Classics and Sci-Fi Panel at next year's APA

Huh. Here's a Call For Papers for next year's APA conference. I can't decide if I have anything to submit.

Ad astra per antiqua: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction

A rich and relatively under-explored area in modern receptions of classical traditions is science fiction. Although points of comparison may be offered by the study of classics in other areas of ‘popular culture’ (e.g., film and comics), science fictional receptions of classical traditions have historical and artistic significance all their own. A complex relationship is evident already at science fiction's arguable point of origin, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), whose subtitle "The Modern Prometheus" alludes to classical meditations on the use of technology to create and control nature and human life. The relationship was developed further by such 'classic' authors as Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864), H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, 1895), and Frank Herbert (Dune, 1965). More recently, classical material has been a part of science fiction in genres as diverse as space opera (e.g., Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek franchise, 1966-present) and steampunk (e.g., William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, 1990), as well as direct but complicated re-tellings of classical tales (e.g., Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos series, 1989-1997, and Ilium, 2003).

Science fictional receptions of classical traditions raise questions not only about science but also about, for example, religion, philosophy, social thought, political theory, and literature. Such questions necessarily must address the complex interaction between (1) science fiction's continuous but mysterious reference to scientific method and to the historical results of that method's applications, and (2) the classical tradition's status – in a mixture of historical fact and fictive imagination – as pre- or non- or differently-scientific. How, then, does science fiction imagine ancient thinking as contributing to or challenging modern discourses with special regard to those discourses' scientific aspects or interests? How does it constitute the classics in light of master narratives of modern scientific knowledge and practice? By raising these and other questions, the comparative study of classics and science fiction helps to ask how ancient Greco-Roman classics continue to speak – or are received as speaking – to a modern world separated from antiquity by profound processes like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.