Harvard Hosts Sci-Fi Conference

If you know to look, or even if you don’t, you’ll start to see science fiction everywhere. It’s on the WB, the New York Times best-seller list and posters in Lamont. Science fiction is conquering the mainstream—and Harvard’s Sever Hall.

This weekend during intersession college students from Columbia to the University of Chicago will fill Sever Hall for the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association’s (HRSFA) fifth annual conference, Vericon.

The conference, which is expected to draw about 200 participants, will screen a number of science fiction movies, organize role-playing games and feature guests like New York Times best-selling author Jacqueline Carey.

Described as “speculative,” science fiction, especially in its older forms, explores the social effects of imagined technology, a theme with resonance in today’s society. But unlike the “more serious” adult conventions—like the one held in Boston last weekend—Vericon will be “focused on people playing around,” said Michael R. von Korff ’07, the guest coordinator for Vericon.

While Vericon is being held at Harvard, HRSFA members said that most of the participants will come from other schools and the residents from the area.

“The science fiction culture, the fringe culture, is definitely not so well accepted at Harvard,” said von Korff.

Mainstream interest in science fiction, said von Korff, has grown in recent years thanks to several key movies.

“[Science fiction] might have become so big lately just because of a few movies that were done really well—X-men, Spiderman, and then you have Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings,” von Korff, the guest coordinator for Vericon said. “They got the public imagination going.”

But this mainstream appreciation of science fiction diverges from some of the more “mystical” elements of HRSFA, said Emily I.P. Morgan ’07, the assistant chairman of the conference and a member of HRSFA.

“There are obviously some aspects of it that are very mainstream but there’s definitely a community of fans and writers that is separate,” Morgan said. For example, she said, each year the club celebrates the Coming and Going of the Hours—“known to the heathens as Daylight Savings”—by walking around the Yard in black while carrying candles and chanting.

“There’s definitely some small stigma attached to the science fiction association [at Harvard] and we want to dispel that, but at the same time we’re unwilling to change anything that we do just for the sake of dispelling that,” she said.

“It’s not necessarily cool to be a geek about something [anywhere]—to be very very into something that’s not productive,” von Korff said, adding, “Unless its something like baseball or football.”

But Morgan herself is a testament to science fiction’s path into the mainstream. More into fantasy than science fiction, she was reluctant to make broad generalizations about science fiction, saying she didn’t “feel quite enough in touch with the world of science fiction” to do so, though she said she is “decidedly a part of it.”

Though von Korff said science fiction would always “to some extent be a fringe culture,” he maintained that Vericon has a broad appeal.

Vericon isn’t the only conference celebrating science fiction being held in the area this year. Last weekend, 2,500 fans attended Arisia 2005, another local science fiction convention. Other conventions are scheduled for February, March and April in the Boston area. Moreover, until recently the Cambridge Public Library housed the most extensive public science fiction collection in the state.

“People used to think you were weird or dodgy if you read science fiction,” said Buzz Harris, the chairman of Arisia 2005.

Ruth Evenson, the manager of Pandemonium Books in Harvard Square, credits the marketing industry and a “media driven” world for the rise in the genre’s popularity. Though she said the reading population was dropping, science fiction has expanded with ease into other mediums. Computer and video games, graphic novels and manga have repackaged many of science fiction’s themes for a younger, modern audience.

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.