As consumers of cultural products we seem to take for granted that texts are, somehow, automatically saved for survival and that any new generation has access to all of them. This is, of course, naïve, misguided and plain wrong. In the case of popular texts (and I mean here generally of all kinds beyond the […]
The debate on the need to maintain dubbing for audiovisual media in Spain is old and tiresome. I’m probably preaching to the converted here but I’d like to contribute (or stress) arguments which are not often considered. Funnily, the inspiration for both lines of thought comes from recent articles on Rogue One, the exciting prequel […]
I keep on telling my students that I very much want to supervise research on the diminishing use of description in contemporary fiction but nobody is taking the hint–or they do, but then they panic thinking of the technical difficulties a dissertation would entail. So here is more bait, see if anyone bites… I don’t […]
I’m celebrating this week the success of my doctoral student Jaume Llorens, who has been awarded the highest grade for his brilliant dissertation on the icon of the posthuman in science fiction. It is my aim to publicise here a little bit the main point he makes, which might seem obvious to many but, believe […]
For the past year, much of my professional time has been occupied with work connected with the organization of Eurocon 2016 here in Barcelona (hence, also known as BCon). For those of you who don’t know what a ‘con’ is, this is a convention in which fans of a particular genre meet; surely you’ve heard […]
[Please, note: This is the prologue I have written for the trilingual edition of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit del segon origen (1974). The text explains why and how it has been produced.] When I joined the team in charge of organizing the Barcelona Eurocon, back in the autumn of 2015, little could I imagine that […]
My doctoral student Josie Swarbrick, who is working on the representation of monstrous masculinity in SF cinema, visited last week my SF class to offer a presentation based on one of her dissertation’s chapters, the one on District 9. In that film a massive alien starship reaches Johannesburg carrying thousands of refugees who have nowhere […]
The students in my new elective on SF have turned out to be mainly absolute beginners in this genre. I am, therefore, using the first weeks in the course to examine how we become familiarised with authors’ names, titles, periods and even whole canons. Here are a few ideas that have come up for discussion […]
As part of the work I’m doing to write my current work-in-progress, the article “Science Fiction in the Spanish University: The Boundaries that Need to be Broken”, I have sent a message to the very active e-mail list of AEDEAN (the Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, www.aedean.org). In this message I have asked my colleagues […]
I’m using my blog here to publish material that I need to add as an appendix to an article I’m working on. This is a piece on SF in the Spanish university, dealing with our difficulties to overcome what Brian Baker has called SF’s ‘crisis of legitimation’. Starting with Ángel Merelo’s 2009 overview, “Ciencia ficción […]