To reserve a place send a cheque or Postal Order payable to Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College for £10 (unwaged/student) or £25 (waged) to: Dr Andrew M Butler, D28, Dept of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe, HP11 2JZ, GB. This price includes lunch and refreshments. For further details contact Andrew M Butler at ambutler@enterprise.net.

Information correct as of 30 April 2003

Dr Stacey Abbott
(University of Surrey Roehampton)
Vampire Road Movie

The vampire road movie is a hybrid genre that emerged in the 1980s, integrating the iconography of the road movie and the western with the conventions of the vampire film as a means of creating a new vampire myth. The primary way in which the mythology was reinvented was the release of the vampire from the confines of the gothic castle or grave. In folklore vampires were traditionally confined to haunting their village or family, needing to stay within reach of their grave. Even in such modern texts as Bram Stoker's Dracula and the many film adaptations that followed, the vampire's movement is still limited by its need to remain within close proximity of its coffin. The vampire road movie however completely breaks free of the temporal and spatial confinement usually associated with the gothic text by replacing the coffin with the car and the ancient castle with the modern highway. In this paper, I will demonstrate that through the reinvention of the conventions of the genre, the vampire, in films such as Near Dark (1987), John Carpenter's Vampires (1998) and The Forsaken (2000), no longer embodies the primitive impulses and barbarity of the past but rather the destructive and alienating nature of modernity and the urban highway.

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
(University of Kent at Canterbury)
H.P. Lovecraft and the Demonic Numinous

This paper explores the manner in which H.P. Lovecraft inverts the concept of the numinous developed by the philosopher of religion Rudolph Otto to represent the sense of an invisible but awesome presence that inspires both dread and fascination and represents the non-rational essence of vital religion, to evoke, not the sense of an uplifting spiritual encounter but the intimation of a horrifying presence, which is yet sublime in its majestic otherness. The paper demonstrates the processes through which Lovecraft evokes awe at the profundity and scope of the cosmos through the creation of figures who would normally have inspired only a sense of dread but which he transforms, in spite of their profoundly negative essence, into what the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner describes as messengers of infinity. The paper concludes on an evaluation of Lovecraft's aesthetic, as exemplified in his stories and programmatic letters and essays, as a vital contribution to the creation of a metaphysics of the demonic. This metaphysics is presented from the perspectives of philosophies which privilege paradox as fundamental to the structure of the cosmos, such as the thought of Jacob Boehme who describes God as portraying the coexistence of contraries, and the Jewish mystical thought of the Kabbalah, which presents the demonic host as the necessary obverse of the angelic presences.

Dr Anna Claydon
(Edge Hill College of HE)
The Projected Man: The B-movie and the Monstrous-masculine

The B-movie, as a manifestation of the film industry, has, alongside its monsters, taken on mythological properties as part of subculture and, on the flip side of mainstream production, has long been seen as cinema's Mr Hyde. The British science-fiction-horror b-movies of the 1960s were in a unique position to question not only the Cold War mythology of American cinema but also the changing sexual politics of the nascent cultural revolution and the failure of masculinism. In this paper, through an examination of Ian Curteis' little known film The Projected Man (1966), I shall discuss how the film uses the mythic templates employed by much psychoanalytical film criticism, particularly Barbara Creed's flawed yet interesting The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), to formulate a monstrous-masculine, driven by jealousy towards the pre-oedipal strong female which, within the political context, offers a critique of the collapse of patriarchal ideologies. In the second half of this discussion I shall also examine how the monstrous-masculine in science-fiction film, the new mythic form of the feminist era, which reshapes the gothic imagery of Shelley and Stevenson into a postmodernist horror, can be traced within other contemporary films as a symptom of de-identification within masculine subjectivity and thus, as the ultimate Kristevan deject. Films discussed within this section will include Strange Days (1995) and Bicentennial Man (2001).

Stefan Ekman
(Gφteborg University, Sweden)
Carrying the Torch: Astrid Lindgren's Renewal of Myths

It is quite possible to re-tell the plot of Astrid Lindgren's Mio, My Son in some detail and still make it sound like the plot of The Lord of the Rings. That one would be influenced by the other can safely be ruled out; both were published in the same year, 1954. Not only has Lindgren used the monomythical hero, she has also dipped her literary ladle into the same cauldron of stories as Tolkien. What myths she has decided to use have shifted over time, however, from the traditional, questing hero, via the dragon slayer and a threatened Eden to the mythical beings of the deep forests. In Ronia, The Robber's Daughter, the world is shrunk to Matt's Forest and its goblin folk inhabitants, invented or re-invented from the cauldron of stories: hell harpies, murktrolls, the Unearthly Ones and the irresistibly cute rumphobs.

In my paper, I intend to look at the three high fantasy novels Mio, My Son (Mio, min Mio), The Brothers Lionheart (Bröderna Lejonhjärta), and Ronia, The Robber's Daughter (Ronja Rövardotter) and discuss how, while the heroes conform less and less to Joseph Campbell's monomyth, other mythical elements are included in the stories, and how these mythical elements have become myths in their own right among Swedish readers, adults as well as children.

Lincoln Geraghty
(University of Nottingham)
Creating and Comparing Myth in Twentieth Century Science Fiction: Star Trek and Star Wars.

Star Trek's cultural value with its own fans would be depreciated if it lacked grounding in historical fact. They watch the series because it is founded on an authentic representation of contemporary life inherently integrated with their history. Indeed, both Star Trek and Star Wars not only take historical facts and make compelling stories from them, they also use culturally inherited myths and symbols synonymous with the very roots of Western civilisation. In this paper I want to examine those myths central to science fiction's two most popular products which will highlight their similarities and differences, perhaps offering an explanation of why they became and still remain so popular with fans and academics for over thirty five years. After a brief outline of how myth is used in Star Trek I reevaluate Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence's seminal piece The American Monomyth (1977) in the context of Star Trek's more recent incarnations. Following on from that, and in response to the fact that there has been a substantial amount of previous work done on Star Trek and Star Wars individually but not together, I offer my own comparative analysis of how the two science fiction franchises compare in their creation and use of history and myth.

What is striking about Star Trek and Star Wars is the enormous amount they can tell us about society; how much they represent contemporary trends and tastes is just as significant as what histories and myths they use to create their own versions of an alternate reality. Both franchises have turned to their own historical narratives to resurrect new and exciting stories to keep their fans involved and interested: Star Trek has created a pre-Kirk series that charts its own journey through very detailed and catalogued history; George Lucas has concentrated on fleshing out and substantiating his original trilogy by investing millions in making three prequels that he hopes will recapture the imagination of cinema goers. These acts of self-examination not only highlight science fiction's trend of looking to its forbears but they show how much American society has become disgruntled with its own time; to all intents and purposes the present is having a knock-on effect on what science fiction audiences want to see on their screens. As a result, the mythic and future times offered by both series offer a way out of dealing with contemporary life; it is not because audiences want to live in a mythic past but rather history and myth offer a better template to fantasise about and create the future. This paper will try to delineate and emphasise some of the similarities and differences between these franchises' use of myth and history and why they are so popular with their fans.

Dr Tristram Hooley
(University of Leicester)
Visions of a New Jerusalem: Predictive fiction in the Second World War

Angus Calder has persuasively described how the stories of Blitz, the People's War and the New Jerusalem have been woven together into a powerful mythology that places the Second World War at the centre of British culture. This myth making was not merely a retrospective process, but one that was going on throughout the war itself. Political manifestos and leftist journalists dreamed of utopias that would ensue after the end of the fighting and they used these visions to influence contemporary politics. Alongside this public discourse of post-war reconstruction flourished a vibrant strand of imaginative political fiction that investigated a variety of possible futures for British society. This paper will show how these predictive fictions contributed to and challenged the public narrative of post-war socialist reconstruction that led to the election of the 1945 Labour Government.

Dr Nick Hubble
(University of Sussex)
Virtual Histories and Counterfactual Myths: Christopher Priest's The Separation

The American 'strategic thinker', Philip Bobbitt, argues 'that without its own history, no society can be constituted as an independent entity.' But, in recent years, history has come to be seen as just another unreliable narrative or myth (following Roland Barthes). The key consequence of this understanding has been the emergence of counterfactual history: the 'what if' school of thought. Such histories assimilate poststructural theory in their conscious deployment of chains of signification dependent on the form/meaning dichotomy, but do so for the age-old ends of legitimating current power structures, e.g. Bobbitt on the US However, counterfactuals were common in science fiction long before they entered mainstream history. This paper takes a recent counterfactual work of science fiction, Christopher Priest's The Separation (2002) – in which the Hess mission is successful, resulting in a peace treaty between Britain and Germany being signed in 1941 – and theoretically analyses what the novel signifies. The question is whether the book simply conforms to the current mainstream usage of counterfactual history, which purports to show why things happened (i.e. by showing what would happen if Britain had made peace with the Nazis, the book would really be showing why there was no alternative to military victory and millions dead)? Or, whether counterfactual history could operate differently as a performative form of imagination in the utopian tradition of science fiction – writing an alternative future in an act designed to help bring it about?

Dr Lorna Jowett
(University College Northampton)
Happy Family / Horror Family: Parents and Family in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I argue that Buffy reproduces anxieties about adult authority and parental absence or neglect which pervade both teen horror and slasher films. Such texts overturn the myth of the happy nuclear family, replacing it with a horror family that can allegorically expose the dark side of family life. Buffy's teens, like other teen horror characters, undermine both adult authority and adult responsibility by being protagonists (it is not adults but the teens who save the world) and so adults are rarely represented positively. Furthermore, I argue that many of these antagonistic or downright scary adults are presented as parent figures, situating them within family structures. I will also discuss Buffy's strong serial form as a factor in its representation of the family. Robyn Warhol and others have argued that serial form both resists the traditional marriage plot of much non-serial fiction and enables the construction of non-traditional and non-nuclear families. I suggest that, as in other serial texts, Buffy's characters form a supportive group that has been read as a family and I argue that this alternative construction also allows the show to resist the patriarchal structure of the traditional family.

Paul Kincaid
(Independent Scholar)
Islomania? Insularity? Exploring the Myth of the Island in British Science Fiction

From Thomas More's Utopia to China Miéville's The Scar, the island has been one of the central characteristics of British science fiction, but islands hardly ever feature in the science fiction of America, Australia or Europe. In this paper I intend to examine the role of the island in the British imagination, and try to interpret some of the things it says about us.

Dr Tanya Krzywinska
(Brunel University)
Playing Buffy: Interactivity, Remediation and Mythic Resonance in the videogame version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is proving to be something of a myth for our time. Its rich use of allegorical resonance is in part derived from the show's combination of the supernatural and the everyday to articulate the precarious fragility and assertions of identity. In a testimony to its popularity and mythic power, the Buffy-verse has broken the bounds of its television progenitor and now has many different media articulations. This paper focuses on the particular attributes that the remediation of the TV show into videogame format brings to the Buffy-verse. Are some of the suspenseful pleasures and mythic inflections of the show lost once players are able to control what Buffy does? Or does interactivity add a new dimension to the show's allegorical take on power and powerlessness? The paper argues that playing at being Buffy affords players a very direct and hands-on experience of autonomy and determination. Through a close analysis of the design of the game, I also consider how the show's increasing relativisation of manichaean moral binaries translates into interactive form. This will be regarded in terms of the way that the game's programming actively channels the player's experience of being in control and out of control, an aspect that resonates with – and extends – the show's symbolic operation.

Gordon MacNeill
(University of Liverpool)
Science Fiction, the Media, and the Myth of Democracy

In this presentation I intend to look at how Science Fiction has shown the capacity of the media to undermine democracy even while it maintains the external appearance, the illusion of democracy. In doing so, I will have to deal with three different concepts of democracy.

(a) Democracy as a concept, an ideal, in which an informed public project their (power?/will?) onto elected politicians who will represent their interests in the state.

(b) Democracy as political institutions which exist in the real world.

(c) Democracy as myth. By this I mean, democracy as it is used by such figures as Bush, Blair etc., which obscures the very real differences between the ideal of democracy and the political realities which have developed out of it.

I will then examine how various works of science fiction, such as The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick, Interface by Stephen Bury, and The Dark Knight Strikes Back attempt to explode this myth of democracy by exposing the failure of democracy (b) to conform to the expectations created by democracy (a). That is to say, they show us how the media fail to fulfil their role of producing an informed public, becoming a source of distraction rather than of information. At the same time they expose the failure of elected politicians to adequately represent the interests of the public.

David Murray
(Independent Scholar)
Babylon 5 as the Dream Quest of Francis Fukuyama

For any possible political subject-position there is an ideal world in which their imaginings are acted-out. An example of this is Orwell's characterisation of the ideal world of the reader of 1930s boys' comics. Conversely, any political narrative is imagined – is 'dreamt' – by an ideal subject. The ideal 'dreamer' of Babylon 5 is Francis Fukuyama, or rather the subject-position of which he is the most eloquent exponent. The universe of Babylon 5 actualises Fukuyama's notion of liberal democracy as the ultimate form of human social organisation, yet which is liable to internal subversion by those passions to which Friedrich Nietzsche's work is a paean.

Babylon 5 is often compared with Star Trek. It is in the differences in their universes and their imagined subject-positions that the strength of the Babylon 5 mythos emerges. Star Trek was rooted in the imagination of Kennedy-era liberalism; indeed one of the oddities of its universe is the paucity of references to the political order on Earth – this may well be for diplomatic reasons, as we are told that it is an order of abundance, is moneyless and stateless, in other words is communist. However the order on Earth of Babylon 5 is one of a world federal government, of the despotism of the megacorps and the continuing struggle between capital and labour.

The passions which subvert the utopia of liberal democray find their allay in The Shadows, beings from Lovecraft's Chthlu Mythos. These are reawakened and seek to bring about a new order where the strong and the spirited rule the weak. Their message is that Humanity must join with them to 'kick over the antheap', i.e. the project of galactic evolution managed by the Vorlons. Their first target is the coalition centered on the Babylon 5 station. The Shadows despise this coalition in the same way as Nietzsche loathed the liberal project for 'perpetual peace'.

Babylon 5 is powerful because it resonates with the liberal sensibility after the collapse of the "soviet" states. It will not be taken on board by the Postmodernists because it so well dramatises the authentic message of their master, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Mark Neocleous
(Brunel University)
The Horror of Capital: Marx's Vampires

The paper presents a different and slightly more sophisticated reading of Marx's use of the vampire metaphor than that usually presented in cultural studies. Where cultural studies usually assimilates Marx's use of the vampire into a general cultural reading of the representation of capital, alongside assumptions about the sexuality and 'otherness' of the vampire, the paper shows that Marx's use of the vampire can only be properly understood in the context of his understanding of the horror of capitalist production. This understanding, it will be argued, is connected to the more general place of the dead in Marx's work and, more significantly, the place of the dead in his critique of political economy. The conclusion will consist of a polemical suggestion concerning capital and death.

Dene October
(The London Institute)
The (becoming wo)Man Who Fell to Earth

Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth tracks the descent of its protagonist, Thomas Jerome Newton, from other-worldly innocence to promethean 'knowledge', from unbound desire to Nietzschean nihilism, from the liquid flows of androgyny to 'andro-id-entity'. Yet this 'being' seems always to be in the process of 'becoming', a man who never quite finishes the fall to Earth. The film's two 'bedroom scenes', for example, appear to contrast the deterritorialised and reterritorialised male body: the alien other (the Body without Organs) against the phallic body (the post-oedipal). Yet Newton's body is both hyper-phallic and hypo-phallic (crucially, his gun fires blanks): his performance of masculinity is self-conscious, rather than 'performative' (Butler), at once a fantasy and parody of 'being', a 'never-quite-being', or a 'being-in-crisis'.

The reading I am suggesting, then, is at odds with a 'postmodernist viewer' grasping at 'the impossible' (Jameson) in that I am arguing Newton's evolution gravitates towards a singular 'screen' of masculinity which is, nevertheless, a site of anxiety and 'performance'. Using the Deleuzean concept of 'becoming-woman', I aim to speculate on the 'becoming-man' – a reversal that Deleuze claims is not possible since man is already always the subject.

Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc
(Independent Scholars, authors of Pocket Essentials on David Lynch, Jackie Chan, John Carpenter, Vampire Films and Horror Movies)
Long Live the New Flesh

Myths and folklore have provided thoughtful, entertaining or cautionary tales since humankind could communicate. They are part of our ancestral heritage – tales of magic, fantastical creatures and hideous transformations. Are they but a shadow of former times, no longer relevant in this technological age of enlightenment, repackaged as picture-book tales to read to delightfully scared children on a chilly night? Or have they evolved to create new myths more relevant to a new age? Maybe science, rather than refuting folklore, has unwittingly provided our imaginations with new monsters. Cybernetics, genetics, advances in medicine and technology create new fears and new ways of adapting to these fears. Some film-makers have attempted to address these issues, dealing with concepts that have only become evident with advances in scientific understanding – parasites invading the body, genetic fusion between man and beast, the blending of human with technology. David Cronenberg is one of Canada's leading film directors and his output has generally focused on all these themes – the dichotomy between man and beast, nature and technology. Similarly Tsukamoto Shinya from Japan has created films that deal specifically with the fusion between man and machine to create new forms of techno-biological evolution. This paper looks at the bizarre imaginations of these two film directors and others in their field, discussing their visions of man's possible future forms. Do their works create a new mythology for a new age or are they manifestations of old mythology in a language that is more comprehensible for a modern era? This isn't about the creation and humanising of robots, or the development of artificial intelligence, it's about future mythical creatures, both monstrous and fantastical, and their relationship to the collective psyche. Welcome to the machine.

Michelle Reid
(University of Reading)
Urban Myths and Urban Regeneration in Charles de Lint's Svaha and Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring

This paper will compare Svaha (1989) by Canadian author, Charles de Lint and Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) by another Canadian author, Nalo Hopkinson, based on the similar ways in which both texts use non-European myths as the means by which a near-future, run-down, urban centre of Toronto can be regenerated.

The comparison will begin by assessing the similarities and differences between the portrayal of a future Toronto in the two texts – the 'TOPQ corridor' in Svaha and 'The Burn' in Brown Girl. Both these future visions of Canada's largest city have distinct geographical divisions between rich and poor areas. These economic divides are also closely paralleled by racial and cultural separations. The two depictions of Toronto address some specific Canadian fears of urban degeneration following American models, as well as interrelated fears of the failure of the Canadian ideal of 'multiculturalism'.

However, in the two texts, the conditions caused by such urban degeneration result in different forms of cultural separation, which enable the revival of belief in First Nations myths in Svaha and Caribbean myths in Brown Girl. The different conditions necessary for this revaluing of beliefs which have been somewhat subsumed in contemporary Canadian society will be analysed. In addition, the ways in which these mythologies are 'grounded' by their connection with certain buildings in both texts will be explored.

This connection with buildings will be developed to investigate how the myths are used as the focus for the regeneration of Toronto, by providing potential models by which both the urban and social structures can be transformed and the white-dominated Canadian society can be 'saved'.

The main role of the belief in non-European myths in both texts is not to offer any direct solution to Toronto's problems, but to provide the impetus for change and a hope for the future. As with many myth structures, these hopes are tied to a single, 'heroic' protagonist in each text: Ti-Jeanne in Brown Girl and Gahzee in Svaha. With this in mind, the paper aims to assess to what extent Svaha and Brown Girl are 'new' myths in themselves, encoding warnings and possible answers to the current problems facing Canada's major cities. However, the idea of the two novels as 'new' myths is complicated by the fact that both texts explicitly refer to existing non-European mythologies as a means of highlighting what is lacking in the current capitalist, individualist, white-dominated Canadian society.

Caroline Ruddell
(Brunel University)
'Virility continually runs the risk of being seduced into vulnerability' (Shaviro, 1993)
Splitting, masculinity, gender and the body in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Is the splitting of psyche a 'myth' for our time? With the current plethora of images of split psyches in films and fantasy-based television it would seem that we are currently in need of allegories that articulate a crisis in the sovereignty of the 'ego'. In this paper I will focus particularly on the literal bodily split that occurs in Fight Club, with some reference to other comparable texts (such as the doubling of Spike in season 7 Buffy the Vampire Slayer). In Fight Club splitting operates as a key formal device for the promotion of dramatic tension. Yet the thematic concentration loss of autonomy and the literal mapping of internal conflict onto the male body, resonates, I argue, with more general cultural anxieties around identity, the meaning of masculinity and the designation of the male body. The paper makes the case that a psychoanalytical reading is appropriate in this case, particularly Lacan's mirror phase, and that psychoanalytic discourse itself has had an influence on the creation of this new splitting and doubling myth.

Gregory Singh
(Birkbeck College)
CGI: A Future History Of Assimilation In Audiovisual Media.

Since the first appearances in Hollywood sf cinema of the CGI, its character and its uses have been explored and have evolved along the lines of its changing technological development, the corresponding evolution in dominant ideas of what CGI should express, and how it should be read. How the audience reads the CGI depends entirely upon its exposure to the accompanying technological and cultural movements in media and entertainment industries, and a young audience, brought up within a techno-culture involving video gaming, music television, and involving many precedents of CGI in cinema, has now come to expect certain generic and cultural signifiers within the Computer Generated Image. The audience's ability to 'read' the CGI text as Computer Generated – as opposed to Filmic – Image, has affected the ways in which the blockbuster is promoted, via trailers, 'making-of' TV specials, and cross-promotional/media strategies.

This paper will give a comparative analysis of a number of James Cameron's sf and non-sf films, and his use of the CGI as an assimilative technique/technology, as well as more recent phenomena such as the emergence of DVD as a popular interactive medium, and the impact of video game culture on a young audience: the possibility that this very audience has developed an ability to modulate between the assimilating/assimilated, and the differentiated CGI within the audiovisual material.

Maureen Kincaid Speller
(University of Kent at Canterbury)
Gwydion Redux: Rewriting the Mabinogion

Although the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion is ostensibly concerned with Math, son of Mathonwy, the presence that dominates the story is that of Gwydion the Magician, 'the best teller of tales in the world'. The stories of the Mabinogion were set down in the twelfth century but Gwydion is still very much with us, his own story regularly revisited, especially in children's fantasy novels. This paper considers the presence of Gwydion in children's fantasy, with particular reference to Alan Garner's The Owl Service and Jenny Nimmo's Snow Spider trilogy, and discusses his continuing appeal for a new generation of tellers of tales.

Sabine Thuerwaechter
(University of California, Riverside)
From July 4th to September 11th: Roland Emmerich's Independence Day – A Second-Order Semiological System?

The call for papers to this conference includes the phrase: 'Science Fiction is not about the future but reflects, via analogies, metaphors and allegories, our fears and dreams about the present.' In writing Independence Day (1996), Dean Devlin (who is also the producer) and Roland Emmerich (who is also the director) have drawn largely on the symbols and icons of American culture and self-identification, and created a patriotic worst-case-scenario long before the events of September 11th.

By destroying Los Angeles, the film has already written itself into the city's historical sign-posts next to its postmodern landmarks as described by Fredric Jameson. Does it qualify as modern myth?

According to Roland Barthes, modern myth is an ideographic system and a system of communicating a message, it is qualified by its aim at ultra-signification and the superabundance of significant forms. Independence Day seems to fulfil these points of Barthes' definition – superabundantly? The use of signifiers in this film is striking, from the first close-up of the American flag to the final celebration with 'fireworks on the Fourth'. It is furthermore at the same time iconographic as well as iconoclastic, patriotic and subversive.

Dr Elizabeth Wells
(Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College)
George R Stewart's Earth Abides: A Return to Origins

This paper sets out to explore the construction of origins and beginnings in the science fiction novel Earth Abides by George R Stewart. In this fiction, which is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, the narrator perceives himself not only as the Last Man of Western civilisation, but as the First Man of a new world order.

Through allusions both to Robinson Crusoe and Christian allegory, Stewart explores a kind of universal fantasy that articulates both fears about the extinction of humanity and a utopian hope in the existence of a Paradise on earth. However in the appropriation of the desert island motif, Earth Abides also re-enacts specifically Western fantasies about colonisation and territorial expansion whilst cloaking it in the discourse of 'progress'.

My paper intends to illuminate how the enduring fascination with 'islands' and a similar preoccupation with the idea of Eden or Paradise intersect in this novel to create a potent narrative of origins.

Dr Chris West
(University of Brighton)
Yesterday's Myths Today and Tomorrow: Problems of Representation and Gay (In)Visibility

This paper examines the hermeneutic problems posed by science fiction texts which have been held to be 'about homosexuality' whilst containing no denotations of it. With no denotations of gayness in evidence, such stories signify their concern with same-sex passion on a connotative level – that is, on a Barthesian analysis, on the level of myth. D.A. Miller and Henry Jenkins have explored one consequence of this state of affairs. On their accounts, homosexuality's status as myth in certain narratives leads to what might be called a queer contamination of them: homosexuality begins to be discernible everywhere. However, an alternative case can be made. Over the passage of time, deprived of denotation's secure anchor, stories that once seemed self-evidently gay may no longer yield gay meanings. On this view, homosexuality's status as myth in various texts leads to its evacuation from the texts in question. This paper shows how such evacuation has taken place in science fictional critical discourse, and argues that while myths of homosexuality can seem to threaten a homosexual plenitude, the greater threat – for those interested in mapping the intersections of (homo)sexuality and science fiction, and ultimately for those interested in accurate and non-discriminatory accounts of the history of sf – is in fact posed by the symbolic annihilation of homosexuality that relegation to the realm of myth also invites.