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Tonight in NYC: The Center for Fiction Kicks Off The Big Read with Dystopia/Utopia

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Published on October 3, 2011

Tonight in NYC: The Center for Fiction Kicks Off The Big Read with Dystopia/Utopia
Tonight in NYC: The Center for Fiction Kicks Off The Big Read with Dystopia/Utopia

All month long, The Center for Fiction in New York City is celebrating Ursula K. Le Guin and science fiction and fantasy with a series of panels and events. (You can see the full schedule here.)

Tonight, Anna North, Charles Yu and Kathleen Ann Goonan will be discussing utopia and dystopia. Click below for details and to RSVP to the event.

This panel will explore the horrific and idyllic worlds that science fiction writers create in their works. Writers Anna North, Charles Yu, and Kathleen Ann Goonan, with moderator DongWon Song, will discuss the universes of science and slipstream fiction.

Anna North was born in Williamsburg, Virginia and grew up in Los Angeles. She graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2009, having received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and a Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and on Jezebel, where she is a staff writer.

Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero. His first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (read an interview with Charles here) was a New York Times Notable Book, and named one of the best books of the year by Time Magazine. His work has been published in the Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, Playboy, and The New York Times Book Review, among other places.

Kathleen Ann Goonan has been at the vanguard of literary science fiction since the publication of her New York Times Notable Book Queen City Jazz in 1994, garnering starred reviews in all major review journals, such as Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, for each of her six novels. A literary stylist, she melds cutting-edge science with strong characterization, history, jazz, and what PW described as ” . . . the work of a powerful imagination with a superior command of language.”  Her work has been the subject of articles as widely varied as Scientific American’s “Shamans of the Small” in their special Nanotechnology issue and scholarly papers in literary journals, and has been studied at UCR, MIT, RIT, and other universities. Goonan has been invited to speak at international literary festivals, such as Kosmopolis in Barcelona and Utopioles in Nantes, government think tanks, and in university settings. Her novels have been finalists for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, BSFA, and Nebula Awards. In War Times won the Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007 and was also the American Library Association’s choice of Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. She is presently a Visiting Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches Creative Writing, Literature, and Science, Technology and Ideology.    

DongWon Song is an editor with Hachette’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, Orbit

[Click here to RSVP]

 


Stubby the Rocket is the voice and mascot of Tor.com. Tor.com is the media sponsor for the Center for Fiction for the month of October.

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