THE LONDON SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH COMMUNITY is an organisation of SF scholars and fans, led by graduate students, early career scholars, writers and artists. The Community presents special events with guest speakers several times a year, and also hosts a monthly reading group online over Zoom on Monday evenings, open to all. Zoom links are distributed via our newsletter and Facebook group. See our linktree for details. Each year the reading group engages with texts organised around a central theme.

Email: lsfrcmail [at] gmail [dot] com

Linktree: lsfrc_

Facebook group: London Science Fiction Research Community

Twitter handle: @LSFRC_

Instagram: @lsfrc_

Newsletter: register here

LSFRC was set up in 2014 by graduate students at Birkbeck, Rhodri Davies, Andrea Dietrich, and Aren Roukema, in order to foster and encourage the research of Science Fiction at Birkbeck. Over the years the group has expanded from Birkbeck staff and students, to Science Fiction researchers and enthusiasts, either independent or attached to other universities. The group began to organise events such as film screenings, lectures, and talks by Science Fiction authors, and from 2017, a yearly conference, to supplement and intersect with the reading group’s annual theme. Aren and Rhodri were later joined on the organisation team by Francis Gene-Rowe from Royal Holloway in 2015, Birkbeck students Katie Stone (2018), Tom Dillon (2019) and Sasha Myerson  (2019), Avery Delany (Goldsmiths; 2019), Rachel Hill (UCL; 2019), and most recently Ibtisam Ahmed (Nottingham; 2020), Angela Chan (2020), Cristina Diamant (Babeș-Bolyai; 2020), Mia Chen Ma (SOAS; 2020) and Josephine Taylor (Royal Holloway; 2020).

LSFRC is a research community, a place for people to share research ideas, explore new texts and perspectives on Science Fiction in a friendly and welcoming environment, regardless of background, institutional affiliation or educational status. We actively support and encourage diversity in Science Fiction studies and fandom, not only in the range of approaches to the genre (including looking at the genre through the lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability etc), but also in our commitment to providing a welcoming space for the intellectual engagement with Science Fiction for people of all backgrounds and experience. See also our anti-racism statement and resources, as well as our statement against the UK Government’s education policy.

The homepage image is entitled “Total Eclipse of the Sun” and was drawn by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and published as part of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings in 1882. The image is in the public domain.

Our first two conferences, “Organic Systems: Environments, Bodies and Cultures in Science Fiction” and “Sublime Cognition: Science Fiction and Metaphysics” took place before the LSFRC website was set up. However, we have been able to gather old conference reports and blog posts about these events, which you can find below alongside reports on subsequent events:

Organic Systems (2017)
Conference Report (CCL) by Sarah Lohmann
Conference Report (Vector) by Lucas Boulding
Conference Report (SFRA Review) by Amy Butt
Conference Report (Foundation) by Paul March-Russell
Blog Post by Francis Gene-Rowe

Sublime Cognition (2018)
Conference Programme
Conference Report (Vector) by Eli Lee
Conference Report (Foundation) by Paul March-Russell. In Foundation 131, to be available online sometime in 2021.
Blog Post by Francis Gene-Rowe

Productive Futures (2019)
Conference Report (Vector) by Jasmine Sharma
Blog Post by Jo L. Walton

Beyond Borders (2020)
Information related to this event can be found in this post.
Beyond Borders cfp
Blog post by Bruce Sterling
 Conference Report (Fafnir)
SFRA Review Symposium
Blog post by Megen de Bruin-Molé
Conference Report (Foundation) by Graham Head. In Foundation 137, to be available online soon.

Activism & Resistance (2021)
 Conference Call for Papers
Conference documents
Climate justice event
 Queerness in SF event
SFRA Country Report by Francis Gene-Rowe
Grace Dillon’s Conference Keynote
 SFRA Review symposium

SF & Extraction (2022)
 Conference Call for Papers
Conference Documents
Strange Horizons Interview
Scrapbooking the Wasteland (Blog post by Megen de Bruin-Molé)

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