I changed my email signature from Reader to Professor. Heartfelt thanks to all the friends, comrades, collaborators and colleagues for all they’ve done over the last couple of decades to make that possible.
And I published The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. It has been really odd to be published ‘trade’ rather than ‘academic’, and by a press who seem to actually want to sell copies – which has involved:
- doing publicity across all my socials (both of them)
- already being reviewed, including a couple before actual publication, rather than waiting a year or two or more (Times Higher, The Arts Desk, New Statesman, The Independent, ELCI, The Los Angeles Review of Books, It’s Freezing in LA)
- a pre-publication extract (courtesy of Boston Review)
- having an actual book launch (at Book Haus in Bristol, with the support of Bristol Ideas and UWE’s Digital Culture Research Centre)
- publishing tie-in pieces: ‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Some Alien Invasions‘ and ‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Shuggie Bain‘
- recording a podcast for ELCI (Economy, Land and Climate Insight)
- and doing public events:
- a panel at Edinburgh Radical Book Fair, with Harry Josephine Giles, author of Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel and Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, author of How We Are Translated: A Novel
- ‘What is the Anthropocene Unconscious?’, Visual and Materials Culture Research Group, Northumbria University, 15 December 2021
- ‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Zombies and Flying Sharks’, School of Critical Studies/ Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow, 24 November 2021
- ‘The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture’, Centre for Research into Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, University of Warwick, 26 January 2021
I also published two books chapters:
‘Speculative Fiction’, in Joshua L. Miller, ed., The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century American Fiction (Cambridge UP 2021), 63–78
‘Flicks! Flicks! I Love You!’ in Melanie Kelly, ed. Opening Up the Magic Box: Friese-Greene and Reflections on Film (Bristol Ideas 2021), 86–89 – also hear me read it on soundcloud
delivered one conference paper:
‘For an Imperfect Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Research Association 2021: The Future as/of Inequality, Seneca College, Toronto, Canada 18–21 June 2021
joined two advisory boards:
University of Minnesota Press’s Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures series
Film Noir UK
introduced two film screenings:
Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor for The Roses Theatre, Tewkesbury, 31 October 2021
Ozu Yasujiro’s Hijosen no onna/Dragnet Girl for Southwest Silents/BFI/Arnolfini, the Arnolfini, Bristol 30 October 2021
examined three rather tasty PhDs:
Päivi Väätänen, Rhetorical Narratology and the Politics of Identity in Afrofuturist Fiction, (University of Helsinki)
David Hartley, The Fantastic Autistic (University of Manchester)
Joshua Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction (Monash University)
with Stacey Abbott and Craig Ian Mann co-founded the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Science Fiction and Fantasy special interest group – find us on Facebook and Twitter
and, thanks to Peter Wright, wrote some ancillary content for a Crooked Dice game – two fake reminiscences by made-up filmmakers to be included with the remastered blu-rays of two non-existent films, Conquest of the Dinosaurs (1973) and Bullet for a Dinosaur (1975).
Mark Bould 