Session: 2k
Day: Wednesday 15 April
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 2.19
Chair: Cristina Diamant

Speakers: 

• Megen de Bruin-Molé (University of Southampton)
• Cristina Diamant (independent)
• Francis Gene-Rowe (University of Southampton)

Roundtable Abstract: In this roundtable, the co-directors of the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) address solastalgia (Glenn Albrecht) not by emphasizing human fragility or culpability for ecocide, but by proposing an antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) mesh of multispecies configurations in resonance (Harmut Rosa), as opposed to an accelerationist vision which devalues the agency of nonhuman actants. This conversation takes place against the backdrop of the LSFRC creative and critical zine Compost Futures to be published in 2026, which looks past the cruel optimism (Lauren Berlant) of dual-use technology, instead using compost as a theoretical framework to sketch a future beyond extractivist fantasies of domination. In doing so, we propose a critical orientation towards more-than-human intersubjectivity, rooting around and rooting for each other as kin in the Cthulhucene (Donna J. Haraway). We will examine several “killer stories” (Ursula K. Le Guin) and poke holes in them, revealing the matter otherwise presumed to be inert and readily commodified. The past may be a foreign country, eroded and fleeting, but the pile of wreckage is hot and writhing with potential, disturbing neat temporalities and boundaries by extending its soft tendrils into alternative futures of symbiotic posthumanist ecologies (Karpouzoi and Zampaki). There is an appetite not for a world without us, but beyond us and through us. 

The London Science Fiction Research Community is an organisation of SF scholars and fans, led by early career scholars, writers and artists.

Megen de Bruin-Molé is Associate Professor of Digital Media Practice with the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and co-director of the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group. She specialises in ‘monstrous’ adaptation and contemporary remix culture, in particular the digital afterlives and appropriations of historical archives, ephemera, and memory in popular culture. 

Cristina Diamant is the President of the all-Ireland Independent Workers’ Union, a Public Relations Subcommittee Volunteer for Women in Research Ireland, and a member of the Irish Network for Gothic and Horror Studies. Her research interests include speculative fiction, monster studies, materialist feminism, medical humanities, industrial relations, and popular culture, especially in the context of investigating various representations of the future from the margins.

Francis Gene-Rowe plays games, understands them, and teaches other people to make them. This helps with imagining things we need and especially things we’re told we don’t need. They also make oracles that don’t tell you about your success and write depressing and horrible poetry. This methodology allows the darkness to be safely transferred onto the page and the light to remain.