The Fantastika conference takes place at Lancaster University on 7-8 July 2015. There will be some thirty seven brief papers on a wide range of aspects of the fantastic in literature, film, music, folklore and new media, linked by a common theme of landscape and place.
Amongst the speakers are Audrey Taylor on Pastoral and Fantasy; Tim Jarvis on "Weird Fiction's Representation Praxes"; Stephen Curtis on “Moon Kampf: The Rise of the Lunar Nazi in Speculative Fiction”; Francesca Arnavas on “The Fantastic Worlds of the Alice Books and the Imaginary Mind”; Christina Scholz, on “‘Lost in the Back Yard Again’: Uncertain Landscapes in M. John Harrison".
There will also be Keith Scott on “From R’lyeh to Whitehall: Charles Stross and the Bureaucratic Fantastic”; Douglas Leatherland on “The Nomos of Fantasy: Natural and Artificial Boundaries in Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Le Guin’s Earthsea” and Kaja Franck on “Hunting the Last Werewolf: Ecology, Fantastika, and the Wilderness of the Imagination”. My own paper is on “Supernatural Landscape in British Ambient and Drone Music”.
The conference is free: simply email fantastikaconference@gmail.com to register.
Mark Valentine
