Proposed Panel for the Chicago, Illinois 50th Anniversary Symposium, May 14-16, 2020--Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature

Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy

deadline for submissions: 

December 20, 2019

full name / name of organization: 

Laura Beadling

contact email: 

LLBEADLING@YSU.EDU

Science fiction usually brings up images of space ships and ray guns and faraway planets with strange new lifeforms.  Fantasy similarly has its own special iconography of wizards and wands and fantastical beasts such as dragons and unicorns.  None of which particularly screams the American Midwest.  Despite this, though, a surprising number of science fiction and fantasy texts incorporate Midwestern settings and characters.  James T. Kirk was born in Riverside, Iowa in 2233 and one of the most famous writers of science fiction and fantasy, Ray Bradbury, was himself from Waukegan, Illinois and many of his works, including Something Wicked This Way Comes and many others, have Midwestern characters or settings.  This panel aims to tease out the intriguing and multifaceted connections between the Midwest and science fiction and fantasy as a genre.

Papers may address but are not limited to the following topics:

• Bradbury’s Midwestern works and/or their adaptations
• Rian Johnson’s 2012 film Looper, set in Kansas City
• Stranger Things (2016-present ) is set in Hawkins, Indiana
• Any of the iterations of The Wizard of Oz
• Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series
• Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon includes a character from small-town Wisconsin and includes a few scenes set there
• Neil Gaiman’s American Gods includes a significant scene set in The House on the Rock in Wisconsin
• Dr. Sam Beckett, the time traveling physicist in Quantum Leap (1989-93) is the son of dairy farmers in Elk Ridge, Indiana
• The opening section of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is set in Indiana
• RoboCop (1987) is set in Detroit, Michigan

For this proposed session for the Annual Symposium of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (May 14-16, 2020 in Chicago at the Newberry Library), I invite 350-word proposals for papers considering works of science fiction and fantasy with significant ties to the American Midwest.  Please send proposals and a 50-word bio including your institutional affiliation to Laura Beadling at LLBEADLING@YSU.EDU by December 20.