A press release from Ellen Kushner:
One more panel this week for me at the Center for Fiction’s Big Read: On Monday I’m moderating an all-star cast (Samuel R. Delany, Andrea Hairston, Steve Berman, Carlos Hernandez & Alaya Dawn Johnson) discussing:
“Outsiders In/Of Science Fiction and the Fantastic”: Monday, October 24, 2011, at 7:00PM. FREE / RSVP to this link or call 212-755-6710. At The Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street, New York, NY.
I also encourage you to attend the final panel in the series, to be held at the Rubin Museum (150 West 17th St.) on Wednesday at 7:00—it’s gonna be smokin’ hot. Writers and scholars discuss the earliest form of fantasy storytelling through the novels of today. Panelists: John Crowley, Hamid Dabashi, Andrew Quintman, Paul Witcover, and moderator Elizabeth Hand.
Tickets are $12 and include 6:15PM tour of the exhibition “Once Upon Many Times: Legends and Myths in Himalayan Art” Tickets and Info (and great graphics) here.
And in between, on Tuesday, October 25, from 6 to 8PM, why not drop by the elegant Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street) for a Critical Fiction Symposium to celebrate the publication of a new book by Wendy Walker? A new production by Temporary Culture (who did my “The Man with the Knives” last year)! Details here.
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10/24 “Outsiders” Panel Description: To many people, “sci-fi” still denotes a world of spaceships piloted by square-jawed white male captains. But while popular culture’s back was turned, the literature of the fantastic has gone way beyond Hollywood to spearhead a deeply daring exploration of race and gender, stretching the boundaries of what could be, and making it possible for us to imagine alternative possibilities through the lens of speculative fiction.
From Le Guin’s own ground-breaking The Left Hand of Darkness—which swept both the genre’s two great awards, the Hugo and the Nebula—to Samuel R. Delany’s gritty masterpiece Dahlgren and beyond, readers have found science fiction challenging preconceptions of gender and race.
This panel will look at “outsiderness” in the world of science fiction and fantasy.
10/26 Rubin Museum: “From Urdu Epic and Tibetan Sorcerers to Today: Fantasy in Tibetan and World Literature”—With moderator Liz Hand’s permission, here are her preliminary
instructions to the panelists: “As this is tied to the Center for Fiction/Big Read’s celebration of Ursula Le Guin’s contemporary classic A Wizard of Earthsea, it seems appropriate to have our discussion begin with the sorcerer, one of the most ancient and universal figures in human history and art.
“This season is one of the cross-quarters of the ritual year in many cultures, rich with with folklore and ceremonies that celebrate the harvest and transitions between autumn and winter, life and death. Sorcerers and shamans, holy men and women—supernatural figures of many types—often possess the ability to make these liminal crossings.
“As everyone on our panel will approach this subject from a quite different perspective, I’d like to start by having each one [panelist] share, campfire-style, a tale, legend or myth, that involves sorcerers, sorcery, ritual magic, religion, mythology, and so on. We have a very broad palette to draw from, so the choice is yours. We’ll have plenty of time for more expansive discussion and comments, as well as questions from our audience.”
For more info, see this page.