A Billion and Fifty Year Spree: Science Fiction, and its Histories, ‘after’ Aldiss

University of Liverpool & Online, 23 January 2024

To celebrate the fact that 2023 was the fiftieth year since publication of Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree in 1973, the University of Liverpool’s Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures and the Science Fiction Foundation are hosting a one-day conference on the history (or histories) of sf. Considering its contours, eddies, and alternative canons, the conference will explore what has shaped and continues to shape our understandings of the genre ‘through’ and ‘after’ Aldiss and his work. Keynote speakers will be Paul Kincaid, author of Brian W. Aldiss (University of Illinois Press, 2022) and Prof. Lisa Yaszek of Georgia Tech, author of Sisters of Tomorrow (Wesleyan UP, 2016).

We are inviting presentations and talks from students, scholars, and fans of sf to present on Aldiss’ criticism and approach to sf, as well as those that reflect movements and ideas that have emerged or become foregrounded since 1973.

It is envisaged that the range of papers will be comparatively broad, to account for the plethora of approaches that participants will have. However, the following list provides a sense of the areas we imagine will be covered to some degree:

• The impact of Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (and the subsequent 1986 Trillion Year Spree by Aldiss and Wingrove), and how it relates to the development of the genre, and our understandings of it.
• Mapping ‘Science Fiction’ (or SF or sf or SciFi), what it is and does, and the contours and borders of the ground the genre might be said to cover, then and now.
• The ‘Origin of the Species’ of Science Fiction – new or contested starting points for the genre and its numerous subgenres and offshoots, its eddies and alternative canons.
• ‘Future histories’ of sf production and reception, and its uses, directions, and concerns, across time, geographies, cultures, and media.
• ‘Alternative histories’ of sf – counterfactuals or provocations that enable us to consider the route(s) that sf has taken over time.
• ‘Yesterday and Tomorrow’ – what histories and critical frameworks have been suppressed or overlooked in science fiction criticism—such as queer, feminist, and non-Western perspectives—and how alternative frameworks have emerged since the publication of Billion Year Spree.
• Genealogies and historiographies of Science Fiction – critical or creative explorations of the criticism and analysis of Science Fiction, particularly those that engage in some way with Aldiss’s work.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to futures@liverpool.ac.uk , with the subject ‘Aldiss Conference’, no later than 30 November 2023, alongside a brief author bio. It is intended that selected papers from this conference will be considered for a special issue of Foundation.