I don’t know why I bothered. The illustrations may be a little better but the disjointed and confusing short story and its implications definitely weren’t for me.
Serenity’s crew suddenly become filthy rich. For a while, anyway. And their ‘what I’d do if I were rich’ dreams were the only good thing about Better Days.
Panellists: Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (Phillipino living in Singapore), Yasser Bahjatt (Saudi Arabian), Irena Raseta(Croatian), Aishwarya Subramanian (Indian), Naomi Karmi (Israeli)
When aliens invade, why do they almost always hit New York? With a few partially-honourable exceptions, such as Pacific Rim and District 9, the American-led alliances of Independence Day and its ilk are still the norm for SF cinema’s supposedly global catastrophes. What is it like to watch these films outside the Anglophone world? Do attempts to move away from American exceptionalism feel real, or are they just window-dressing? And how do different countries deal with apocalypse in their own cinematic traditions?
Panellists: Foz Meadows, L.M. Myles, Tansy Rayner Roberts,Sarah Shemilt, Christi Scarborough
At the end of last year, to mark ten years since the broadcast of the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the BBC, Naomi Alderman made a special edition of the Radio 4 programme Front Row, featuring interviews with cast, creator, and critics. Among other things, she asked what the show’s legacy had been, and whether the right lessons — female characters written as well as men, given as much narrative importance as men, and surrounded by other women — had been learned. Following on from her discussion, our panel will ask: who are Buffy’s heirs? (And you can listen to the original programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03m7zmq)
Panellists: Martin McGrath, Carrie Vaughn, Roz J. Kaveney (GR),Takayuki Tatsumi, Laurie Penny
One of the defining political issues of our time, societal inequality is showing up on-screen in films like In Time, Elysium and The Dark Knight Rises, and TV shows such as Continuum and Arrow. How successfully do these works engage with the issues they raise? Is the imagery they use at odds with the narratives they follow? And what would radical anti-inequality SF look like?
Why does SF hate poor people? It seems to echo the media’s hate for the poor.
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