On September 14, the Spanish Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030 led by Ione Belarra, Secretary General of left-wing party Podemos, launched the campaign #BastaDeDistopías [#StopDystopias] to encourage the debate around the current general discouragement, especially among the young. The main piece is a 1-minute video in which various characters are seen in what […]
Genres are never static, this is a basic truth of literary theory. They may appear at a given time, no matter how hard it usually is to pinpoint exactly when, and fade away as readers become less interested. Each genre has its history, whether this is the larger narrative arc of a genre as gigantic […]
The one who should be writing this post today is my PhD student Pascal Lemaire since he has chosen to deal with the technothriller as his topic of research. However, I am myself curious about some of the points he is raising about this genre, so here I am. Back in 2014 Pascal published in […]
This weekend I have been participating in the IV CatCon or Catalan convention on science fiction and fantasy, celebrated like the first three in the lovely seaside town of Vilanova i la Geltrú, about 50 kms south of Barcelona. CatCon gathers together fans and writers and is also the event during which the Ictineu prize […]
I have recently published a new book, but I don’t know whether it is really a book because it is self-published and, as such, it does not exist for the authorities that assess my research, the Ministry and ANECA. My new book is called Entre muchos mundos: en torno a la ciencia ficción, and it […]
This is the English translation of the article in two parts originally in Catalan, which I published in the web El Biblionauta (https://elbiblionauta.com/ca/, November 2021). Here is the second part. In Douglas Adams’ humorous novel The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (1978), a small, yellow animal known as a Babel fish is used, inserted into […]
This is the English translation of the article in two parts originally in Catalan, which I published in the web El Biblionauta (https://elbiblionauta.com/ca/, November 2021). It is common to celebrate from time to time the novelty of the publication in Catalan of foreign works of science fiction or fantasy, but it is not so common […]
This is the ten-minute talk I gave last week at the international conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, of which I spoke in my last post. Since we had been given such a short time, I used no secondary sources and focused directly on the two novels I discuss. I was a bit nervous […]
I’ve been attending these days in fits and starts the Science Fiction Research Association’s international conference, conditioned by the six-hour difference with Toronto, where the hosting institution (Seneca College) is located. Fifteen months into the pandemic I needn’t say how impossible it is to listen to anybody speak on Zoom, or similar, without either multitasking […]
This is a self-translation of my part of the article originally in Catalan which I have just published with Miquel Codony on the website El Biblionauta. I have not translated Miquel’s section but comment on it at the end of my own text. I have been working on gender and science fiction for a long […]