New Lecture Series - Worlds of Speculative Fiction

After our move from the Hudson Valley of New York back to Milwaukee, we started looking for another library to partner with in order to offer a monthly series.  The Brookfield Public Library stepped up, and we began organizing the new series: Worlds of Speculative Fiction - Philosophical Themes.

The general idea behind the series is for me to reread classic science fiction and fantasy authors I've enjoyed in the past, and then to discuss with an audience of library patrons and the general public some of the philosophical themes either explicitly referenced or implicitly involved with the worlds generated within their works.

We've had two sessions so far - and here are the video-recordings from those talks:

• Lecture 1: Introduction to the Series (January) 
• Lecture 2: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Saga of Middle Earth (February)

In the months to come, we'll be looking at the works of ten more seminal figures in science fiction and fantasy - A.E. Van Vogt, C.S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Leguin, Michael Moorcock, Phillip K. Dick, Mervyn Peake, and George R.R. Martin.