“Some people think the future means the end of history. Well, we haven't run out of history quite yet.” 

- Captain Kirk, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

This conference is about science fiction media in the 1990s. We are looking for high quality papers that examine science fiction properties and fiction during that decade. There has been interest from a publisher for a potential book.

The title for this conference is taken from the concept “End of History” by Francis Fukuyama. Papers do not need to interface with this theory directly.

This conference is affiliated with Bath Spa University, as an output of their Film and Media Imaginaries and Infrastructures Research Group.

In 1989, political theorist Francis Fukuyama published the essay “The End of History?” in which he argued that, with the Cold War at a close, liberalism had won out as the inevitable endpoint of human progress. Consequently, the idea that capitalist liberal democracy was now an apolitical tenet of society became normalised in the cultural consciousness. One area of tension however can be found in the world of science fiction. As Fukuyama’s theory became increasingly culturally prevalent, imagined futures needed to reckon with it. Did they agree, and was the future simply a technologically advanced liberal democracy? Did they break with the theory and make a directly political opposition? Did they imagine futures that continued this trend, but instead of a positive ideal, the capitalist status quo became a dystopian trap? Did they view politics as over, and therefore move into different spheres of the human experience? Whichever perspective a work or creator had on the issue, it became difficult to imagine a future outside of the terms of explicitly engaging (positively or negatively) with it. For how can a future be manifested if history is over?

The Science Fiction at the End of History conference aims to explore science fiction during the 1990s - the so called End of History -  with papers on the various forms of science fiction media being produced at the time. 

This conference will take place on Zoom.

Possible topics included, but are not limited to:

• The response of Star Trek’s utopian future to the end of history
• Science fiction literature of the period
• The conspiratorial nature of the X-Files
• The dream/virtual worlds of cyberpunk and mainstream works (e.g. The Matrix, eXistenZ)
• Babylon 5 and its move beyond binary oppositions
• The end of ‘the end of history’: science fiction in the 21st century and the increasing political nature of the genre
• The end of the Cold War and science fiction: metaphorical representations of the fall of the USSR
• The rise of “gender episodes”, particularly in series such as The X-Files, and how these relate to the formation of queer theory as a discipline during the decade
• Urban fantasy and “goth” aesthetics in relation to topics such as race and queerness
• Japanese kaiju and tokusatsu cinema/TV, and their changing set of metaphors
• Japanese cyberpunk in relation to body politics and national identity
• The “wilderness years” in Doctor Who and its relationship to notions of objectivity

Submission Guidelines:
Please send an approximately 300 word abstract alongside a title and a 100 word bibliography to endofhistorysf@gmail.com The deadline for submissions is April 15th, 2024, and successful proposals will be contacted by April 30th. The conference date will be sometime in July 2024.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Organisers:

Dr. Chris Gerrard
Dr. River Seager