Creating Creating Speculative Fiction Across Media 2025 — Artificial Intelligence: Fantasies, Realities, Futures

Speculative Fiction Across Media 2025 — Artificial Intelligence: Fantasies, Realities, Futures. The second annual Speculative Fiction Across Media (SFAM) conference. September 25-27, 2025, at the Courtyard Marriott Monterey Park, Los Angeles. Announced in an e-mail to SFRA and others by Simon Spiegel via jiscmail.ac.uk, 20 May 2025.

The second annual Speculative Fiction Across Media (SFAM) conference will explore AI narratives in speculative media, from the foreboding, through the mundane, to the celebratory. We will explore how speculative media shapes our anticipations of a world in which we live with and use AI and consider the degree to which certain sf tropes — such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics — have found their way into research and design conversations. We invite papers on a wide range of media and topics, but especially encourage submissions that consider the intersections of AI and speculative imaginaries from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Confirmed Special Guest: Ted Chiang, author of multiple award-winning works, including The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2011), and sought-after commentator in venues such as The New Yorker regarding AI discourse and the implications of AI tools.

Confirmed Special Guest: Brit Marling, writer, director, actor and producer, who wrote and starred in multiple sf media works, including the critically acclaimed series The OA and the limited series A Murder at the End of the World, which addresses issues of AI and political culture.

RDE, finishing, 21May25