So in the 9th entry of this column, I wrote up the first Speculative Fiction Across Media Conference in Los Angeles. This is an academic conference devoted to Science Fiction Academia that has attendees from around the globe who are attending and giving papers. The entire thing takes place in Los Angeles, and it is an amazing weekend of learning. Being that it is a short train ride for me from San Diego, I intend to make it an annual event.
Timing was not great for me, as Cari, and I just moved into a new apartment days before. That said, it was easier to catch a bus from this spot at 4:30 AM to get to Santa Fe depot to catch the Surfliner train. This year, my reads up to LA were a Barry Malzberg collection and a Robert Bloch novel. I mostly just wanted to read Malzberg’s anti-war classic, The Final War, finally. That story, along with Union Forever, those stood out. I started reading it the night before and read the Final War, waiting to board the train. On the train, I read a totally bonkers SF bizarro novel, Sneak Preview by Robert Bloch. I really can’t believe this book exists. I read most of it on the train, and finished it crossing LA to the hotel.
I stopped downtown to pick up punk rock-themed donuts to share with vegans at the conference. I took a different bus to Monterey Park in East LA than last year. It was a significantly nicer bus ride. It was a bit more of a walk when I got to the neighborhood, but worth it.
I got to the hotel at 11 AM, and the sessions didn’t start till 1:30. I went and checked in, got my badge, and started finding a few friends from last year. After a few tries, I found my PKD friend Tom Schlote, with who I just hung out during the Bay Area pilgrimage. We were on a panel in the first session talking about Severance, along with Sharon Sharp, who teaches Television and media at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Sherryl Vint, who teaches at UC Riverside and edits Science Fiction Studies.
We talked about all the science fictional and greater themes of Severance. I thought it was a great discussion, and the most exciting part was the Q and A. Questions came from researchers visiting the conference from Mexico, China, Norway, and Korea. It highlights that I have an audio recording of the panel up on my podcast feed. Listen to it here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Ir1Ks29SONxP7At39IpLr?si=152245b52de442d4
Or
After the Severance Panel, there was a wonderful talk about the play R.U.R., which is responsible for coining the term Robot. This presentation by Dr. Zdeněk Vacek, Director of the Karel Čapek Museum in the Stará Huť, and Daniel Hrbek, Artistic Director of Prague’s prestigious international Svanda Theater, was fantastic. Vacek gave a fascinating talk about Čapek’s life before and after the writing of R.U.R. Hrbek talked about the Czech play they produced using AI, and it was hilariously bad. He showed clips. A good talk.
Most of the conference attendees went to a reading from the play. Before leaving, Tom and I socialized with folks. A couple of folks joined us, and we had a wonderful conversation. After most left, I got to spend some time with Steven Shaviro, whom I enjoy hanging out with. I have had him as a guest on both podcasts. He has a forthcoming book on the film Neptune Frost, and in 2024, he published a book that Amazing Stories readers should be interested in. Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality.
I said good night to Steven and I door dashed the same meal I got the year before, Island fries from the vegan Hawaiian BBQ Lucky Catsu this year adding a fantastic Macaroni Salad. After that, I watched a movie in my room and went to sleep early.
Friday morning I hit the hotel gym at 6 AM got in a run on the treadmill, and then walked to Ralphś to get a few things. One of the international researchers asked me where I was going, when I said What’s that I said, “Where The Dude wrote the check in the Big Lebowski.”
The hotel is in Monterey Park, a primarily Asian neighborhood, and as such, you have lots of great Asian restaurants, shops, and bubble tea spots. The AMC movie theater has posters for Andy Lau movies. Which is neat for this Hong Kong movie fan.
The first block of papers was quite good. I chose to attend the Environmental Perspective papers. Which opened with Zhiwen Hu of Colgate University. He is a Chinese academic, and I love his paper “AI and Solarpunk Utopia: Biocomputing in Wan Li in the Peng Cheng City.” I believe the story he was talking about is not translated into English, but it sounded incredible. Zhiwen and I had a long talk, and I am working on bringing him on to the PKD hangouts. One person who has already been a guest is Patrick Sharp, whose paper “Extraterrestrial Utopias and Speculative Nature in the Seventeenth Century” was interesting, highlighting stories from the 17th century that highlighted utopias in an era long before SF had congealed into a genre. One of the highlights of last year was Sheyda Safaeyan’s paper on Annihilation. This year, she was talking about a novel I had not read before. “A set of freshly sprouted eyes’: Vegetative Eruption and Rewriting the Rite of Spring in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu.” It sold me on the need to check out Lai’s work.
I was giving a paper in the next block. Which opened with Ksenia Fir talking about a show I have not yet seen. ‘Taking Time Off Like Real People’: Artificial Consciousness and Laboring Bodies in Greg Daniels’s Upload.” Great paper, now I want to see it. And then Talia Parker, all the way from New Zealand, “Little People’: The Theme of Work in Blade Runner.” She focused on an intense level on the Roy Batty Tears in the Rain speech from the movie. Great set-up for my paper, we could talk about how much Phil would have hated the conclusions you can infer from the speech. Great presentation from Talia. Perfect combo to spark conversation.
Then I gave my talk “Artificial Empathy, Animal Rights, Robots and the Fake Humans of Philip K. Dick.” You can read a version of this here… https://davidagranoff.blogspot.com/2022/09/article-do-androids-dream-of-animal.html
After a lunch break
I attended a Panel Discussion: Portrayal of AI vs. AI’s Effects on Storytelling. The Moderator: Ed Zitron is apparently a tech blogger; he had an aggressive tone to the topic, and I enjoyed that he called bullshit on the threat of AI replacing storytellers. The panel featured TV writers David Slack, Kim Shumway, and Joe Henderson. After a short break, there was a session where Sherryl Vint interviewed Brit Marling writer and star of Alone on Earth and The OA. Fantastic who knew she grew up dumpster diving with crust punks?
I was very excited about the paper by Ayana Jamieson, who presented a paper. “Progenitrix propels the Machine: Recasting the Computer in the Star Trek Multiverse” is A fascinating take on the computer in Star Trek Discovery changed the dynamic in the franchise. How the evolving relationship between the actor who played the Computer on Trek for decades and the Discovery storyline turned the relationship between the computer and the crew. The next two papers were San Diego researchers. Curtis Marez made a really interesting presentation about the effects on local communities, “Streaming Poor Places: AI in TV Distribution and Production.” Next was Shelley Streeby. I am a big fan of her book Imagining the Future of Climate Change, and seen her at Clarion events in SD she presented on “Teaching Ted Chiang on AI in the Ethnic Studies Classroom.”
Saturday night was about dinner with PKD hangout folks Sean Nye and Akita Allgire of USC vets of the Tuesday night PKD hangouts, joined us for dinner at Happy Family Vegetarian restaurant, where we crushed a family-style meal. We got to know each other and of course talked about PKD. After Dinner, Tom returned to his room to work on his paper.
Sean and I went to a Taiwanese dessert shop. I wanted a Bobo tea, and he got this very strange-looking dessert. He ate all of it. When we returned to the hotel, we had a great conversation with two PKD academics, Angela from Stanford and Helen from Korean National University.
Saturday morning, I hit the gym again, ate some leftovers for breakfast, and got ready to watch some papers being presented. I really enjoyed a paper by Jeri Zulli on “Hawthorne’s Feathertop as Artificial Intelligence.” I happened to read last year when I read Bruce Franklyn’s Future Imperfect on 19th-century proto-science fiction. Great stuff. I started hearing about the next paper while walking around Northern California. Tom Scholte presented “Perceptual Control Theory and Asimov’s Law of Robotics.” It was a fascinating talk, and we got into some nitty-gritty about Asimov, but more importantly, I started to understand PCT better.
The last round of papers I watched opened with Rachel S. Anderson presenting a paper, “There is no Something without Nothing’: Grievable Lives in ‘”Saying Goodbye to Yang” and After Yang.” I enjoyed this talk probably more than the movie itself, but Anderson answered some questions I had about the movie, ever since I saw it. Up next was an informative and entertaining paper from Leslie Fernandez of Harvard. “Robot or Asian? Techno-Orientalism and the early AI Imaginary in Pulp Science Fiction.” This paper had lots of great information, but the moment when Fernandez read from classic pulp and asked the audience, “are they describing robots or Asians was a informative and sadly funny moment. I saved one of the best for last Haerin Shin of Korean University, “The Algorithmic Persistence of Ancillary Intelligence: False Alignment as Techno-Orientalist Agency in Science Fiction and AI Systems.” This paper was excellent, blended lots of reality about what is happening in Asia and in Science fiction, and helped me understand better the feedback loop between Science fiction and technology in Asia.
Speaking of Korea on the way home, I read a collection, Your Utopia, from Korean author Bora Chung. Yeah after Helen’s paper I made a pass through the coffee break, hugged it out with a few new friends. And bused back to Union station to San Diego. That collection by Bora Chung was great. I was home for Dinner. And take say enough about the whole weekend. You really should think about coming next year.
David Agranoff Grew up in Bloomington, Indiana hanging in the park that inspired this novel. His future wife worked at the Spoon serving the real-life Electric Fred. They have two of his notebooks and a house full of rescued animals. David is a novelist, screenwriter and a Horror and Science Fiction critic. He is the Splatterpunk and Wonderland book award nominated author of 11 books including the novels the WW II Vampire novel – The Last Night to Kill Nazis, and the science fiction novel Goddamn Killing Machines from CLASH BOOKS, The Cli-fi novel Ring of Fire, Punk Rock Ghost Story He co-wrote a novel Nightmare City (with Anthony Trevino) that he likes to pitch as The Wire if Clive Barker and Philip K Dick were on the writing staff. As a critic he has written more than a thousand book reviews on his blog Postcards from a Dying World which has recently become a podcast, featuring interviews with award-winning and bestselling authors such Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Alma Katsu and Josh Malerman. For the last five years David has co-hosted the Dickheads podcast, a deep-dive into the work of Philip K. Dick reviewing his novels in publication order as well as the history of Science Fiction. David’s non-fiction essays have appeared on Tor.com, NeoText and Cemetery Dance. He just finished writing a book, Unfinished PKD on the unpublished fragments and outlines of Philip K. Dick. He lives in San Diego where you can find him hooping in pick-up games and taking too many threes.
