiction to paying genre markets. Come with your favourite writing implements (digital or analogue), and expect to leave bursting with ideas for future stories and dream markets to submit to!
Current Research in Speculative Fiction Conference 2026 