Session 35 in Worlds of Speculative Fiction - Lewis Carroll

I haven't been posting regularly about this ongoing monthly talk series - Worlds of Speculative Fiction - but I intend to remedy that going forward.  We're now well into year 4 of the series, and I decided to start this one off with some sessions focused on some of the early major contributors to the genres that fall into that broad designation of "speculative fiction" - authors who influenced the other, later writers we have been discussing these last three years.

In January, we kicked off the new year with Edgar Allan Poe.  February was G.K. Chesterton.  March was supposed to be Mary Shelley, but unfortunately, I had to cancel due to illness (we'll hopefully reschedule for later this year).

Lewis Carroll - or, to use his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dogdson - was the fourth in that set, and we held that session a few weeks back.  I'd enjoyed his works on logic back when I was an undergraduate, and had read his Alice and nonsense poetry books to my daughter when she was young.  I decided that the works we'd focus on would be Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark.  That would allow us to discuss one of the key themes of the series - worldbuilding - as well as getting into some of the philosophical themes raised and played with by Carroll.

Here is the videorecording from the session:

If you're in the Greater Milwaukee area, and looking for a lively, philosophically-informed conversation about speculative fiction, stop on in.  All the sessions are hosted at the Brookfield Public Library, and you can find the events on my Facebook page.  

We also have a free online class site (which I'll be updating once the semester is finished), which you can enroll in, if you'd like to see all of the other session videos and access other curated resources on the authors and their works.

The thinkers we have scheduled right now for the rest of the year include: Tanith Lee, Piers Anthony, Gordon Dickson, August Derleth, Karl Edward Wagner, Aldous Huxley, Bram Stoker, and R. Scott Bakker