Doors at 5:00pm
Science fiction has always been a repository for and source of vivid
images of the thinking self. Some of these include Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous experiment at the very beginning of the
genre, the clockwork men of the mid-19th century, the swollen
superbrains of pulp magazines, and the cyborgs of the late 20th
century. Nowadays, it is common to imagine ourselves as software and
our brains as organic computers, but writers such as Greg Egan and Ted
Chiang challenge those assumptions, offering even stranger and perhaps
more useful metaphors for our inner lives.
Brian Attebery is a well-known scholar of fantasy and science fiction
who is currently editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
His most recent book is Parabolas of Science Fiction, edited with
Veronica Hollinger (2013). His book Decoding Gender in Science Fiction
(2002) is an alternate history of the genre through the lens of
gender. He has published two books on fantasy—The Fantasy Tradition in
American Literature (1980) and Strategies of Fantasy (1992)—with a
third appearing next year from Oxford University Press under the title
Stories about Stories: Fantasy and Myth. He worked with co-editors
Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler to produce the The Norton Book
of Science Fiction (1993), an anthology that is still widely used in
literature and writing classes. He has received a number of honors,
including the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International
Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, the Mythopoeic Scholarship
Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies, and the Pilgrim Award for lifetime
achievement in science fiction scholarship. He teaches English and
music (cello) at Idaho State University and is married to folklorist
Jennifer Eastman Attebery.