October 21-24, 2026
Four Points by Sheraton Los Angeles Westside
5990 Green Valley Circle, Culver City, CA
Speculative Fiction Across Media (SFAM) invites proposals for our 2026 conference, Contacts and Crossings: Borders in Speculative Fiction.
Gloria Anzaldúa posits that “borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where the lower, middle and upper classes touch.” According to Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Border, “societies and states are the products of (b)ordering, not the other way around.”
We invite papers that explore how these and similar ideas about borders and contact zones inform speculative fiction—as motifs within individual texts, as frameworks for subgenres such as space opera or first-contact narratives, as spaces of intensified surveillance and tracking via new IT tools, and as theorizations of form as we debate the borders between and exchanges among multiple speculative genres. We invite papers and panel discussions that investigate the affordances of speculative genres for interrogating, illuminating, or proposing alternatives to the myriad ways that borders and contact zones shape our identities and communities.
Our 2026 conference will feature keynote speaker Kalindi Vora, Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor takes up questions of technology, colonialism, and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her second, Surrogate Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures, co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, explores the racial and gendered politics of robotics and artificial intelligence. With the Precarity Lab, she is co-author of Technoprecarious (2020), which tracks the role of digital technologies in multiplying precarity.
Please send proposals for paper sessions, individual papers, or panel discussions to Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@gmail.com) by May 15, 2026; decisions will be communicated in early June. Proposals should be sent as PDF attachments and should include
- Name and contact details for all presenters
- 250-word abstracts for the paper (or one each for papers submitted as a panel) or a 250-word description of the topic for a discussion panel section
Please note that all presenters must be registered attendees to participate.
We will also feature programming in dialogue with the Lucas Museum (https://www.lucasmuseum.org), including an excursion to visit that space on Wednesday. Keep watching our website (https://sfamla.org) for more updates on creative guests and further details on programming and related events.
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
- The politics of empire in space opera by writers such as Arkady Martine, Anne Leckie, Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Emily Tesh, Bethany Jacobs, games such as Mass Effect, television series such as Star Trek, and more
- Technologies of border surveillance and control as they are depicted in speculative narratives such as T.R. Napper’s Ghost of the Neon God, Ray Naylor’s The Mountain in the Sea, and near-future sf by authors such as Cory Doctorow and Tim Maughn
- Worldbuilding as a border-making process in speculative fiction in any medium
- Game design and gaming architectures as they explore borders, such as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Cyberpunk 2077, Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, tabletop games such as Risk or Civilization, and more
- Fantasy realms and multidimensional narratives as investigations of ontological borders such as Everything Everywhere All At Once, Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series, the game Split Fiction, and more
- Narratives that make borders their central motif such as China Mieville’s The City and the City, R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, Sleep Dealer, Elysium, N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, the Borderlands game series, the tv series Dark Winds, and more
- Speculative narratives that explore species borders among aliens or between humans and nonhuman species, between humans and mechanical beings, such as work by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ursula K. LeGuin, Stephen Graham Jones, the Mass Effect game series, Alien: Earth, Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind, Ghost in the Shell, and more
- Differentiations by class as a border technology within sf narratives by Claire North, K.J. Fajardo, Robert Jackson Bennett, the television series The Expanse and Severance, and more
- Time travel as a sociopolitical technique of making and unmaking borders in works such as Annelee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline, Katherine Hurley’s The Light Brigade, the television series Continuum and Beforeigners, and more
- Narratives focused on counterspace or other enclaves of difference, such as the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic and its film adaptation as Stalker, J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes, M.R. Carey’s The Book of Koli, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and more