Annual Conference of the Science Fiction Research Association

Science Fiction has long been a powerful medium for representing, envisioning, exploring, and critically reflecting upon transitions of all kinds: from mind-bending technological leaps to radical societal upheavals, from personal transformations to global paradigm shifts. Some transitions are visible and explicit, others implicit and recognized in retrospect. Some are planned or desired, others accidental or enforced. And multiple transitions can be related to each other in very complex ways. The genre has developed its own distinct poetic, representational and metaphorical capabilities to make our real-life transitions visible, to reflect upon and make sense of them. But transitions can also happen to science fiction as it traverses history, interacts with other forms, and shifts its position in the contemporary genre system: from one ideological or discursive formation to another, from national to global arena, from genre to mainstream, and so on.

Thus, “Transitions” seeks to discuss all kinds of transitions as the thematic, narrative, formal, historical, and philosophical driving force behind SF: both how SF envisions transitions, and how the representation of transitions critically and metaphorically reflects upon our own.

The project is a part of the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024 main programme.