CFP: Violence in Kate Wilhelm (2/25/06; WisCon 30, 5/26/06-5/29/06)
In six or eight of her stories from the Vietnam War years, Kate Wilhelm made a name for herself as one
of the most aggressive critics of the culture of violence in the military-industrial state. But her work at
that time was hardly unique in her oeuvre; from as early as the 1950s, with the suicidal explosion that
ends her second published story, Wilhelm's fiction has been engaged in analyses of the violent mindset,
of how individual and societal violence interrelate, of the cognitive basis of violent personalities, and of
the personal effects of impersonal violence. The extent to which outward-directed violence is destined