SFRA 2005
Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino
Las Vegas, Nevada
June 23 - 26, 2005

Distinguished Guest Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Featured Guest Authors: John Barnes, Kij Johnson, Tim Powers, Steven Brust, and Elizabeth Bear
Venue: The Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino

Program

SF and Games I
- Thomas J. Morrissey: "SF Plays Dice with the Universe I"
- Oscar De Los Santos: "SF Plays Dice with the Universe II"
- David Mead: "Sports, Games and Play in the Fiction of Jack Vance"
SF, Film and Media I
- Peter Lowentrout, moderator
- Jean Lauer & Shelley Rodrigo: "Alice in Alien Land: Video Games, Cinema & the SF Genre"
- Fred Erisman: "Stagecoach in Space: The Saga of the Firefly"
- Jonathan Vos Post: "Beyond the Frontier: Science Fiction and the Western"
- Joe Milicia: "Books on SF Film and TV: What We Have, What We Need--A Roundtable Discussion"
Authors' Roundtable and Discussion
- Veronica Hollinger, moderator
- John Barnes
- Elizabeth Bear
- Steven Brust
- Kij Johnson
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Tim Powers
The SF of Phillip K. Dick
- Robert O'Connor: "Strategy in Phillip K. Dick's The Game-players of Titan: Competing in the Rigged Game"
- Eyal Tamir: "The Aura-less Pleasure of Artifacts: Collectors, Artifacts, and the Metafiction of Reproduction in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle"
- Sherryl Vint: "Androids or Electric Sheep? Speciesism and Otherness in Dick's Novel"
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Antonia Levi: "American Bishounen: Why 'Angel' is Not a Man's Man"
- Stacie L. Hanes: "If It Isn't a Story, How Do You Explain the Soundtrack?: the Ethical Dangers of the Epic Narrative in Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
- Lori L. Rowlett and Philip Kaveny: "The Paradox of Mary: The Television Series Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Case Study"
Author Reading and Book Signing
- Elizabeth Bear
- Steven Brust
Author Reading and Book Signing
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Tim Powers
On SF
- Dave Samuelson: "Breach of Promise: the Paradox of Literary SF"
- Gary Westfahl: "2,928 Ways to Define Science Fiction"
- Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.: "Annexing the Stars: SF and Imperialism"
Contemporary SF Authors I
- Veronica Hollinger: "Technology, Sexuality, and Performance in The Female Man"
- Rhoda M. Martin: "Surviving the Known World"
- Erica G. Marsh: "Girl Power, Feminism, and the Women of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents"
Science Fiction as Politics, Politics as Science Fiction
- Session Chair and Organizer: Lisa Yaszek
- Patrick Sharp: "The Real Nuclear Terror: Phillip Dick and the Critique of Postwar Suburbia"
- Lisa Yaszek: "An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man"
- Doug Davis: "George W. Bush, SF Grand Master? Science Fictions of Mass Destruction and the Poetics of National (In)Security"
The SF of Ursula K. Le Guin Session I
- Michael McClintock: "Disputing with Le Guin"
- Ria Cheyne: "Ursula K. Le Guin and Translation"
- Alfred E. Guy Jr.: "Theorizing Gender Essentialism from Le Guin to Gibson"
SF, Myth and Folklore
- Ivan Wolfe: "Storytelling at the End of Time: The use of oral folklore in science fiction and fantasy"
- Mary Pharr: "The Lab and the Woods: Science and Myth in Les Yeux sans visage"
- Judith Leggatt: "Native North American Dystopian Fiction"
Contemporary SF Authors II
- Christine Cornell: "Rossum's Universal Robots Among the Ancients"
- Kirpal Singh: "Science Fiction and the Asian Imagination: Wisdom versus Adventure"
The SF of Ursula K. Le Guin Session II
- Lisa Hammond Rashley: "'Essays at the truth': Language, Politics, and Connection in Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Telling"
- Sonja Fritzsche: "Publishing Ursula Le Guin in East Germany"
- Bradley Seymour: "'And the are no Footprints in the Dust Behind us…' Language as the Source of Human Power and Identity in The Telling"
- Amy Clarke: "Quantum Skip: Churten Transilience and the Cosmic Do-over"
SF and Games II
- Loren Eason: "Video Games, the Army's Future Combat Systems, and Richard Morgan's Broken Angels"
- Pawel Frelik: "Does Ted have to become a jelly? Science fiction and/in computer games"
- Larisa Mikhaylova: "War Games: Releasing Aggression or Preparing for War?"
- Vibs R. Petersen: "Work and Play: Which is the Game"
The Importance of Place in SF and Fantasy
- Kimberly Knight: "Mapping Ideology: The Country and the City in Garth Nix's Old Kingdom Trilogy"
- Rebecca Janicker: "New England Narratives: Space and Place in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft"
- Melissa Coleen Stevenson: "No Place Like Home: Real Identities/Virtual Realities"
SF, Film and Media II
- Kerry Gough: "Aliens in an Econ(c)omic World: Cheap at Half the Price -- From the Hollywood Blockbuster to the Comic Book"
- Craig B. Jacobsen: "Buy Robot: SF Film Advertising and the Blurring of Narrative Boundaries"
The SF Superhero
- Elizabeth Monier-Williams: "Death is her gift? Female superheroes, fatalism, and the problematics of suicide"
- Kerry Gough: "Negotiating Heroism: Ripley as the Female Superhero?"
- Ryan J. Cox: "'I was not the first anomaly to exist' Placing Superhero Comics in a Poetic Tradition"
Contemporary SF Authors III
- Neil Easterbrook: "Recognizing Patterns: William Gibson's Hermeneutic Phobias"
- John F. Barber: "Prototypes for Cyberspace: Influences on William Gibson's 'consensual hallucination'"
- Christine Mains: "In Possession of Vital Information: Sharing Knowledge-Power in Joan D. Vinge's Hegemony"
The SF of C. J. Cherryh
- Ed Carmien: "Cherryh's Alchemy: The Classical and Romantic Transmuted in Angel With a Sword"
- Jan Bogstad: "Living Alien: Alienated Humanity in Recent Hainish (Le Guin) and Foreigner (Cherryh) Novels"
Science in/and SF
- Joan Slonczewski: "Avian Flu, or The Birds Strike Back"
- Lisa Yaszek: "Not Lost in Space: Science as Women's Work in the Postwar SF Community"
The SF of Ursula K. Le Guin Session III
- Sandra Lindow: "Wild Gifts: Anger Management and Moral Development in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Maurice Sendak"
- Warren Rochelle: "Choosing to be Human: American Romantic/Pragmatic Rhetoric in LeGuin's Latest Teaching Novel, Gifts."
- Richard D. Erlich: "Le Guin East and West (With a Word or Two on Gambling)"
Star Wars Multimedia Presentation
- Paul Brians: "The Roots of Star Wars or, Why Princess Leia Fights Like a Girl"
"Libraries, Archives and E-Texts...oh, my!...libraries and the scholars who use them"
Join the discussion and let us know about your experiences!
- Leslie Swigart, moderator
- Jan Bogstad
- Hal Hall
- Len Hatfield
- Andy Sawyer
The SF of Ursula K. Le Guin Session IV
- Andrew Sawyer: "Ursula Le Guin and the Pastoral Mode"
- Donald M. Hassler: "The Relation of Story to Idea: The Vines of Kress and the Gethen of Le Guin"
Contemporary SF Authors IV
- Joan Gordon: "Prospero Framed in Neil Gaiman's The Wake"
- Amanda Dafoe: "Faith, Fantasy and Frontier: Neil Gaiman's American Gods"
"Science Fiction Teaching: How and Why"
- Peter Brigg, moderator
- Bruce Rockwood
- Joan Slonczewski
- Rhoda Martin
- Dave Samuelson
- Craig Jacobson
Nineteenth Century SF
- Joe Sanders: "Paradise Denied: James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater"
- Art Evans: "Jules Verne's America"
- Sarah Canfield Fuller: "Some Fictions of Science, or Hypothetical Analogical Scenarios in Nineteenth Century Science Writing and Science Fiction"
Contemporary SF Authors V
- Mark Bould: "'Wanking away and pretending it's sex': Metaphor and commodity in the criticism and fiction of M. John Harrison"
- Carol Franko: "Storied Reality, Liminal States, and Moral Realism in Tim Power's Fiction"
SF and Spirit
- Ed Higgins: "Inside/Outside Worlds: Speaking and Silence in Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day"
- Graham J. Murphy: "Fantastic Journeys: (Cyber)Spirituality in (Cyber)Fiction"
- Bruce L. Rockwood: "Looking Within: SF Explores the Future of 'Being Human'"
Author Reading and Book Signing
- John Barnes
- Kij Johnson
"The Tiptree Award"
- Margaret McBride, moderator
- Brian Attebery
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Michael M. Levy

Remember:
What happens in Las Vegas is
immediately
reported to the Galactic Overlords on Planet 10.