We invite you to the international academic conference Liquid Futures: SF, Postapocalypse and Fantasy in the Neoliberal Era. We welcome your active participation in the form of conference paper presentations.
Date and venue: 25 – 26 November 2026, Institute of World Literature SAS (Dúbravská cesta 9, Bratislava, Slovakia)
Deadline for abstract submission: 15 July 2026
Selected contributors will be collected by end of August.
Conference languages: English and Slovak
Contacts: Johannes Kaminski (j.kaminski@savba.sk), Olesia Medukha (olesia.medukha@savba.sk), Igor Tyšš (igor.tyss@savba.sk)
Call for Papers
This conference brings together literary and intermedia scholars to discuss texts from Central Europe and beyond – that is, literature written in Czech, Croatian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Slovak, Ukrainian and other languages. The transnational circulation of English-language texts will also be considered.
The topics may cover the range from highbrow writers such as László Krasznahorkai and Dubravka Ugrešić to popular writers such as Andrzej Sapkowski and Frank Schätzing.
The fragmentation of our shared reality is accelerating, a process that began with the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the advent of neoliberal markets. Amid the waning appeal of ideological projects on both sides of the Iron Curtain, societies and communities retreated from the imaginaries that had previously provided orientation or, at least, a set of shared symbols. Arguably, this sense of fragmentation manifests in literature as a pronounced departure from realist norms of world-building, as the three genres situate their plots in non-empirical environments. While often dismissed as epiphenomena of the neoliberal book market, SF, fantasy and postapocalyptic fiction emerge from diverse traditions, including utopian writing, Christian and pagan myths and Gothic fiction. Rather than nurturing escapism, the flight of fancy responds to the collapse of social and political certainties, as the promises of liberal modernity and technological rationality appear increasingly incapable of producing greater equity, justice or a desirable future. While notable examples of genre fiction embrace nihilistic scenarios of how the world ends, others passionately renegotiate the horizon of the imaginable future.