GIFCon 2026: Technologies of the Fantastic – Paper Speaker Bios & Abstracts

Adrian Arana-Armesto 

Abstract: Invisibility Is Not Freedom: Transparency, Surveillance, and Fantasy Technology in Tolkien 

This paper reconsiders the One Ring in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a technology of transparency rather than a symbol of evil.  For this purpose, this analysis draws on critical transparency studies, which challenge the assumption that visibility is inherently empowering or ethical. Thus, the paper argues that the Ring functions as a transparency device that promises enhanced perception and agency while in fact enabling asymmetrical surveillance and control. To this end, this article applies Clare Birchall’s concept of shareveillance and the right to opacity, Michel Foucault’s panopticon, and Byung-Chul Han’s notion of transparency. The Ring renders its bearer invisible within the immediate physical world, and it simultaneously makes them hyper-visible within Sauron’s perceptual and political network. Thus, this technological device contributes to oppression by exposing the wearer to a centralized power without reciprocal insight. In addition, this paper shows how the ring serves as an analogy for contemporary issues, aligning with modern critiques of datafication, surveillance infrastructures, and the false promise of transparent systems. However, paradoxically, in this work, invisibility works as a mechanism that intensifies control by obscuring the structures of power. Finally, the paper argues that Tolkien’s ethical response to transparency technologies is refusal and destruction. By situating Tolkien within contemporary debates around surveillance, visibility, and power, I aim to demonstrate how fantasy articulates a sustained critique of technological transparency that remains urgently relevant. 

Bio: Adrian Arana-Armesto is a predoctoral researcher and assistant lecturer at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). The author holds a background in English Studies and a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He was awarded the predoctoral fellowship of the Basque Government to research American Western literature. He examines the work of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry from the perspectives of cultural studies, postcolonialism, and decolonialism. Finally, one of his most important publications that has been accepted for publication, forthcoming in 2026, is his chapter “Knight of the Plains The Don Quixote–Sancho Panza Dynamic in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove” for the volume Critical Insights: Sidekicks in Literature published by Salem Press. 

Cláudio Augusto Carvalho Moura 

Abstract: Science-Folk and the Fantastic in ‘O Auto da Maga Josefa’: Folklorized Technologies and Northeastern Brazilian Folklore 

This paper proposes the concept of science-folk as a provisional analytical category to examine how science-fictional motifs are absorbed and re-signified within living folk imaginaries. The concept dialogues directly with Arthur C. Clarke’s third law (1962), but inverts it: within science-folk, technology does not become magic; it becomes folklore. Rather than operating as rational speculation or futurist projection, elements such as extraterrestrial beings, anomalous technologies, and temporal displacement function as vernacular belief embedded in oral tradition. To explore this process, the study develops a comparative analysis of science-fictional features present in the 2018 Brazilian YA fantasy novel O Auto da Maga Josefa (The Penance of Josefa the Hag) and Northeastern Brazilian folklore, focusing on figures such as the chupacabras, flying saucers, and narratives of time travel. While theoretical models such as Darko Suvin’s concept of cognitive estrangement (1979), Farah Mendlesohn’s taxonomy of fantastic systems (2008), and Mark J. P. Wolf’s work on imaginary worlds (2012; 2014) offer valuable insights, they do not fully account for narrative formations in which science-fictional imagery is folklorized rather than rationalized. Departing from decolonial and epistemological perspectives advanced by Aníbal Quijano (2000), Walter Mignolo (2011), and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), the analysis argues that, in Northeastern Brazilian folklore and O Auto da Maga Josefa, science-folk emerges where scientific discourse circulates fragmentarily and is retranslated through local epistemologies. More broadly, the concept remains applicable beyond colonial contexts. In this sense, science-folk is advanced as a portable analytical lens for examining how technological imaginaries are assimilated. 

Bio: Cláudio Moura is an Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Anglophone Literatures at the Federal University of Piauí (UFPI), Brazil. He coordinates the Center for Research and Extension on Fantastic Literatures, Interarts, and Translation Studies (NUPLIFIT) and collaborates closely with UFPI’s Office for International Affairs. His academic activities encompass teaching, research, extension, and academic administration at both undergraduate and graduate levels. His research interests include fantasy (especially J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium) and the fantastic, speculative fiction, mythopoeia, intermediality, and translation studies. His work combines creative writing, literary theory, comparative literature, and pop culture, and he regularly publishes, teaches, and supervises research at undergraduate and graduate levels. 

Prakriti Basu 

Abstract: From Laboratory to Lore: A Study of Stranger Things as Science Fantasy and an Escape From Capitalist Anxieties 

With its immense impact on global culture spanning a decade, Stranger Things is the most-watched series on Netflix as of January 2026. The show draws in audiences with striking portrayals of retrofuturism and vibrant depictions of the 1980s through fashion and music. The Starcourt Mall exemplifies the spectacle of capitalistic endeavour amidst rising tensions of the Cold War and creates a bittersweet longing for a time long gone—a phenomenon that is described by Svetlana Boym as ‘reflective nostalgia.’ The show is an intricate illustration of the science fantasy genre, constructing the dark, untrodden realm of the Upside Down which mirrors the real world but is actually a wormhole frozen in time. The game of Dungeons and Dragons not only forms the taxonomical basis for the characters to situate the otherworldly creatures within the familiar, but also depicts the fantastic archetypes that the main characters embody. While Eleven is the ‘chosen one,’ the Mage who is endowed with superpowers, Dustin is the Bard who boosts the morale of the others in the group and harnesses the power of knowledge. The Mind Flayer, a formidable opponent, represents capitalist totality, erasing individualities and thriving through ceaseless consumption and contamination. The purpose of this study is to analyse Stranger Things as science fantasy and to illustrate how it uses both fantastic and nostalgic elements to become the viewer’s escape from contemporary capitalism. 

Bio: Prakriti Basu is a former student of B.A. English (Honours) from Loreto College, Kolkata, India. She had served as the Vice President of the Literary Society throughout the course of her third year. As an avid reader, she has always harboured a keen interest in literature. With a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai, she blends her skills in research with literary analysis and studies of social sciences as well as media. 

Caleb Berk 

Abstract: “We Finish this Together”: Queering Utopian Imagination Through Magic and Technology in Netflix’s Arcane 

My paper examines “Hex-Tech,” an amalgamation of magic and technology, in the television series Arcane, as a force of queer utopian imagination that disrupts the status-quo and facilitates change. The world of Arcane is drastically changed by an industrial revolution brought on by technology that harnesses and controls magic, catapulting the lead characters from socially diverse backgrounds into a new life defined by the strained relations between the wealthy, ruling class of Piltover, and the impoverished, working class of Zaun. I read Arcane alongside notable utopian/dystopian theorists such as Bloch and Muñoz. 

Muñoz’s theoretical interpretation of queer utopia is presented as a “rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz 1). Similarly, Hex-Tech functions as a queer hybrid of possibility by facilitating a “venturing beyond” (Bloch 5) of the industrial technological status-quo. Building from this, I demonstrate how, within Arcane, Hex-Tech encompasses all facets of the queer utopian imagination, embodying Bloch’s concept of “astonishment,” and highlighting the real potentiality of “bad utopia”. Finally, I will show how Hex-Tech functions as a catalyst, forcing the various characters to “do something as well as say something” (Muñoz 9), portraying the potential power of queer utopian imagination and creating a new world full of unknown possibilities. 

Bio: Caleb Berk (he/him) is a scholar, world-builder, storyteller, and artist who graduated from the University of Glasgow with a MLitt in Fantasy literature in 2025. His research focuses on interpreting fantasy through interdisciplinary perspectives that critically analyse utopian/dystopian theory, queer theory, religious studies, and community building within fantasy literature. His most notable work on Utopia in Fantasy was accepted to the Society for Utopian Studies 2025 Conference. Through exploring utopia and dystopia in fantasy, Caleb hopes to explore and reimagine how fantasy text reflects and can initiate real-world change. 

Dr Francesca Bihet 

Abstract: Electronic Parasites: The Programming of Fairy Belief in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. 

Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) begins by inverting the traditional “once upon a time” fairy-tale formula, preparing viewers for an unsettling genre-merging science-fiction fairy tale of the future. The film poses questions about the nature of humanity and its relationship to both the natural and the supernatural. It is a twisted fairy tale, a skewed rendition of Pinocchio. The robotic boy David is programmed to experience human emotions and, like Pinocchio, holds a quasi-religious faith in the Blue Fairy’s ability to make him human. 

The Blue Fairy, modelled on a kindly mother, becomes linked to the divine feminine figure of Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart. Gigolo Joe asks: “What if the Blue Fairy isn’t real at all David? What if she is magic? The supernatural is the hidden web that unites the universe. Only Orga [humans] believe what cannot be seen or measured. It is that oddness that separates our species.” Her symbolism is diffused throughout the film, ever present yet never fully manifest, but nevertheless providing hope. Richard Sugg notes that fairies are “very like you, and yet, not quite like you.”   This ambiguity mirrors the ontological status of both fairies and AI as non-human Others. This paper examines the Blue Fairy’s symbolism throughout the film, arguing that AI’s belief in the supernatural and fairy tale marks a threshold whereby it truly simulates human emotion and consciousness. The Blue Fairy acts as a 21st-century ‘Turing Test’. 

Bio: Francesca Bihet is an independent scholar based in the Channel Islands. She completed her PhD thesis ‘Folklore and Fairies: The History of Fairies in the Folklore Society from 1878 to 1945’ at Chichester University in 2020. She has published chapters in Magical Folk (2018), Uncanny Ecogothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020), and Fairies: A Companion (2025), as well as articles in Gramarye, Revenant Journal, and Preternature. Her main research interests are fairies, Channel Island folklore, and nineteenth-century folklore scholarship. 

Danielle Blee 

Abstract: The Archduke’s Arsenal: Necropolitics, Warfare, and the Industrialisation of Magic in Baldur’s Gate 3 

Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) subverts the traditional boundaries of high fantasy by reflecting modern sociopolitical anxieties in its magical industrialisation. While Clarke posited that ‘advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, Baldur’s Gate 3 complicates this trajectory by effectively disenchanting the Forgotten Realms, transforming the Gate into a burgeoning military-industrial complex. This paper examines the transition of the titular city into a surveillance state under the technocratic rise of Enver Gortash and his ‘Steel Watch’, a network of biomechanical automatons that function as a critique of contemporary militarised security.  

By Act 3, the player encounters a city defined by censorship, refugee displacement, and the pervasive presence of ‘the Watch’. Gameplay is routinely interrupted by the Watch, forcing the player into stealth or combat. Drawing on Foucault’s expansion of the Panopticon, I argue that the Watch replaces individual magical agency with state-sanctioned repression. Furthermore, by uncovering the Watch’s biomechanical origins (a network piloted by illithid-infected brains), I utilise Mbembe’s theory of Necropolitics to analyse the game’s magical ‘death technology’ within the military-complex. Whilst the Steel Watch Foundry is interrogated as a site of alienated labour, where magical mass production is predicated on the exploitation of marginalised Gnomes.  

Ultimately, this paper argues that Baldur’s Gate 3 uses magic not as an escape, but to mirror modern debates regarding AI, data-driven surveillance, and the human cost of ‘security’. It positions the Watch as a haunting demonstration that even magic, when industrialised, can become a tool of systemic hegemony. 

Bio: Danielle Blee (she/her) is a first-year PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, where she researches grotesque intertextualities in the fiction of Alasdair Gray. She holds an MA in Literary Studies from Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests include grotesque bodies/states, postcolonialism, and capitalism. Currently, she is working in collaboration with the Alasdair Gray Archive to develop a table-top role-playing game inspired by Gray’s fictional imagination. In her spare time, she likes thinking about her 6-foot-tall Tiefling alter ego, Fiadh, playing video games, and reading.  

Zuleyha Cetiner-Oktem 

Abstract: Mapping the Magical: Atlases, Footnotes, and the Archives of Authority 

Fantasy often treats technology as spectacle, where various weapons or devices have the power to transform worlds. This paper argues instead that some of fantasy’s most consequential technologies are epistemic. Not gadgets per se, but atlases, footnotes, and archives emerge as technologies of the fantastic.  Through a comparative reading of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and Ihsan Oktay Anar’s The Atlas of Misty Continents, this paper argues that fantasy exposes colonial and scientific fantasies embedded in archival knowledge. In Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, magic is a scholarly discipline. Footnotes create the illusion of continuity and objectivity. English magic becomes credible through documentation, closely tied to imperial power. Anar’s Atlas of Misty Continents dismantles this logic. Its false maps, apocryphal histories, and chronicles reveal the archive as an unreliable instrument. Mapping in Anar’s novel manufactures empires and legitimises domination, erasing alternative ways of knowing. The atlas parodies colonial science’s promise of absolute knowledge. Read together, these novels show that fantasy can destabilise the authority of archives. By pairing a canonical British fantasy with a non-Western counter-archive, this paper argues that fantasy not only reflects technological systems of knowledge but also interrogates the power structures that sustain them. 

Bio: Zuleyha Cetiner-Oktem is an associate professor in the field of English Literature at Ege University. Her research and teaching portfolio includes children’s fantasy literature, science fiction, graphic novels, posthuman narratives, and medieval literature and culture. Among her editorial contributions are Mythmaking across Boundaries (2014), Languages, Cultures, and Gender (2016), Nautical Narratives (2025), and Eurasian Folk and Fairy Tales (2025). She is also the author of Memory and Men: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2022). She is a member of the New Chaucer Society and the Science Fiction Research Association. 

Amelia Chen 

Abstract: Dwelling in the 21st-Century West of Ireland: Sublime Infrastructures in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones 

Irish writer Mike McCormack’s highly acclaimed, award-winning 2016 novel Solar Bones has been read as paying homage to the modernist experimental tradition, a moving celebration of the everyday, and a commentary on the post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. This project builds on the existing body of criticism to argue that McCormack’s engagement with all of those elements would be better understood in his imaginations of technology, the speculative, and the fantastical, categories that form a through line in his oeuvre. Inspired by the recent infrastructural turn in critical theories, I analyse how unfinished and retired edifices are for protagonist Marcus Conway sublime, awe-inspiring technologies through which to construe alternative modernities to trouble the idea of linear, homogeneous time that buttresses the Enlightenment and neoliberal developmentalism. In addition, public utilities such as roads and water pipes serve for Marcus—a civic engineer—as conduits through which he situates himself in the Irish nation as an imagined community. That is, able to function pragmatically and produce affective experience in its users, infrastructure is a channel through which the state hails and interpolates individual subjects. It therefore becomes a site in which the state-citizen relationship plays out in violence and intimacy, and in which national identity and history are spatialized. Finally, drawing from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, I show that Marcus’s pursuit of living in the wake of the Tiger’s property boom and subsequent housing crisis is at its heart a meditation on an ethics of building that attains to the Heideggerian ideal of dwelling. 

Bio: Amelia Wan-Chi Chen is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Oregon. She works at the intersection of modernist and contemporary English and Irish literature, medical humanities, and museum studies. 

Michelle Chen 

Abstract: Babel’s Loose Ends: Destruction and Vengeance in Academic Settings 

Language and translation become harbingers of unexpected political and personal destruction in R.F. Kuang’s bestselling Babel, manifesting innovative postcolonial narratives through speculative fiction and historical fantasy augmented with literary and philosophical systems-thinking. The complicity of academia in continuing oppression of marginalized groups is deftly reflected within novelistic techniques such as multiple and alternating diverse perspectives, and unmakes, in a sense, the stability of the present day as participants within scholarly locales grapple with new intimacies developed and dismantled within transnational and cosmopolitan spaces, including the metropolises of Oxford, Canton, and the symbolic city-state of Babel Tower. The novel visualizes the legacies of colonialism through melodramatic depictions of private and public violence, as well as third person intimate point-of-view drawing upon modernist legacies of stream-of-consciousness, and postcolonial disillusionments illustrated through frequent ruminative interiority and intertextuality. Philosophical, historical, and literary theories inspired by Hugo Meltzl, Itamar Even-Zohar, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Pascale Casanova, and Lawrence Venuti inscribe climaxes which utilize fictional narrative to develop solutions for the crisis of conflicts of methods in literary scholarship, world literary theory’s centre-periphery dynamics, and problems of untranslatability. Written in Kuang’s “maximalist” style for indulgent and enigmatic descriptive paragraphs, five-act structure, and fantasy magic systems, the (un)making of postcolonial thought through decisive action, dialogue, and multicultural characterization highlights the adversities and tribulations linguistics and translation bring into empire-building and resistance – while harbouring intuitive and premonitory solutions to entrenched debates pertinent to postcolonial and literary theory. 

Bio: Michelle Chen lives in New York City, though her birthplace is Singapore and she hopes to return and visit someday. Her work appears in Prairie Schooner, Deep Wild, Kinsman Quarterly: Winds of Asia, The Evergreen Review, The Statesman, and elsewhere. She attended Girls in Icy Fjords, the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio with the support of the National Society of Arts and Letters, among others. At Stony Brook University she received the Best Masters Essay Prize, Distinguished Travel Award, and AAPI Mentorship Travel Grant, and is currently a Master’s student at NYU.  

Laura Ciriza Martin 

Abstract: “Uncertainty, struggle, choice and change”: The One Power and the Scientific Structuring of Fantasy in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time 

This presentation aims to analyse the construction of magic in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, with particular emphasis on the One Power as a system governed by internally coherent, rule-based principles. More specifically, I intend to examine how Jordan’s worldbuilding reconfigures magic as a discoverable and governable force rather than a purely supernatural phenomenon. Indeed, I shall argue that Jordan frames the One Power as a quasi-scientific system by emphasising balance, limitation, and causality within a post-cataclysmic world in which magic functions as a form of lost knowledge awaiting rediscovery. Particularly, the dual structure of saidin and saidar operates by shaping how power is accessed, controlled, and managed. This division determines method and risk, reinforcing the idea that the One Power is bound by systemic rules. The corruption of saidin strengthens this logic, presenting magical practice as vulnerable to contamination and long-term consequences. By focusing on these elements, Jordan subverts conventional fantasy tropes that rely on unbounded or miraculous magic, instead presenting channeling as a discipline that requires knowledge, training, and regulation, with artefacts such as ter’angreal, angreal, and sa’angreal blurring the boundary between magic and technology, functioning as remnants of advanced systems that are no longer understood. Through this approach, Jordan’s The Wheel of Time reshapes fantasy worldbuilding. 

Bio: Laura Ciriza Martín is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Studies at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), which explores the Gothic conventions present in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English Studies, with a minor in English Literature (2020) and a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature and Literary Studies (2023) from the same institution. She has previously participated in different conferences, most recently, the “9th. International Conference on Myth in the Arts” held at the Faculty of Arts of the University of the Basque Country. In 2017, Laura was named as the winner of the VIII Concurso Internacional Universitario de Microrrelatos “Félix Menchacatorre” in the English category. 

Alexandra Davies Franco Lucio 

Abstract: Fans Policing Fantasy: The Role of Social Media Networks in Escalating Pro-Censorship Fan Rhetoric.  

This paper will consider the role of social media in escalating aggressive and extreme rhetoric in online fandom and fantasy spaces. These spaces are interlinked, as many fantasy fans engage with their texts through fandom activity, like creating fan-authored works. This paper argues that engagement with fantasy texts and fandoms are increasingly mediated through real world technology and platforms, particularly social media sites. Social media can be a generative space to foster fan creativity and raise a text’s profile. However, social media has also become a site of conflict that rewards negative and extreme stances and encourages in-group mentality through the “echo chambers” of online social networks. This has contributed to escalation of hostile rhetoric and a culture of increasingly censorious attitudes within some fandom spaces that limits creativity.  

This paper is based on ongoing social media monitoring research tracing parallels between right-wing rhetoric and pro-censorship fandom discourses on Tumblr. It will take critiques of Archive of Our Own (a fanfiction-sharing site) and the manga/anime Black Butler as case studies to explore the logic of a loud minority of fans who vocally oppose the representation of dark themes and tropes in fan-authored works and seek to police the activities of other fans. Fandom discourses represent the tastes and opinions of ‘regular’ fans and can therefore be predictive of broader cultural shifts that may come to impact mainstream fantasy. It is therefore important to understand these logics and the power of online rhetoric. 

Bio: Alexandra Davies (she/her) is a second year PhD student at the University of Strathclyde where she is researching parallels between right-wing and fandom discourse and rhetoric around censorship. She has presented about her research at her university’s student-led symposia and conferences, including its PGR Humanities Symposium 2025, which she co-chaired and co-organised. She completed her MSc in Gender Studies at the University of Strathclyde and wrote her thesis on heteronormativity and mpreg (male pregnancy) in Teen Wolf fanfiction, which she presented at GIFCon 2025! She also has a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Classics from the University of Bristol. 

Ana Diéguez-Algaba 

Abstract: The Seeds of Downfall: Technology, Knowledge and Nature in “Aldarion and Erendis” 

Fantasy’s imagined worlds have served as a stage for exploring the relationship between technological ambition and ecological cost. But to understand the effects of technology on the natural world, we must first understand what technology does to our understanding of nature, a question that Tolkien poses in “Aldarion and Erendis”. Many readers and Tolkien scholars locate the fall of Númenor in the corruption of Ar-Pharazôn, yet the deepest roots of the tragedy lie centuries earlier, in the story of “Aldarion and Erendis”. This narrative portrays the tension between three different approaches to technology and its uses, each based in a distinct understanding of nature. Aldarion’s shipbuilding represents the view of nature from instrumental knowledge, Meneldur’s study of the stars is grounded in the approach from contemplative knowledge, and Erendis’ love of trees stems from an aesthetic appreciation of nature.   

Aldarion’s technical rationality creates an ontological understanding of nature as a resource – something to be possessed and exploited – that clashes with the approaches of both Meneldur and Erendis and displaces them. Rather than a conversation between the three, the tension results in an impasse culminating in Meneldur’s abdication, Erendis’ self-imposed exile and Aldarion’s imperialism, which sows the seeds of Númenor’s downfall. Drawing on philosophy of technology, environmental philosophy, and Tolkien’s own theorisations of sub-creation and knowledge, this paper examines the effects of technology on our understanding of nature and its consequences. Ultimately, it argues that Tolkien presents technology as inseparable from how we know the world and interact with it, and that the ontological repercussions of technology have a real impact in the world as depicted in the downfall of Númenor. This contribution aims to address a gap in Tolkien studies, as his minor and unfinished works remain largely understudied, and to complicate existing ecocritical readings by arguing that the conflict at stake is not one of technology versus nature, but an ontological one.  

Bio: Ana Diéguez-Algaba is a first-year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Professor Anna Vaninskaya. Her research focuses on portrayals of technology in Tolkien’s work, examined through the lens of Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy of technology.  She has worked as a research assistant for ARG-tech at the University of Dundee, where she completed her undergraduate degree in English in 2022. She also holds an MSc in Translation Studies from the University of Glasgow.  

Michelle Esrig-Munguia 

Abstract: Technologies of Genre Regulation: Romantasy and the Marginalisation of Feminised Systems 

Romantasy is an emerging genre positioned between Fantasy and Romance. Its contested legitimacy reveals the gendered mechanisms through which fantasy defines technology boundaries. Despite its rapid commercial rise, Romantasy continues to face cultural and academic devaluation. This devaluation operates as a technology of knowledge production, shaping what is recognised as “technology,” “fantasy”, and “serious” literature. 

This pattern becomes visible when technology is understood not only as machinery but as a system of classification which dictate valuation and perception. In this expanded sense, the fantasy genre hierarchy functions as an epistemic technology that regulates which narrative systems are legible as technological. Romantasy frequently constructs complex, rule-based infrastructures, often utilising embodied magic as bio-modification, mating bonds as biometric systems, telepathic links as communication networks, runes as coded architectures and magical contracts as legal-technological frameworks. These systems operate as technologies within the narrative world, yet are routinely dismissed because they are relational, affective or embodied, and therefore coded as feminised.  

This understanding builds on longstanding genre scholarship that traces how feminised forms of narrative have been systematically excluded from cultural legitimacy. Romantasy makes this exclusion visible by revealing that while its internal narrative systems function as technologies, it is the external genre hierarchy that operates as the regulatory technology determining which forms of world-building are granted epistemic authority. Through this lens, the exclusion and marginalisation of feminised systems emerge as a structural act of genre regulation that shapes value, legitimacy, and the limits of what counts as technologies that matter. 

Bio: Michelle is an MRes researcher in English Literature at the University of Strathclyde, with an interdisciplinary focus on gender studies. Her work examines how Romantasy narratives of stigma, embodiment, and desire expose systemic violence through corporeal and epistemic othering, while feminist standpoint epistemologies illuminate forms of resistance. She is currently analysing Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and the Empyrean series as a representative case of the genre’s contemporary trajectory. With over twenty years of experience as a storyteller, writer, and editor in marketing and visual media, Michelle’s interdisciplinary background informs her interest in Romantasy, embodiment, and feminist literary critique. 

María Ferrández-Sanmiguel 

Abstract: Transhumanism, Immortality and the Political Role of Fantasy in Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire (2006) 

From our earliest myths, through the promises of most major religions, to contemporary biotechnology, humanity has consistently sought ways to stop aging and reach eternal life. Philosophers have long attempted to explain why humans resist mortality. As finitude is a defining feature of humanity, to negate death is to effectively reject being human. Transhumanist thinkers have little trouble with this: they believe—or hope—that thanks to technological advancement, humans will eventually transcend our biological limitations to become immortal posthumans. In this context, there has been a recent proliferation of literary texts within the range of the speculative that imagine and warn about possible unforeseen consequences of the radical enhancement of the human through technology. This paper will examine Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire (2006) from the perspective of transhumanist discourse on radical life extension. I will argue that the Lord Ruler’s apparent immortality, achieved through a fantastic version of genetic and technological enhancement, dramatizes the promises and perils of transcending human limits: while his immortality embodies the transhumanist dream of overcoming aging through technoscience, it also exposes the ethical and political cost of such aspirations. As I will argue, however, by juxtaposing the Lord Ruler’s ageless tyranny with Mistborn Kelsier’s sacrificial death—an event that catalyzes collective resistance—and with the Terrismen Keepers’ enhanced memory—which extends knowledge beyond individual lifespans—the novel complicates simplistic boundaries between transhumanism and bioconservatism. In so doing, The Final Empire criticizes the transhumanist fascination with illusions of eternal life, highlighting instead the power of responsible technicity and ancestral wisdom. My reading will suggest that the very impossibility of the fantastic is precisely what enables it to probe the pleasures and anxieties of transhumanist thought in a unique way, drawing attention to the genre’s capacity to inspire political reflection and become an engine of change. 

Bio: María Ferrández-Sanmiguel is Associate Professor at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Her main research interests lie in contemporary US speculative fiction, with special attention to the representation of trauma and the posthuman. Her most recent publications include “Mourning the Human? Posthuman Death and Ontological Vulnerability in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy” (International Journal of English Studies, 2024) and “Towards an Ethics of Affinity: Posthumanism and the Question of the Animal in Two SF Narratives of Catastrophe” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2022). She has also edited the collection The Posthuman Condition in 21st Century Literature and Culture – Interdisciplinary Insights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).  

Sophie Fink 

Abstract: Cities Born and Raised: Negotiations of Urban Selfhood in Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became 

What—or who—makes a city alive? This paper pursues this question through an examination of supernaturally-assisted urban decay and growth in Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass (2024) and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020). Though differing in genre, style, and tone, both novels center upon cities whose fates are bound up in the desires of immortal supernatural beings. These beings continually negotiate the physical and ideological boundaries of their respective cities as they work as midwives and mothers to consolidate a singular living city-body from the multiplicitous, often contradictory people-bodies living within. This paper argues that these texts use the construction of fantasy cities to reveal the inherent fantasy within all cities—the functional sociopolitical myth that a plurality of voices and desires can exist as a singular bordered entity. Beginning with Rosemary Jackson’s configuration of fantasy as oxymoronic, this paper will reveal how each fictional city oxymoronically holds together the individual and the collective, affirming an “impossible unity” of identity. This complex contradiction will be further illuminated through a study of each texts’ use of artistic practices such as writing, dancing, rapping, and painting as the foundations for an inclusive cultivation of creative empathy, wherein the self is found to be housed within the other. Ultimately, this paper positions fantasy cities as a social and physical technology which both interrogates animacy and collectivity within these two key texts, and functions more broadly to expose the malleability in our real-world fabrications of “the city.” 

Bio: Sophie Fink is a postgraduate student of the University of Glasgow’s MLitt in Fantasy Literature programme. Her research interests include theories of time, ecocriticism, critical futures studies, fantasy, and science fiction, with a particular interest in nonhuman and posthuman temporalities. Her speculative poetry has been published in Strange Horizons and Reckoning. Currently, she is working on a dissertation about the desires and dangers of manipulating the global past within Western science fiction projections of precarious futures. 

Erin Finley 

Abstract: Conjuring Wonder: Ambi-Drawing and the Pencil as Machine 

This workshop invites participants to explore drawing as a form of conjuring, treating the pencil and other mark-making implements as magical-technological instruments capable of shaping perception. In a series of guided exercises, including drawing with the non-dominant hand, Ambi-Drawing (ie. mark-making with both hands simultaneously), and playful explorations of line and gesture, participants will experiment with mark-making techniques that blur boundaries between body and tool. 

Framing the pencil as a “drawing machine,” this workshop considers how creative technologies, whether mundane or fantastical, can transform both maker and medium. Drawing becomes a site where technique, perception, and imagination intersect, conjuring artifacts that feel simultaneously familiar and enchanted. By engaging in exercises that disrupt typical motor patterns, participants will be surprised by the unexpected creativity that takes place when we generate “errors” intentionally. 

This workshop emphasizes the interplay of human skill, embodied cognition, and simple technological instruments to conjure images that are imaginative and transportive. Each participant will leave with original drawings, reflecting both their personal exploration and the magical capacities of everyday mark-making tools.  

Bio: Erin Finley is an award-winning Canadian artist, recognized with two OCAD University Teaching Awards and the University of Toronto OISE Award for Distinguished Service. Her research is supported by grants from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. She facilitates public art events and outreach projects for people with disabilities, neurodiversity, brain injuries, dementia, and mental health challenges. Erin teaches drawing at OCAD University and has developed intergenerational programs connecting young people with older adults through community projects. 

Patricia García-Santos 

Abstract: From Biblical Myth to Speculative Fantasy: R. F. Kuang’s Babel or the Technology of Translation 

Recent speculative fantasy has increasingly blurred the boundaries between magic and technology, foregrounding rule-based systems that mirror modern regimes of knowledge, power, and institutional control (Mendlesohn 2008; Miéville 2009). This paper reads R. F. Kuang’s Babel, or The Necessity of Violence (2022) as speculative fantasy that exemplifies this trend by portraying a world in which translation is a highly regulated, institutionalized practice that functions simultaneously as magic and as a colonial technology, shaping both the narrative world and the trajectories of its characters.  

Set in 1830s Oxford, Babel portrays linguistic transparency as a political and technological ideal sustained by an academic institution that trains translators to serve the British Empire. Translation operates as an extractive system of knowledge production that renders the magical infrastructure predictable for imperial power, while systematically erasing the epistemic agency, cultural identities, and opacity of the colonial subjects who sustain it. In this sense, the novel exposes how technologies commonly framed as progressive become commodities and function as mechanisms of surveillance and dispossession.  

Through a speculative fantasy narrative, Babel critiques colonialist constructions of knowledge that privilege transparency while denying the right to opacity (Glissant 1990) and the right to secrecy (Birchall 2011). Engaging with key concerns of the technologies of the fantastic, this paper argues that contemporary speculative fantasy offers a critical response to real-world technological imaginaries that rely on the marginalization of communities to reinforce asymmetrical structures of power.  

Bio: Patricia García Santos (Córdoba, 1999) is a predoctoral researcher in the Department of English at the University of Córdoba (Spain). She holds a dual degree in Translation & Interpreting and English Studies and has completed a Master’s in Advanced English Studies. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Languages and Cultures, where she is a second-year student. She holds an FPI grant linked to the state-funded project The Poetics and Politics of Transparency in Contemporary English Literature (PID2023-146346NB-100). Her research examines the tension between contemporary demands for transparency and the inherent opacity of language and linguistic systems. 

Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad 

Abstract: Prometheus Unbound: The Mystery, Magic and Miracle of the Atom in Golden Age Science Fiction 

This paper will examine the impact and presentation of the Atomic in American Golden Age SF (circa 1940s/50s), particularly as a source of energy powering the future in practically magical ways – a force often facing fewer limitations than magic itself – looking at works from authors such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Clifford D Simak and Eando Binder. 

In the aftermath of the atomic blast, the split atom was a symbol of immense power containing a duality of extremes. Within the atomic lay apocalyptic dangers and the magical elixir for civilisation – untold energy which could power both the most dystopian and utopian outcomes. In 1953, President Eisenhower spoke to the UN about atomic power as the key to peace. In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission were marketing a future where our “children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Despite the shadow of the atomic bomb, the United States momentarily faced a wave of immense optimism and confidence in nuclear energy which would leave a lasting footprint in the history of Science Fiction. 

For SF, the Atomic Age introduced a hypothetical future era where energy sources need no longer be explained. The split atom powered a utopian vision of the relationship between ecology and technology, giving authors the power to handwave the logistical implications of wide-scale technological advancement without straying from the convincingly realistic. The Atomic, like magic, enabled something that is not necessarily escapism from notions of advancement, but escapism from advancement’s costs and logistics. 

Bio: Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad attained her MLitt with Distinction in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow in 2020 and has since presented at GIFCon on three previous occasions (2021, 2024, 2025). Today, her work is featured in critical anthologies such as “Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier” (2023, Vernon Press), “Theology, Religion, and Dungeons & Dragons” (2025, Lexington Fortress), and “Disability, Illness, and the Vampire in Literature and Culture” (2025, Routledge). She is currently in the PhD programme at NTNU with the working title “AI – American Icon: The Figure of the AI in 20th Century American SF”. 

Stephen Goldfinch 

Abstract: Silver, Empire and Colonialism in Babel by R.F. Kuang 

In R.F. Kuang’s Babel the magical technology of silver-working manifests the process of translation as a physical object which becomes the focus for anti-colonial resistance. Using silver as a symbolic but tangible commodity reflects the ‘violent injustices’ of colonial oppression whilst creating a locus of imperial power the resistance can attack. 

Silver-working involves engraving a silver bar with an English phrase on one side and its translation in another language on the reverse. What is lost in translation creates magic when the words are spoken aloud. This is the core of the British Empire’s industrial power in the fictionalised 1830s of the novel. 

Through the technology of silver-working, the act of translation in Babel becomes a literal tool of the British Empire, paralleling how language can be a cultural tool of colonialism. Indigenous speakers of languages such as Mandarin are manipulated into using their linguistic talents to support the imperialism which exploits and harms their countries, such as in the opium trade with China. 

This exploitation is underscored by the historical importance and symbolic resonance of silver. Historically, silver was both a tool and a product of colonialism and had both a cultural and economic role. It is malleable and mercurial, and was transmuted into many forms as it was globally traded. 

In turning abstract ideas about translation into a physical technology, Kuang concretises language as a commodity which is displayed, destroyed, sold and stolen, and ultimately reappropriated as a tool of resistance. 

Beak, Feather and Bone: A Collaborative Map-Making Game About Fantastic Infrastructure 

Beak, Feather and Bone is a ‘map-labelling RPG’ designed by Tyler Crumrine and published by Possible Worlds Games. In this workshop, up to ten participants will take on roles representing different communities within a city populated by ravenfolk. They will take it in turns to claim a building on a city map for their community, then define its Beak (what people say about it), Feather (how it looks) and Bone (what it is like on the inside). Participants will be encouraged to consider the role of fantastic technology in the infrastructure of the city as we create it. Through this process a narrative for the city and its people will gradually emerge. The game will end with one participant claiming the seat of power within the city, and deciding on its name. 

Bio: Stephen Goldfinch (he/him) is currently enrolled in the English Literature: Fantasy MLitt programme at the University of Glasgow, where he presented his first conference paper as part of GIFcon 2025. He studies part-time whilst working as Curriculum Leader in Core Skills at Edinburgh College. He also co-founded, and is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of Elsewhere, the University of Glasgow’s student-run fantasy journal. When not studying or teaching he writes fantasy literature and designs games. After completing his MLitt he hopes to undertake a DFA which will combine fantasy fiction, fantasy theory and creative non-fiction. 

Timothy R. Granger 

Abstract: Bureaucratic Magic in Jack Vance’s Rhialto the Marvellous  

Famously, in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the ubiquitous tabletop role-playing game, wrote, “It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important. Never hold the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you…” (230). While this sentiment perfectly encapsulates what has become known in modern role-playing circles as the “Rule of Cool,” it stands in stark opposition to Dungeons & Dragons’ magic system. Inspired in no small part by what has become known as “Vancian magic,” noted fantasist Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series presents a bureaucratic practice of wizardry in which that magic of the deteriorating planet serves as an advanced and largely incomprehensible understanding of ancient technology. Ironically, within Vance’s Rhialto the Marvellous (1984), we are met with a cabal of sorcerers who, though largely incapable of completely understanding the technologies of the past, wield its equations and principles—often clandestinely, as a means of status and even subjugation: in a sense, the very “room lawyers” Gygax maligns. This paper argues that such a framework of administrative and even procedural “magic” contradicts concepts of the “Rule of Cool” and also reveals how the magic system within Vance’s final Dying Earth volume features an inverse effect: how the degrading of a structured environment has pushed society into a dark age in which technology and magic are inseparable. 

Bio: Tim Granger is a graduate student in English at Florida Atlantic University where he specializes in fantasy and science fiction literature. His research interests include pulp fiction, weird fiction, and the nature of storytelling. His creative fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as New Edge Sword and Sorcery, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and Goblins and Galaxies. 

Mark Hines 

Abstract: Aragorn the Divider: Racebending in Magic: The Gathering’s “Tales of Middle Earth” and “Deviant Excommunes” 

This presentation examines community responses to the racebending of major characters in the Magic: The Gathering set Tales of Middle Earth. This set, featuring characters, locations, and mechanics inspired by Tolkien’s writings and Jackson’s films, is notable for its depictions of Aragorn, Eowyn, and Theoden as having dark skin. These depictions contrast with other popular representations which often feature Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits as White, with some notable exceptions. The Lord of the Rings is perhaps the most responsible text for the racial politics of fantasy and speculative media. Though fan reactions to the practice have been mixed, Tales of Middle Earth became one of MTG’s most successful sets commercially. My presentation utilizes data scraping and linguistic analysis tools to analyze the discourse around racebending in a prominent MTG subreddit: r/FreeMagic. Subscribers to this subreddit are often those who have been banned from more mainline subreddits and I dub this problematic, sometimes antisocial phenomenon a “deviant excommune,” a term in great debt to Kishonna Gray’s work on online behavior (2014). I use r/FreeMagic as an example of a typical deviant excommune to analyze the resounding problematic discourse of many online spaces around gaming. This group’s critiques of racebending practices in Tolkien’s world demonstrate that racebending is interpreted as a political decision contradictory to Tolkien’s vision—that racebending is making political something which is not. Using Critical Race Theorists, most notably Charles W. Mills’ “Orkish Manifesto,” I counter that The Lord of the Rings and MtG have always been “racially-structured,” and that longstanding beliefs in fantasy and gaming’s postraciality account for the doubling-down of users “keeping it real” as a means of engaging in gatekeeping and hate.  Moreover, this presentation points to lingering tensions in the politics of racebending as representation, tensions pointed out by Stuart Hall in representing an “essential black subject” (pg. 166). Putting a Black Aragorn in place of a White one, then, is not punk; it is pure, commercial, “selling out.” This sort of racebending does not reckon with the racist histories and hierarchies upon which Lord of the Rings was inspired and profited. 

Bio: Mark Hines is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. He is interested in representations of race and gender in virtual and fantastic worlds. His background is in race studies, game studies, and cultural studies. His dissertation focuses on changing systems and logics of racial representation in fantasy games following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. His work has been published in Games and Culture, Analog Game Studies, The Journal of Games Criticism, and The Journal of Popular Culture. 

Maliha Iqbal 

Abstract: Unsettling Time: The Self-Reflexive Fantastic in Om Shanti Om and Last Night in Soho 

This paper examines cinema and routinized vision as technologies of the fantastic that operate through self-reflexivity in Om Shanti Om (2007) and Last Night in Soho (2021). Rather than treating reflexivity as an inherently demystifying or politically radical device, the paper argues that it functions as a historically contingent mechanism that can produce divergent fantastic effects, including temporal rupture, haunting, and repetition. 

In Om Shanti Om, reflexivity operates explicitly through cinema itself. The film mobilizes reincarnation as an ontological rupture within the narrative, overturning linear capitalist time. The rebirth of Om Makhija as Om Kapoor restructures class position and visibility through Shah Rukh Khan’s star body where myth, labour, and consumer culture converge. Within this reflexive economy, femininity is unevenly positioned: Shantipriya’s return as a ghost marks the limits of cinematic renewal, confining her to spectral repetition. Bollywood reflexivity thus re-mythologizes cinema. 

Last Night in Soho deploys reflexivity in a modernist register in which Eloise’s time-slip visions function as a thematically self-reflexive technology for the spectator, dismantling the romanticized fantasy of 1960s Soho held by both Eloise and the audience. While granting critical distance to the viewer, they deny agency to the subject: the past intrudes without disrupting capitalist time. Haunting here exposes structural exploitation rather than enabling temporal repair, as Sandy’s commodified youthful body is counterposed with her aged form while the formless ghosts represent the repetitive and structural character of patriarchal violence. 

Thus, reflexivity operates materially through these technologies, producing mythic intensification and disenchantment as fantastic effects. 

Bio: Maliha Iqbal is a student of English Literature at Aligarh Muslim University, India. She has published over fifty articles, short stories and poems in magazines such as Livewire (The Wire), Creativity Webzine, Cerebration, Histolit, Countercurrents, Times of India, Freedom Review, Counterpunch, ArmChair Journal, Kitaab, Counterview, Alcott Youth Magazine, Janata Weekly, FemAsia, Good Morning Kashmir, Writers Cafeteria, Café Dissensus, The New Verse News, Borderless Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, The Afterpast Review, The Palestine Chronicle, The Cadre Journal, The Paris Post and Indian Periodical. 

Sara Kabir 

Abstract: Infrastructures of Care: Solarpunk, Science-Fantasy, and Ethical Technology in Sultana’s Dream and Monk and Robot 

This paper examines Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905) and Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) as solarpunk narratives that imagine sustainable futures through alternative relationships between energy, infrastructure, and community. Situating Sultana’s Dream as a proto-solarpunk text and Psalm as a semi-post-solar narrative, the paper explores how they critique colonial, capitalist, and extractive models of technological progress while envisioning ecologically embedded, care-oriented societies. 

Drawing on Gillam (2023) and The Solarpunk Community’s (2021) manifestos, this paper argues that solar energy functions not merely as a power source but as an organizing principle shaping social relations, ethical responsibility, and everyday life. In Sultana’s Dream, solar-powered infrastructures are presented as rational, legible, and communal systems grounded in feminist and anti-colonial values, even as the narrative acknowledges the ethical dangers of solar-powered weapons. Psalm, by contrast, depicts a world shaped by the aftermath of industrial collapse, where renewable energy, rewilding, and repair replace expansion and growth, and technology recedes into the background of daily maintenance and coexistence. 

Drawing on energy humanities scholarship, particularly Rhys Williams’ work on solarpunk energy imaginaries (2018; 2019) and Andrew Dana Hudson’s concept of “de-abstracting” material relations (2020), I argue that both texts resist linear narratives of progress and technological transcendence, framing energy as political and relational and foregrounding infrastructural care, communal responsibility, and the limits of utopian hope. By juxtaposing a colonial-era feminist utopia with a contemporary science-fantasy pastoral, the paper positions solarpunk as both an aspirational and cautionary mode for imagining sustainable futures. 

Bio: Sara Kabir holds an MLitt in Fantasy Literature and an MEd in Children’s Literature and Literacies from the University of Glasgow. She is currently a Full-time Lecturer in the Department of English and Modern Languages at North South University, where she previously completed her BA in English Literature. Her research explores emerging Solarpunk narratives, the politics of hunger in children’s and young adult literature, and the intersections of grief, ecology, and cultural memory. She is also an established cultural critic and essayist whose work appears in local and international publications, including her long-standing contributions to The Daily Star since 2016. 

Özcan Kahraman 

Abstract: Solar-Powered Fantasy: Video Game Infrastructure and Magical Systems in Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand 

Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand is a 2003 Game Boy Advance game that offers a unique way to explore how fantasy and technology work together to create a magic system unlike any other. This is achieved through an integrated solar sensor that requires the player to be near actual sunlight to charge the game’s main weapon, Gun de Sol. By converting real sunlight into a force capable of killing vampires in the game through the magical technology of Gun de Sol, sunlight goes beyond being just a magical resource. The game depicts it as an external environmental condition beyond the player’s control, since it is sometimes inaccessible in various locations and at different times. Through infrastructure studies and ecocriticism, in Boktai, sunlight appears as a fantasy infrastructure because it serves as a structural support for action, defining progress and becoming visible only when the energy needed to recharge the Gun is scarce or lacking. 

Boktai links the technological elements of a video game with the player’s physical environment by utilizing external factors such as climate, sunlight, day and night, and geography. As it combines fantasy, technology, and environment, it provides a new perspective on how we view magic and its role as a way to escape reality, by creating a reliance on natural elements that fuel the fantasy and the game. Ultimately, with its solar-powered design, Boktai portrays a unique magic system that comments on fantasy and video game infrastructure while providing a distinct perspective on ecocriticism.  

Bio: Özcan Kahraman earned his BA in English Language and Literature from Hacettepe University and completed his MA at Ankara Social Sciences University with a thesis on bildungsroman experiences in fantasy narratives. He is currently a PhD student at Ege University and an instructor at ?zmir Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the mundane in fantastic universes, domestic space in fantasy narratives, and tabletop fantasy experiences. As both a scholar and a part-time Dungeon Master, he explores world-building across literature, film, video games, tabletop games, and animation, while quietly creating his own fantastic universes. 

Brian Keeley 

Abstract: Heart Transplant Technologies: The Struggle Against the Fantastic 

In the preface to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley refers to Luigi Galvani’s technique of applying an electric current to muscle tissue: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated, galvanism had given token of such things…” (Shelley, 1831:x). Portable automated external defibrillators (AED), which apply an electric current to restart a heart, are now commonplace and save countless lives after sudden cardiac arrest.   

Other cardiology-based technologies, including blood transfusions, extra-corporeal life support (ECMO) machines, and even the ‘heart-in-a-box’ Organ Care System (OCS) have all been imagined by science-fiction.   

Heart transplantation itself, however, has struggled to shake off its roots in the realm of the fantastic.  Although 10,287 heart transplants were carried out worldwide in 2024 (WHO), superstitions around the heart as the centre of personality and emotion continue to provided fertile ground for fantastical transplant narratives. Even recent heart transplant movies portray recipients possessed by the intrusion of the donor’s homicidal past, or as obsessively seeking romantic relationships with a deceased donor’s spouse.   

The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by recipients following heart transplantation is the stuff of fantasy, but such ideas are deeply embedded in popular culture, and even continue to be the subject of academic discourse.  

This paper traces the historical origins of some of the fantastical heart narratives dating back to Christian depictions of ‘the scared heart’ – when Da Vinci already understood the heart as a functioning pump, and asks why, with heart transplants long since normalised, does the emotional view of the heart persist over its biological function? 

Bio: Dr. Brian Keeley is a visual artist, filmmaker and researcher, based in the north of Scotland.  His recent PhD thesis at the University of Aberdeen explored representations of heart transplantation across contemporary visual culture. As a heart transplant recipient since 2013, Brian takes a uniquely experiential approach to his research and creative practice. He is also a transplant awareness advocate and an organ donation ambassador, and gives talks to clinical professionals and medical students, offering a patient perspective on Intensive Care and heart transplantation. Brian has previously worked as a commercial video editor, and as a teacher of Art & Design. 

Siravich Khurat 

Abstract: Hosts of Homeostasis: Digital Monster as the Balance of Parallel Convergence between Fantasy and Science 

From the 1999 anime that is Digimon Adventure to the 2025 video game that is Digimon Story: Time Stranger, Digimon (Digital Monster) has always been a media-mix series that threads the line between science fiction and fantasy. Conceptually Science-Fantasy (Digital-Monster), Digimon will be apposite for this paper’s scrutiny of the genres’ conventional elements. With Digimon’s myriad forms of Science-Fantasy convergence, this paper will observe whether the line between sufficiently advanced technology and magic exists. 

For Digimon’s database-fantasy world, this paper will build on the scholarship that examines the two genres in conjunction, ranging from Geraghty’s Channeling the Future: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy (2009) to Rogers and Stevens’s Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2018), as the dual-genre framework for Digimon. 

Equipped with such scholarship, this paper aims to unlock Digimon’s ‘magic’ rules and systems as a means to configure the possibilities of Science-Fantasy convergence. The centre of which is Homeostasis’s Hosts, as depicted in Time Stranger, who enable the contemplation of whether genre elements can be solely fantastical or technological. As personified host computers, Hosts are high administrators: the deities who represent the common flavour of computer science within Digimon. Above them, Homeostasis is the Higher Being: the Deity of deities who represents Digimon’s recurring blend of biology and fantastical monsters. With their converged nature of being scientific and fantastical simultaneously, the paper will contribute one perspective on whether and how the division of fantasy and science is worth thinking beyond a matter of classification. 

Bio: Siravich Khurat is pursuing his PhD at the University of Portsmouth, with affiliation to the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries’ School of Film, Media, and Creative Technologies. As a Raven holder of the MLitt in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow, his critical and creative interests lie in extracting thematic inspirations across Japanese fantasy as a database. His doctoral research entails inspirational media mix’s thematic motifs and reference materials such as Digimon’s Reference Book. 

Ishita Lahiri 

Abstract: Jugaad-punk: Reframing Speculative Aesthetics through South Asian SF 

This paper proposes jugaad futurism as a critical framework for rethinking the “punk” aesthetics in speculative fiction beyond Euro-American subcultural models. Originating in South Asia, jugaad names practices of improvisational problem-solving, repair, and technological bricolage under conditions of scarcity. Rather than invention born of surplus capital or institutional infrastructure, jugaad foregrounds making-do: reusing, hacking, and repurposing available materials to negotiate everyday constraints. Reading jugaad alongside speculative fiction thus allows for a reconceptualization of “punk” not as stylistic rebellion or countercultural attitude, but as an ongoing mode of survival and creativity within postcolonial modernity. 

My paper argues that jugaad futurism reframes steampunk’s fascination with bricolage and retrofitted machines through the lens of colonial and postcolonial constraint. Where steampunk often aestheticizes abundance – (ornate machinery, artisanal excess, and nostalgic industrial plenitude), jugaad futurism emphasizes uneven infrastructure, underfunded science, and informal technological expertise. Punk, in this context, emerges not as resistance from the margins but as the everyday act of negotiation between constraint and possibility. 

Through close readings of Vandana Singh’s short stories “Delhi” (2011) and “Indra’s Web” (2011), my paper traces how speculative narratives rooted in South Asian contexts imagine futures shaped by partial knowledge, modular technologies, and labouring bodies forced to improvise within extractive systems. In doing so, I present Jugaad-tech as fragile, communal, and contingent and assembled through intuition, collaboration, and repair rather. Finally, by centring jugaad as a speculative method, I argue for a postcolonial punk aesthetic grounded in living within and navigating through modernity’s broken infrastructures. 

Bio: Ishita is currently a 4th year PhD student in the department of English Literature and Language in the University of Washington. Their research interests span Feminist and Marxist theory, labour studies, speculative fiction and global south studies. Ishita is invested in questions of labour and care work and in their research, they try to investigate it through the lens of science fiction. Ishita is also interested in writing and reading speculative fiction itself as a kind of political and imaginative labour. In addition to reproductive care and gendered labour they are also intrigued by the urban spatialities of work. Ishita has taught several courses through these four years in UW focusing on themes of social reproduction, feminist and Marxist theory, cultural studies and literature. These pedagogical and scholarly initiatives continually shape their thinking about the cultural politics of care as well as highlight how everyday sites can enable collaboration and community. 

Nicole Love 

Abstract: Communities of Belief: Science / Magic as Technologies of the Fantastic in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and Ahmed Saadwai’s Frankenstein in Baghdad 

This paper proposes a comparative reading of Poor Things by Alasdair Gray and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, and examines how each text reconfigures the boundary between science and magic as technologies of the fantastic through culturally specific logic systems. These technologies of the fantastic act as critical spaces to examine power, marginalization and knowledge systems. By examining two novels that both invoke the Frankenstein narrative, yet do so through radically different ontologies, they offer a site to interrogate whether science and magic are meaningfully separable, or whether they operate as culturally specific technologies of the fantastic. 

In Poor Things, Godwin (God) Baxter resurrects Bella through the authority of Enlightenment science, institutional medicine, and pseudo-Victorian documentation, exposing scientific rationalism as the technology of the fantastic: a rule-bound belief system sustained by power, patriarchy, and individual ambition. Frankenstein in Baghdad, by contrast, situates its monstrous creation within warfare, religion and folklore. Saadawi’s creature is animated through spiritual causality and communal trauma. Magic functions as the technology of the fantastic, where the monster’s continual need for replacement parts mirrors both the maintenance logic of magic as inherently communal alongside the endless reproduction of violence. 

Read together, these novels suggest that the difference between science and magic in the fantastic is not ontological but cultural. Both texts demonstrate that technologies—scientific or magical—operate because communities believe in the systems that authorize them, revealing the fantastic as a critical space for examining power, marginalization, and contested knowledge systems. 

Bio: Nicole Love was born in 1995 and lives between Glasgow and Edinburgh, where she pursues a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. She has seen her work anthologized by Fish, BffA and FAS. She has been longlisted for the Mslexia Short Story Competition for “Sullen Kinks,” the Cymera Prize for Speculative Short Fiction for “The Second Amen” and was invited to read at the West Cork Literary Festival in the Republic of Ireland for receiving an honorary mention in 2024 with “Things That Hurt.” 

Amit Mandal 

Abstract: Alien Ancestors and the Myth of Prehistory: Reimagining Human Origins in Moonfall and Prometheus 

This paper examines the enduring human fascination with origins—questions of who we are, where we come from, and why we exist—through the science-fiction trope of “alien ancestors.” Popular culture has long speculated that humanity may share extraterrestrial origins, a notion supported by the hypothesis of panspermia, which suggests that life may have originated in space and reached Earth via cosmic bodies or alien intervention. Such fantasies, far from being arbitrary, emerge from psychological, evolutionary, and existential anxieties surrounding human insignificance in an infinite universe. 

Through a comparative reading of Moonfall (2022) and Prometheus (2012), the paper critically explores how these films construct and exploit the myth of pre-history. Moonfall imagines the Moon as an artificial megastructure created by technologically advanced human ancestors who seeded life on Earth after being destroyed by a rogue AI. The film reconfigures panspermia by suggesting a recursive human origin, foregrounding uncertainty and cosmic vulnerability. In contrast, Prometheus presents humanoid “Engineers” who deliberately sacrifice themselves to seed Earth with their DNA, aligning alien ancestry with mythic creation narratives such as that of the Greek Prometheus. 

Both films privilege humanoid alien forms, reflecting human narcissism and the desire to render the unfamiliar familiar. They also construct a fantasy of a lost pre-history marked by advanced technology and transcendence, reinforcing the belief that humanity is exceptional and cosmically significant. By situating these narratives within broader cultural and philosophical frameworks, this paper argues that the alien-ancestor myth functions as a compensatory response to existential uncertainty, revealing more about human desires than about the cosmos itself.  

Bio: Amit Mandal is a doctoral researcher in English at the University of Delhi, India. His research interests include posthumanism, environmental humanities, Anthropocene studies, multispecies ethics, and eco-cinema. His publications include Scorched Earth and Precarious Lives: A Study of the Indian Anthropocene in Kadvi Hawa and Jal (Routledge, 2025) and “From Bots to Beings: Posthuman Immortality in HBO’s Westworld,” published in Ekphrasis (2024). His forthcoming essays will appear with Taylor & Francis on AI and posthumanism in Westworld, with Peter Lang on multispecies extinction in All That Breathes (2022), and with Oxford University Press on cinematic wastescapes in Indian environmental films. 

Oana Marin 

Abstract: Crip Technics and the Geopolitics of Stasis: Uneven and Combined Development in Game of Thrones 

This paper challenges the dominant medievalist reading of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, arguing instead that its geography operates as a technologically stratified map of what Leon Trotsky termed Uneven and Combined Development. Rather than representing distinct historical stages, the series’ various regions function as a simultaneous layering of different “industrial” and socio-technical formations, whose coexistence serves to stabilize a global status quo. From the primitive accumulation of the Wildlings to the hyper-centralized, quasi-corporate archival infrastructure of the Citadel, “magic” in this world operates not as a premodern residue but as a form of fantastic technology, one that manages temporal dissonance, regulates mobility, and prevents revolutionary transformation. I focus in particular on how these heterogeneous technological spaces intersect with what I term crip technics: the adaptive, non-normative technological practices of disabled bodies. In a world organized around martial productivity, characters such as Bran Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and Doran Martell deploy fantastic technologies – from advanced saddle-engineering and palanquin systems to the bio-surveillant capacities of warging – not as compensatory “fixes,” but as infrastructural reconfigurations that subvert compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer). These practices allow disabled subjects to bypass the physical labor demands of their respective socio-technical regimes, revealing disability not as deficit but as a site of technological innovation and political possibility. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of friction, I examine the spaces where these technological formations collide: the Wall as a border-management apparatus, the Free Cities as proto-capitalist financial hubs, and the Dothraki Sea as a zone of mobile pastoral infrastructure. I argue that the “fantastic” names the systemic violence required to keep these regimes from collapsing into one another. The true horror of “Winter,” in this reading, is not supernatural invasion but the impending failure of this managed stasis, a world-historical glitch in the biopolitical regulation of surplus life. By reframing magic as infrastructure and disability as technopolitical practice, this paper contributes to broader discussions of how fantasy imagines bodies, power, and technology not as separate domains but as co-constitutive systems. 

Bio: Oana Marin is a researcher, theatre director, actress, cultural manager, and educator. She is Assistant Professor at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, where she teaches courses on contemporary theatre, performance aesthetics, cultural project management, and research methodologies in the performing arts. Her work focuses on the intersections of performance, social justice, migration, and marginalized identities. She has forthcoming articles contracted with Bloomsbury and Routledge. Since 2019 she has collaborated with the Sibiu International Theatre Festival and, since 2022, has coordinated the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market. She also develops inclusive performance practices with marginalized communities, integrating non-professional actors into professional productions. 

Mimi Markham 

Abstract: ‘Adam’s utopia masked a nightmare, as utopias generally do’: Future Technologies and Historical War in Speculative Fiction 

Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan’s first foray into the realm of science fiction and alternative history, explores the ethical quandaries surrounding the now not-so-distant technologies of androids and artificial intelligence. The novel appears firmly in the territory of speculative futures, except for its twist setting – an alternative 1982, where the atomic bomb was never dropped on Hiroshima and Margaret Thatcher resigns after losing the Falklands War, as Alan Turing grows old with his husband. 

This paper addresses two principal elements: first, the potential of fiction to assist history-makers and creative practitioners in navigating the moral dilemmas posed by generative AI; and second, how representations of fictional future technologies intersect with representations of the factual histories of the twentieth-century wars. Speaking about the importance of historical accuracy in fiction, Ian McEwan stresses that ‘in writing about wartime especially, it [accuracy] seems like a form of respect for the suffering of a generation wrenched from their ordinary lives to be conscripted into a nightmare’. To what extent do these notions about the careful handling of accuracy in historical fiction remain relevant when these same understandings of the history of war are instead used to inform conceptions of future technologies? Drawing on Katharine Harris’ concept of ‘neo-historical authenticity’, this paper examines the wider issues surrounding fantasy’s handling of dark histories, and it posits that imagined technologies and historical narratives are not as dichotomous as they may initially appear.  

Bio: Mimi Markham is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, working in collaboration with the Imperial War Museums. She previously gained a BA in English and History at Royal Holloway, University of London, followed by an MA in Public History at the University of York where she explored the potential of contemporary speculative fiction to further public understandings of difficult histories, including war and conflict. Her current research focuses on fairy tales produced during the First and Second World Wars, and they were utilised for propaganda purposes or to express wartime experiences. 

Kyna McClenaghan 

Abstract: The Fantastic in Scientology’s E-Meter—A New Age Technology 

While the term “fantastic” is most simply used as an adjective for “fantasy,” I mobilize the term as it is defined by Tzvetan Todorov, who theorized it as a literary genre that contends with the supernatural and a sense of uncertainty when confronting that which we cannot explain. I put the fantastic in conversation with Scientology’s undeniable mystical lineage and origins in the Church leader’s science fiction/fantasy writing. Scientology was introduced in the form of Dianetics in 1952, which was largely informed by psychoanalysis, the efficacy of the E-meter (which was very similar to the lie-detector and other biofeedback machines before it), and detailed an origin story of ancient alien battles that caused the need for humans to rid themselves of “thetans,” or the negative remnants of alien beings.  I will explore Scientology’s e-Meter and the Church’s invocation of the fantastic in their technology as evidenced by their doctrinal publications, marketing materials, and a media archaeology of the e-Meter itself. Through this case study, I argue the allyship of the fantastic and technology is culturally pervasive, especially in contemporary religious movements that incorporate technology into their teachings. More than this, I argue that Todorov’s fantastic accounts for an occult encounter that troubles a disenchanted, wholly rationalist view of the world.   

Bio: Kyna McClenaghan is a PhD candidate in Film in Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She researches occult media histories, putting religious studies and media archaeology in 

conversation through her dissertation entitled: “California Media Occulture.” Since working as the Managing Editor of Camera Obscura, she has taught at both UC Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College. 

Anna Milon 

Abstract: Who Built This Nature: Technophilia in Epic Fantasy 

Fantasy quests often take their protagonists into the wilderness, an environment we assume devoid of human influence. But all too often the wilderness is suffused with evidence of habitation and technology: barrows, abandoned ruins, or non-human cities. These are the ‘enta geweorc’, the ‘work of giants’ bestowed upon much of epic fantasy through Tolkien’s love of Anglo-Saxon poetry. This paper evaluates a selection of epic fantasy texts to examine how fantasy narratives treat signs of ancient technological superiority and uses them to construct diegetic nature and wilderness. 

The paper focuses on Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, Tad Williams’ ‘Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn’, Robert Jordan’s ‘The Wheel of Time’, and Lev Grossman’s ‘Bright Sword’ as examples of secondary worlds that are underpinned by pre-existing technologically advanced societies. The paper engages with Moorcock and Mieville’s criticism of Tolkienian fantasy as limited by its bucolic setting as well as current work on fantasy and ecology, to argue that epic fantasy already allows for complex readings of the enmeshment of nature and technology. 

Bio: Dr Anna Milon wrote her doctoral thesis on the Horned God as Environmental Figure in Anglophone Fantastika at the University of Exeter. She was a researcher fellow on the AHRC-funded Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures project at Nottingham Trent University, and is currently a research associate on the AHRC-funded StoryMachine project at the University of London. Her work can be found in Folklore, Correspondences, and the BFS Journal. 

Alexander Morgan 

Abstract: Machinations of Magic: Tolkien’s Typing, Elvish Technology, and the Victorian Arts & Craft Movement 

In Tolkien’s Modern Reading (2021), Holly Ordway dispels the authorial myth of Tolkien’s technophobia. Unlike C. S. Lewis, his fellow Inkling and medievalist—whose technophobic views and pre-modern nostalgia have been erroneously projected upon Tolkien—Ordway argues that Tolkien was often an enthusiastic adoptee of new technologies in both his academic scholarship and creative work; most notably, the typewriter (204). While many of his academic and literary peers—including Lewis—refused to use a typewriter themselves, opting instead to hire a (female) typist to prepare typescripts for publication, Tolkien himself owned multiple typewriters, and confesses in the preface to The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) that the final drafts of the novel “had to be typed, and re-typed: by me” (xiv).  

Following media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s account of the typewriter’s transformative effect on the writer and their writing, my paper considers the implications of Tolkien’s use of modern, twentieth-century writing technology in the production of his pre-modern secondary world of Arda. Drawing on the history of the material production of Tolkien’s literary works—how it was drafted, re-drafted, revised and typed, and by whom—as well as the ethics of technology articulated by Tolkien’s mythology in The Silmarillion (1977), I argue that Tolkien’s processes and means of literary production echo the ideological values and practices of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement, and of William Morris in particular. While Morris’s stylistic influence on Tolkien’s writing—and the pre-Raphaelite’s influence on his artistry—have been well-documented (Ordway 163; Falconer, “Earlier Fantasy Fiction: Morris, Dunsany, and Lindsay” 304), my argument focuses instead on the relation between the writer and what is written, the maker and what is made; like Morris’s entrepreneurial endeavours, Tolkien’s literary production enacts an experimental fusion of antiquated and modern techniques of production, reflecting the technological ethos of the Arts and Crafts movement, giving new perspective on Tolkien’s nuanced attitudes toward modern technology and its affordances. 

Bio: Alexander Morgan is a PhD candidate in English literature at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. His research specializes in speculative fictions, with a particular interest in the intersections of utopian, science fiction, and fantasy literatures. His dissertation, Dreams of Reason: Technologies of Fantasy and Fantasies of Technology, interprets the magical practices and artefacts of fantasy literature as a series of symbolic techniques which critique our everyday understanding of technology, its relations to us, and our relations to others, thereby exposing our fantasies about technology in the real world. 

Mars Nicoli 

Abstract: Transgender Technohorror 

In his history of trans internet, Dame-Griff (2023) points to the role digital connectivity played in building community networks and support systems for trans people, being a “lifeline” for many trans folks isolated from in-person trans communities. This phenomenon however caused an emotional overreliance on digital platforms for connection, dividing an  isolating trans individuals along axes of access and discouraging them from forming in-person bonds. 

The underlying anxieties and isolation borne of this social overreliance on the internet has recently manifested in the production of trans-authored horror narratives which engage with the tension between needing to gather digitally and the isolation and vulnerability which comes from it – with examples across artforms such as cinema (CyberGrime, Computer Hearts…), webcomics (What Happens Next) and novels (Brainwyrms, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke…). The proposed paper will explore this emerging microgenre, which I define as “Transgender Technohorror”, informed by Powell (2018) and Burke’s (2024) theories of technohorror. While experiences like social alienation and loss of contact with the embodied self through the internet are not unique to trans people, I pose that trans artists hold an epistemic privilege in this genre due to the documented, crucial role of the internet in trans community-building.  

I rely on the technohorror concept of “paradoxes of the screen” articulated in Burke, exploring how each of said paradoxes is topically experienced and expressed in trans-authored horror through the case study of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022) by Jane Schoenbrun. 

Bio: Mars Nicolí (he/him, ze/hir) is a PhD candidate at Sheffield Hallam University with the research From Transsexual Transylvania: Transgender Perspectives on Horror Film, and has co-run the horror conference Fear2000. He studied Film at the University of Roehampton, with a Master’s thesis on a transmasculine reading on MPreg fanfiction. 

He balances academic research with artistic output in many forms – currently co-running a queer art zine as part of the Fairies Collective, ze has also published prose and poetry in English and Italian, and hir short film Adam and Steve premiered in 2019 at the Weihnachtsfilmfestival in Berlin. 

Elisa Pesce 

Abstract: The (Un)Freedom to Live on the Threshold of Death – The Fantastic vs Capitalist Technology in Adam Silvera’s Death-Cast Series 

Set in an alternate contemporary New York, Adam Silvera’s Death-Cast series follows a group of teenagers whose lives intertwine over the ten years following the founding of Death-Cast, an organization that, via a mobile app, notifies subscribers if they are to die within the next twenty-four hours (so-called “Deckers”). While, to date, the series deliberately withholds a clear explanation of the technology’s mechanism, it reveals that founder Joaquin Rosa somehow receives knowledge on future Deckers from the dead. I argue that Death-Cast can therefore be read as a capitalist technology that commodifies a supernatural mode of knowledge – one rooted in Puerto Rican spiritual traditions and that would otherwise situate the narrative more firmly within the fantastic – and converts it into social, economic, and political value. 

First, I examine how Death-Cast exploits technology to sell an illusory “freedom from death” – by partially removing its uncertainty – a promise that echoes narratives of the American Dream. I ask who is granted access to this freedom, and how Silvera’s YA dystopian romance raises questions of biopolitics, fate, and free will in the contemporary United States. Second, building on Pamela Thurschwell’s reading of the series as representing teenagers as “out of time,” I explore the entanglement of technology, fantasy, and temporality in the novels. From a queer perspective, I argue that the fantastic mechanisms potentially underlying Death-Cast offer an alternative to technological control, enabling the imagination of brighter presents and futures precisely by engaging with life through death. 

Bio: Elisa Pesce holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow, where she researched gender bias and power dynamics as reflected in the category of the US maximalist novel. Her postdoctoral work further develops her interest in the cultural understanding of maximalism in twenty-first-century US literature, while also investigating the representation of US culture and oppressive power dynamics in popular genres, especially queer young adult literature. She is the recipient of the Teach@Tüebingen Fellowship for the 2026 summer semester, and her research outputs have been presented at international conferences and in journals such as EJAS, RIAS and Atlantic Studies. 

Dr. Pritam Panda, Dr. Panchali Bhattacharya

Abstract: Three Hundred Patents and A Cooking Pot: Culinary Magic as Rogue Infrastructure in Saad Z. Hossain’s Bring Your Own Spoon  

In the nanotech saturated future demonstrated in Bangladeshi fiction writer Saad Z. Hossain’s Bring Your Own Spoon, the mystical and the mechanical converge seamlessly. The djinn Imbidor, boasts of “holding three hundred patents” instead of casting magic spells. Drawing on Yuk Hui’s Theory of Cosmotechnics, this paper posits that the protagonist Hanu and the djinn Imbidor do not only pose social resistance before the system, they exhibit a rival cosmotechnics- a confluence of the mechanical and the magical that shreds through the overt universalisation imposed by the state. The short story distorts the Clarkean binary between “magic” and “science”, positioning Imbidor as a sort of “unauthorized hardware” holding 300 patents instead of being stereotyped as a mystic relic. The paper talks about how Hanu’s “illegal eatery” functions as cosmo-technical node, where the preparation of “dirty” organic matter convert itself into a “bio-hack” against the sterile food of the corporate grid. According to Hossain, the kitchen not only functions as a dining place but as an open laboratory that bypasses the state’s nanite surveillance to create an untraceable biological reality. Hossain, through the escape of the characters into an uncertain yet independent future after the eatery is demolished by the state, rejects the legitimacy of the “smart city” as the universally accepted future. The paper, through the lens of Cosmotechnics , argues that real resistance to modern technological imperialism lies in “techno diversity” based on the synergy of indigenously developed techniques and modern science which reclaims human identity from corporate synthesis.  

Bio:  

Pritam Panda (First author): The author discusses literature and language as Assistant Professor of English, JDSG College, Bokakhat, Assam, India. He completed his Ph.D. from the University of Lucknow, India and the title of his doctoral research was “Re-enactment of Today’s Myths and the Creation of Tomorrow’s Myths in Science Fiction and Cinema”. He has presented papers in several national and international conferences and published papers in Scopus indexed journals.  His areas of interests include Speculative fiction, Eco-critical studies, and Film Studies.  

Panchali Bhattacharya (Second author): Panchali Bhattacharya is an Assistant Professor (Literature) in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the NIT Silchar, Assam, India. She completed her PhD from the School of HSS&M at IIT Bhubaneswar, India. She has extensive experience in publishing research in esteemed journals and conferences, and also serves on the reviewer panel for several international journals in the field of environmental studies. Her research interests currently lie at the intersection of ecospirituality and Indigenous studies, with a particular focus on Northeast India. 

Punyashree Panda, Rrtwika Roychowdhury 

Abstract: Let It Go, Let It Grow: Building the Material Self in Frozen and Encanto 

This paper explores the act of magical creation as a foundational practice in the formation of feminine identity. Focusing on the protagonists of Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Encanto (2021), it posits that selfhood is architecturally forged through their act of constructing their own spatial domain. Using Bill Brown’s “thing theory,” the paper distinguishes between a passive object and an active, agential “thing” to argue that these protagonists do not metaphorically find themselves; they materially create who they are. The methodology involves a close textual and visual reading of key sequences through feminist materialism, such as Elsa’s construction of her ice palace and Mirabel’s restoration of the Casita, to trace how physical craft becomes synonymous with self-actualization. Material creation of identities is thus magical in both films: Elsa generates magic to build her palace, while Mirabel rebuilds her Casita to restore magic. In this way these films move away from narratives where womanhood is realized through internal reflection or romantic validation to employ a storytelling paradigm that prioritizes a tangible artistry of action and material transformation. This shift repositions the feminine archetype from a passive source of inspiration or the classical muse, to an active agent: one who builds her own domain. This paper proposes that identity is an active creative project, and advocates for an artistry rooted in doing and building. Its central claim that these narratives exemplify a powerful model of creative audacity, suggests to a global viewership that the definitive expression of self-discovery is the tangible, material labour of constructing one’s own reality. 

Bio:  

Punyashree Panda (First author): Punyashree Panda (PhD) is an Associate Professor of English at Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, India. She has widely published in the fields of Postcolonial World Literature, Indigenous Literature, Ecocriticism, Memory studies in journals such as Journal of American Studies, Studies in American Humor, ETropic, Studies in Travel Writing, NALANS etc. Her book chapters have appeared in Routledge, Palgrave MacMillan, Mythopoeic Press, Peter Lang, Atlantic Publishers, among others. She can be reached at punyashreepanda@gmail.com.  

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7027-9137 

Rritwika Roychowdhury (Second author): Rritwika Roychowdhury is a PhD research scholar in English at the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar. Her research focuses on the intersections of children’s media, gender studies, and visual culture. She can be reached at   a24en09002@iitbbs.ac.in. 

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8417-6676 

Zvonimir Prtenjača 

Abstract: “You think Ida B. Wells could have done what she did from a kitchen?”: An Afrofuturist Feminist Reading of Bitter Root 

Afrofuturist feminism is a critical praxis which, when applied to Black speculative comic books such as David F. Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene’s Bitter Root (2018–2021), prompts readers to simultaneously interrogate the intersections of racial identity, gender roles, and power over technology which have historically suppressed Black women’s agency, and re-envision these relations as future-oriented and liberatory through a complex interplay of images and texts. Comics scholar Damian Duffy notes that this interplay is central to Bitter Root’s “technosocial meanings,” which privilege kindred “connections” over “divisions” between the Sangeryes, a clan of Black monster hunters who employ both non-Western and Western technologies in their mission. These range from rootwork and conjure to “fantastical reconfigurations” of the “real” World War I weaponry, deployed to “forge” and administer “medicine” like the Fiif’no serum to the Jinoo: grotesque incarnations of “the poisonous hates of racist tradition” (Duffy) haunting Harlem Renaissance-era New York. Walker et al.’s Black family saga is thus inherently Afrofuturist, drawing on the imaginative possibilities of its subgenres like Horror Noire and Dieselfunk. However, what renders its narrative feminist and is this paper’s intervention is the authors’ intentional reconceptualization of the early twentieth-century Black female experience through Belinda “Blink” Sangerye’s character arc. As she learns to operate “technologies both arcane and new” (Nelson 12), Blink transforms from a domesticated, subservient nurturer into a self-determined conjure woman, protector, and leader. By ultimately repositioning Blink – and through her, other Black women – from heteropatriarchal “victims” to “agents of technoculture” (Nelson 12), Bitter Root articulates a model of Black female futurity which reclaims the technologies of the fantastic as tools for resistance and becoming. 

Bio: Zvonimir Prtenjača (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate and a teaching assistant with the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, the Republic of Croatia), where he researches theories, politics, and practices of representation and difference in American popular culture. If not teaching English in his elementary school or writing his doctoral dissertation, he is consuming excessive amounts of caffeinated beverages after working out, watching and reading the newly released or published superhero and dark fantasy film/TV show/comic book, or annoying his fiancée by building yet another LEGO Marvel set. 

Lorna Ross 

Abstract: ‘Then build us a world’: How Becky Chambers’ alien world-building imagines a more inclusive future for disabled people. 

Michael Saler theorises that imaginary worlds allow readers to reflect on social realities from a critical distance and experience different ways of being. As opposed to accepting reality as fixed, sub-creation for Saler reveals the actual world as an imaginary construct which can be dismantled and rebuilt like a secondary world. It is significant that the fourth instalment of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (The Galaxy) was written during the Covid-19 pandemic, which highlighted the prevalence of the social attitudes and structures that oppress and isolate disabled people on a global scale. Understanding Chambers’ alien world as conversant with its contemporary moment, this paper will explore how The Galaxy imagines a more inclusive future for disabled people. Read through a posthuman lens, an inclusive notion of what constitutes as ‘human’ is embedded in Chambers’ alien world-building, which allows the reader to appreciate how different people experience the same world differently. Through the social model of disability, I read Speaker, an alien protagonist in the novel, as a disabled individual living in an ableist society as the Wayfarers universe is not built for her Akarak species, just as the actual world is not built for disabled people. I understand Chambers’ characters as world-building collaboratively in the text, demonstrating how the actual world can be changed through connection, community organising, and collective action. Ultimately, Chambers highlights how a more inclusive future for disabled people is possible if we can imagine it together through science-fiction. 

Bio: Lorna Ross (she/her) is currently enrolled on the Fantasy MLitt programme at Glasgow University. She studies part-time and works as a Programmes Administrator at the Adam Smith Business School. She obtained a MA English Literature Honours degree from Edinburgh University where her undergraduate research specialised in understanding representations of femininity and female homosocial relationships through the Bluebeard fairy tale intertext. She was the MLitt Liaison for GIFCon 2025, ‘Queering the Fantastic’. Lorna has too many hobbies, deeply aspires to a Hobbit lifestyle, and adores mooching around the Southside’s green spaces with a coffee and sweet treat in hand. 

Mario Scorzelli 

Abstract: Extrascientific Machines: Absolute Contingency and Technological Fantasy in Leopoldo Lugones’s “La fuerza Omega” 

This paper proposes a rereading of Leopoldo Lugones’s short story “La fuerza Omega” (1906), included in the collection Las fuerzas extrañas, as an early exploration of what Quentin Meillassoux terms extrascientific fiction. While Las fuerzas extrañas is frequently classified as a foundational text of Latin American science fiction or as an example of modern fantastic literature, this paper argues that “La fuerza Omega” operates within a different speculative regime, one that neither extrapolates scientific laws nor relies on supernatural rupture. Instead, the story imagines a technological system grounded in absolute contingency: a machine whose effects are conceptually thinkable but scientifically unpredictable. Drawing on Meillassoux’s theory of absolute contingency and hyper-chaos, the paper examines how Lugones constructs a technological apparatus that mimics scientific rationality while ultimately exceeding its epistemic limits. The “Omega Force” is presented not as a plausible future technology nor as a magical artifact governed by hidden laws, but as an extrascientific device that exposes the fragility of natural laws themselves. In this sense, Lugones’s technology functions as a fantasy machine, operating beyond both scientific verifiability and traditional magical causality. By analyzing the narrative’s pseudo-scientific rhetoric, testimonial voice, and laboratory setting, the paper shows how “La fuerza Omega” stages a speculative experiment in which technology becomes a medium for thinking radical contingency rather than progress or mastery. This reading situates Lugones within a non-Anglophone genealogy of speculative fantasy that anticipates contemporary debates on magic, technology, and systems without stable rules. Ultimately, the paper argues that “La fuerza Omega” exemplifies an early form of technological fantasy in which machines do not extend scientific control but dramatize the possibility of worlds where no law—natural or magical—is guaranteed. 

Bio: Mario Scorzelli is a scholar of Latin American literature and visual culture. He holds degrees in Curatorship in Art (UNA) and Image and Sound Design (UBA) and is currently completing a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies (UNR). He is a PhD candidate in Art at the National University of the Arts (Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Argentina). He teaches at the National University of the Arts (UNA) and at the National University of Rafaela (UNRaf). His research focuses on speculative fiction, fantasy, modernity, and the intersection between aesthetics, technology, and ideology in Latin American cultural production. He is currently developing research on early twentieth-century speculative narratives and their relevance to contemporary theories of acceleration, media, and the fantastic. 

Saige Severin 

Abstract: Pondering the Orb: Artificial Intelligence and the Colonization of the Imagination 

In her 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” Ursula K. Le Guin discusses the strong anti-fiction trend in American society, particularly among the ruling class. She argues that imagination and its spiritual riches have been systematically devalued by a wealth-driven, male-centric society. The essay introduces “Le Guin’s Law,” the idea that “There is an inverse correlation between fantasy and money”. I return to Le Guin’s work fifty-two years later with Artificial Intelligence in mind. The same society that informed her essay has now spawned a series of mega corporations (and their billionaire CEOs) with names, products, and iconography drawn directly from the fantasy that once could “only be self-indulgence or escapism”.  

My paper reads Le Guin’s essay alongside the current economic and political trend of using the trappings of fantasy to sell technological “progress”. Moving beyond the obvious irony of company names like Palantir and Oracle, I consider what it means that many AI companies purposefully shroud their proprietary technology in mysterious and spiritual terms, including specific colour schemes, the use of the sparkle emoji, and the insistence on future (fantastical) uses of AI that have yet to materialize. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, I argue that AI technocrats use fantasy as a mechanism through which they can colonize and capitalize upon the imagination. Stripped of its magic soul and turned into a technological product, I read AI as a destructive continuation of Le Guin’s Law, where a false fantasy concentrates money in the hands of the chosen few.  

Bio: Saige Severin (any/all) is a Starling, from the MLitt class of 2024-25. They are a co-founder of Elsewhere, as well as its first Editor-in-Chief. Their academic interests are deeply rooted in the connection between fantasy, history, and community-building. Outside of academia, they’re working on collecting all of Pratchett’s Discworld series second-hand and love to paint, crochet, bake, cook, read, wear sparkly things, and obsess over world politics. They hope someday to collect the Thanos gauntlet of grandma hobbies and teach the new generation about art as political resistance. 

Jaya Singh 

Abstract: Extraterrestrial Contact vs. Existential Speculation: A comparative analysis of films Cargo, Koi Mil Gaya, Krish and sequels 

The mainstream Indian cinema encompasses a wide range of genres, including romantic, action, drama, thriller, and horror films. Science fiction did not receive much attention in the early years of films, though some early films contain proto-science fiction elements, often blended with fantasy and mythology. Films like Kalai Arasi (1963) and Mr X in Bombay (1964) experimented with invisibility, futuristic science, and scientific accidents. 

The paper intends to analyse the establishment of the science fiction film category in Indian Cinema with special focus on Cargo, Koi Mila Gaya, and the Krrish franchise. A huge breakthrough in Indian cinema in the category of science fiction was registered with the release of Rakesh Roshan’s Film Koi Mil Gaya in the year 2003. The gargantuan success of Koi Mil Gaya led to the Krrish franchise (2006-2019), which blended science fiction with the superhero genre, focusing on genetic enhancement, advanced technology, extraterrestrial contact with aliens and scientific ethics. Cargo represents a later phase of unconventional science fiction film, a close Western world sci-fi film in terms of the theme of a speculative futuristic setting to explore existential questions 

The film Cargo, directed by Arati Kadav, is an experimental shift towards soft science fiction. Set aboard a spacecraft managing post-death transitions, the film explores mortality, memory, and human connection while blending Indian mythology with futuristic speculation. Both films are distinct in the science fiction category and are milestones. The purpose of the paper is also to explore similarities and contrasts with the Western world’s science fiction films. 

Bio: Jaya Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature, SPM Govt. Degree College (A constituent college of the University of Allahabad), Prayagraj, India. 

she is pursuing her PhD in the department of English Literature and Modern European Languages, University of Allahabad. She has been awarded pre-doctoral research fellowship from the Centre for International Programmes, Osmania University. She has cleared NET-UGC exam. She has published many research papers in International and National Journals and presented papers.  

Caighlan Smith 

Abstract: Playing an Eldritch Influencer: Technologies of Magical Influence in Cult of the Lamb 

Video games, by the very affordances of the medium, bring a technical aspect to magic. How that magic is rendered playable – actionable, quantifiable, upgradeable, etc. – reveals certain parallels between the genre of magic represented and real-life technologies which follow similar “mechanics”. For example, in Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb, players wield the magical Eldritch powers of a cult leader, whose magical operations bear striking similarities with contemporary real-life influencer culture. Our cult leader, the lamb, is essentially tasked with becoming the top Eldritch influencer, using their dark magic to outperform influencer rivals and amass the largest following. 

Uniting research on real-life influencer tactics (He?manová), with critical review of the cult of the charismatic leader in fiction (Buchberger; see also Brown), this paper explores how Cult of the Lamb converts Eldritch magic into technologies of social influence, wherein influencers operate as competitive social capital, while followers become expendable social capital, consumed and discarded for the magical/influential increase they provide players. I tie this magic gameplay analysis into a broad discussion of neoliberal capitalism and the concerning radicalization we are seeing today through 21st century technologies of influence, as especially connected to digital fascism (Fielitz and Marcks). Cult of the Lamb, in all its cuteness, acts as a warning parody of the real-life horrors that can manifest through technologies of influence, when their power brokers are mystified, if not deified, by the uncritical devote follower. 

Bio: Caighlan Smith, PhD (she/her), is a digital media researcher. Smith completed her doctoral work at Memorial University of Newfoundland as a Vanier Scholar, studying the hero archetype in video games. She also holds a MLitt in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow and has a background in creative writing and speculative fiction, as an internationally award-winning novelist. Smith is currently studying the intersections of feminism, neoliberal capitalism, and democratic agency in video games and gaming culture. 

Clarice de Souza 

Abstract: No One Mourns The Wicked: The Construction of a Public Enemy No. 1 for Maintaining the Status Quo 

This article proposes to analyze how the construction of the character Elphaba Thropp in ‘Wicked’, in its musical version, reflects the construction of an alterity under the scrutiny of spectacular technologies of power, using green skin — interpreted by the system as an aesthetic and moral flaw — to sustain the Wizard’s hegemony and strengthen his heroic image before Ozian society. The study demonstrates that Elphaba’s transformation into a villain is a process of social engineering, in which surveillance technology and political propaganda are employed to isolate the dissident body. Furthermore, it is also observed that Elphaba’s villainization is not a character trait, but a political necessity of a system built upon lies that utilizes propaganda technology to consolidate public enemies and maintain the status of social functioning. The theoretical framework used for this analytical and bibliographic research is mainly based on Beauvoir, Todorov, Bakhtin, and Candido, exploring the construction of Elphaba passing through, first, a socially repressed and denied individual and, subsequently, consolidating herself as the greatest antagonist to the Wizard of Oz. The results indicate that technology in Oz does not serve only for progress, but to shape history based on the wills of those who command the communication machine. 

Bio: Clarice de Souza is a Professor of Portuguese Language, specializing in Literature and Academic Writing for university entrance exams. She holds a postgraduate degree in Children’s Literature in Schools from PUC-Minas, Brazil. Currently, she serves as a teacher trainer for Portuguese language educators in the municipality of Brejo da Madre de Deus (PE, Brazil), focusing on pedagogical development. As an educational entrepreneur, she runs her own preparatory writing course. Fluent in both English and Spanish, her work bridges classroom practice with educational consultancy, fostering critical thinking and literary analysis in both students and fellow educators. 

Cenk Tan 

Abstract: Artificial Companionship, Affective Labour, and Technocratic Care in Brian Aldiss’s Super-Toys Last All Summer Long 

This paper examines Brian Aldiss’s Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969) as an early critique of artificial intelligence and this critique is grounded on emotion, care, and social reproduction instead of the traditional narratives of technological autonomy or revolt. Human beings are gradually replaced by robots in a future that transforms into a new realm of material abundance, technocratic rule, and stringent biopolitical control over reproduction. The android child, David Swinton, who does not act as a human being’s failed imitation but functions as an ethically vulnerable being whose lack of attachment exposes affective deficits of the society that creates him. Building on Foucault’s biopolitics, the author introduces elements of population control and emotional regulation. Moreover, the model of emotional labour proposed by Arlie Hochschild provides an insightful perspective on the economic aspects of love in the sense that, in a world where no human beings are available or nobody is willing to care, the idea of care can be manufactured at the level of artificial agents. Additionally, Donna Haraway’s posthuman ethics offers the reader the key to a relational interpretation of David where his exclusion from the realm of recognition marks the limits of humanist moral frames, whereas Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of technological proletarianization allows an understanding of how automation destroys the workers’ affective and social capacities instead of strengthening them. Super-Toys All Summer Long challenges the notion of AI being an existential threat by pointing out to the social conditions rendering artificial companionship appealing. It does so by revealing a technocratic utopia emptied of emotion, in which emotional scarcity becomes the defining condition of the society. Accordingly, the article argues that Aldiss’s story not only marks the beginning of a debate on AI and human relationships but also lays the conceptual groundwork for subsequent discussions. 

Bio: Cenk Tan received his BA in American Culture and Literature from Hacettepe University (Ankara, Turkey). He earned his PhD from the department of English language and literature. Cenk is a trilingual speaker of English, French, and Dutch and specializes on topics such as science fiction, ecocriticism, cinema/film criticism and continental philosophy. He works as an associate professor at Pamukkale University (Denizli, Turkey) and is the author of various scholarly articles. He is also the editor of many published and upcoming books. His latest books include, Science Fantasy: Critical Explorations in Fiction and Film and Eco-Concepts: Critical Reflections in Emerging Ecocritical Theory and Ecological Thought published by Lexington Books (Bloomsbury) in 2024. Cenk is currently co-editing the upcoming volumes, Class Conflict in 21st Century Science Fiction Film and Reinventing The Witch: Witchcraft and Sorcery in 21st Century Fiction and Film both to be published by McFarland Books in 2026. 

Lara Toppel 

Abstract: Alethiometer and Adolescence: Regarding the Matter of Consciousness in His Dark Materials   

Phillip Pullman intertwines science and fantasy in the world of His Dark Materials by introducing the conscious matter of Dust, and the experimental theologians who study its connection to original sin. Central to the study of Dust is the alethiometer, a truth-telling device similar to a compass. Scientists of Lyra’s world seek to destroy original sin, by separating children from their dæmons, as they are believed to be the main source attracting Dust. Lyra’s unique ability to intuitively correspond with the alethiometer ultimately pertains to her innocence and vanishes in the awakening of her sexuality. Her maturity is reflected by her dæmon’s settling as a pine marten, marking Lyra’s transition into adulthood and allowing her to be surrounded by the elementary particles of consciousness.   

Pullman does not attribute His Dark Materials to the fantasy genre, rather describing his writing as ‘stark realism’ which concerns itself with themes such as adolescence, psychology or sexuality, whilst fantasy is only used to ‘support and embody’ these central themes (Pullman 1998). However, as I argue, Pullman uses the fantastic concept of conscious matter as primary force to illustrate that a world without sin, and thus without consciousness, is also an existence in which social awareness and original thought evaporate. The Dust controlling the alethiometer is the technological force which allows for deeper understandings of the universe. Yet adults blame adolescent development and justify the exploitation of children as sacrifices for a ‘better’ world.   

Bio: Lara Toppel (she/her) is a current postgraduate student of the Fantasy MLitt programme at the University of Glasgow. She recently completed her BA in American Studies and German Literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests include Arthurian Studies, Fairy-Tale Retellings, Queer Theory, and Children’s Fantasy Literature. She has a lovely cat named Merlin.   

Percy Truong 

Abstract: ‘Horror Lurks Within’: World-building through Intratextuality and Intertextuality in Magic the Gathering’s Innistrad Expansion. 

Released on September 30th, 2011 (Magic Set Archive), the Magic the Gathering expansion ‘Innistrad’ introduces players to the titular world of Innistrad. Populated by humans, vampires, werewolves, angels, and spirits, the plane’s aesthetic qualities pull primarily from the trappings of Gothic horror. This paper aims to contextualize Magic cards as a distinct world-building technology closely connected to, but independent of, mediums like traditional literature. While some have written on Magic cards as a novel form of literacy before, analyses of cards’ function as world-building tools prove absent from wider scholarly discourse. I argue that ‘Innistrad’ world-builds both within and between cards to spawn individual elements of the world which converse with each other to build a greater sense of whole. I employ Scott McCloud’s theories on the form of comic books to explore how Magic cards function to construct world-building elements through the collaboration between image and word. Additionally, these acts of intratextuality manifest as intertextuality through references to Gothic horror, tying the expansion to a pre-established canon and aesthetic system to derive legitimacy and further shortcut player understanding of the world. Situating ‘Innistrad’s intertextuality through Brian Atterbery’s theory of mitochondrial literature further allows this paper to further contextualize ‘Innistrad’ and Magic’s position within wider fantasy and its reinvention of Gothic horror tropes. Ultimately, exploring trading cards as a world-building technology opens discussion into form within fantasy, allowing us to deconstruct and broaden our collective sense of what a piece of fantasy media could look like beyond conventional storytelling mediums. 

Bio: Percy Truong is currently completing an MLitt Fantasy Literature degree at the University of Glasgow. His research interests lie within Literary Studies, Comic Studies, and Film Studies and explores Orientalism and representations of colonialism. He is also interested in depictions of ghosts in non-western media, especially constructions of hauntings as cultural traumas in Asian art cinemas. His undergraduate thesis investigated the role of violence and trauma in the comic series Saga and queer-inflected love as an avenue out of those cycles. 

Özlem Uslu 

Abstract: The Biomechanics of Death: NDEs as Traumatic Technologies of the Body in V.E. Schwab’s Villains 

In V.E. Schwab’s Villains series, the man-made metamorphoses from human to “ExtraOrdinary” (EO) are stripped of traditional mystical whimsy. Instead, the process is described with the industrial coldness of a technological, and therefore repeatable, procedure. The protagonists, Victor Vale and Eli Ever, “hack” nature by treating the Near-Death Experience (NDE) not as an end, but as a mechanism to design a new form of life, attempting to upgrade the individual through deliberate trauma. This paper argues that the resulting powers function less as a “magical” gift and more as a biomechanical modification that renders the subject permanently impaired. 

Utilizing Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory and the biopolitical frameworks of Foucault and Agamben, this presentation analyses how the EO body disrupts the binary between “ability” and “disability”. Rather than achieving a post-human ideal, the protagonists gain powers that impose eternal costs: chronic physical pain, psychological obsession, and a fundamental “wrongness” that necessitates constant medical or violent intervention. I will specifically examine Eli Ever as a biopolitical agent who attempts to “normalize” the EO population. Through his failed medical thesis, Eli equates bodily difference with deviance, transforming the fantastic into a pathology that must be “cured”. Ultimately, Schwab’s work reveals that when the fantastic is pursued as a technology of mastery, the result is not liberation, but a deepened entanglement in systems of bodily and social control. 

Bio: Özlem Uslu is a Master’s student in English Language and Literature at Akdeniz University. Her research explores the intersection of power, institutional knowledge, and speculative fiction, with a primary focus on R.F. Kuang’s Babel and M.L. Wang’s Blood Over Bright Haven. Utilizing a theoretical framework grounded in Foucauldian biopolitics and the works of Hannah Arendt and Byung-Chul Han, her current thesis analyses how magic systems function as metaphors for exploitative systems of control in the form of industrialization. Her broader interests include the representation of bodily trauma and the biomechanics of the fantastic in contemporary genre fiction. 

Julia Jin Wang 

Abstract: The Affective Potentials of Writing: Fantastical Depictions of Mental Health Management in Murashige’s The Lost Souls of Benzaiten 

This paper applies Brian Massumi’s (2002) affect theory to examine a fantastical expression of the technology of writing in Kelly Murashige’s (2024) young adult novel, The Lost Souls of Benzaiten. Its protagonist, Machi, lives with depression and refuses to speak, communicating by writing on a whiteboard. When she prays to the Japanese goddess Benzaiten to become a robot vacuum cleaner, Benzaiten appears, with Machi’s prayer written on a little board strung on her necklace. I read their fantastical adventures as expressions of the writing process, such as editing, going to unplanned places, and seeing a reflection of true feelings. I argue that this fantastical portrayal of writing explores writing’s affective potential to instigate mindset changes, in this case shifting Machi’s depression and enabling her to speak again. 

For Massumi, human experience has three ontological dimensions: virtual, actual, and hinge in-between. The virtual holds all potential experiences. Affect occurs when a potential experience is “selected” and moves toward the actual. Affect belongs in the hinge and connects us to potentiality, enabling deep changes. 

In the novel, Machi “writing” to Benzaiten creates a state in-between the mortal and immortal worlds, where Machi can see what Benzaiten can, such as spirits in the mortal world. Thus, I read the immortal world as the virtual dimension, Benzaiten as bringing potential experiences from there, and Machi’s in-between state as the hinge-dimension of affective experience. Machi’s experiences in this space change her deep feelings about being alive, shifting her depression into a more manageable state. 

Bio: Julia Jin Wang holds a PhD in Children’s Literature and Education from the University of Cambridge, where she studied how the reader’s orientation in fantasy multiverses implicates their feelings toward the characters and affects their real-life cognitive habits and pathways of alienation. Her research interests include fantasy, cognitive stylistics, affect and emotions, spatiality, (dis)ability, Neo-Daoism, children’s literature, and diaspora studies. Her most recent publication is “A Neo-Daoist Adolescence: Cultivating Selfhood in The Daily Life of the Immortal King,” in The Lion and the Unicorn. 

Amanda Weiss 

Abstract: Technologies of Faith and Fantasy: Containing Catastrophe in Makoto Shinkai’s Post-2011 Disaster Trilogy 

Produced in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear accident, Japanese director Makoto Shinkai’s “disaster trilogy” responds to the limits of modern technology-based disaster prevention and response. Together, the three films—Your Name (2016), Weathering with You (2019), and Suzume (2022)—expose the inadequacy of contemporary technological frameworks to fully prevent or meaningfully process large-scale natural destruction. Instead, they reframe disaster response through “technologies of faith and fantasy”: magical interventions that mitigate or reverse catastrophe through religious and traditional symbols, specialized roles, and ritualized practices.  

As the failures surrounding Fukushima made clear, contemporary disaster prevention often rests on a false assumption of human mastery over nature. Shinkai’s films instead draw on Japanese mythology and Shinto cosmology, which position humans not as rulers of nature but as “children of the kami” who are embedded within larger systems of tsunagari (connections and relationships). Accordingly, Shinkai’s characters confront catastrophic phenomena such as comets, climate change, and earthquakes not through scientific rationality, but through supernatural mechanisms grounded in Shinto belief and myth. Calamity is contained or mitigated through traditional crafts and premodern tools such as kumihimo (corded braid), kuchikamizake (“mouth-chewed” sake), and mikageishi (magical stones). These interventions are enacted through ritualized roles including miko (shrine maidens) and across symbolic thresholds like torii (Shinto gates). These magic systems articulate a post-2011 cultural response that acknowledges the limits of modern science and technology, imagining the restoration of balance between humanity and nature through interconnection, ritual, and belief. 

Bio: Amanda Weiss is Associate Professor of Japanese at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses on Japanese media and society. She is also editor and founder of Hivemind: Global Speculative Fiction, a science fiction and fantasy magazine focused on language and culture. Her book, Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors: Competing Masculinities in Chinese and Japanese War Cinema (Hong Kong University Press, 2023), explores contemporary East Asian remembrance of WWII. 

Makayla Wigder 

Abstract: Urban Romantasy: How Technology and Romance Come Together 

Sarah J. Maas is lauded as one of the initiators of the Romantasy Movement. Her fantasy worlds, like many across the fantasy genre, are projected onto and inspired by a fictional medieval Europe, but the setting of series Crescent City, Lunathion, resembles a modern American city. Characters have access to cameras, cell phones, social media, and cars which changes how characters interact and navigate the secondary world. This reach into urban fantasy depicts how readers, specifically women, navigate cities, allowing Maas to ground real societal issues in a recognizable context. Portraying Lunathion and protagonist Bryce Quinlan as fitting into readers’ conceptions of the primary world allows readers to recognize ourselves. 

The hybridization of magic and primary world technology within Lunathion implies Crescent City is an urban fantasy. However, series like Crescent City differentiate themselves from paranormal romance, romantasy, and urban fantasy to manifest a fuzzy set loosely considered “urban romantasy.” Crescent City uses romance to push back on the detective, monster-hunter aspects of urban fantasy and express grounded feminist social critique from the female gaze. It adds a softness that urban fantasy sometimes lacks. Integrating technology and magic into the modern worldbuilding provides a different type of representation than either romantasy or urban fantasy by showing women navigating cities be sarcastic and harsh but also as kind, heroic leaders. Though this duality exists across romantasy, urban romantasy is in the unique position to reflect the subtle differences in the modern female experience that cannot be captured by unrecognizable worlds. 

Bio: Makayla Wigder (she/her) graduated from the University of Glasgow’s English Fantasy Literature MLitt program in 2025 (go Starlings). She wrote her final dissertation on the female gaze and visionary fantasy within the Romantasy Movement and BookTok communities, and this dissertation is one of the first uses of the word “romantasy” in scholarly literature beyond the undergraduate level. Makayla also served as a founding editor for Glasgow’s fantasy literary journal Elsewhere last year during her time in the cohort. Her special research interests are romantasy and romance and their impacts on the fantasy genre and contemporary literature. 

Dr. Grace A.T. Worm 

Abstract: Contraception as Magic and Technology in Pierce and Hobb 

There is one technology that, whether real or fantastical in origin, has the power to fundamentally reshape society yet is often overlooked as foundational or radical: contraception. Reliance on the Waves metaphor in Anglocentric feminist scholarship has confined the radical significance of contraception to a historical movement of the 1960s, eroding sustained attention to contraception as foundational to feminist aims. Linda Gordon argues that birth control has never been solely about technology; it has always been about power and the cultural construction of women’s function and role within society. Gordon further notes that there was invariably “a complex, mutual, causal relationship between birth control and women’s status” within societies throughout history, and that a society’s valuation of women’s rights is closely linked to the development of birth control technology, as societies that prioritize women tend to support the advancement of contraception, which engenders further equality through its technological benefits. The inclusion of this “feminist technology” in fantasy worlds highlights its role in shaping social structures because its presence is a deliberate authorial choice. In fantasy texts, where birth control is imagined through magic rather than constrained by realism, it can take multiple symbolic forms that shape its perception in society. Using a close reading of contraception as magic and technology in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall Universe and Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy, this paper will demonstrate how framing birth control as magic alters the fantasy societies these authors create and underscores the transformative importance of this feminist technology. 

Bio: Grace Ann Thomas Worm (she/they) will ideally be finished with her PhD on Female Fantasy in Tamora Pierce’s fantasy world of Tortall at the University of Glasgow. Grace is an English Literature International Bachelorette accredited secondary teacher who has taught across the U.S. This would be her 6th time participating in a GIFCon. She won’t shut up about video games and bad TV, so take pity and talk to her about them.