DAY 1: ICFA 2018

Day 1 was intense -- four panels attended, and lots of interesting ideas heard. What's intriguing this year (as opposed to last) is how many papers are sticking to the conference theme of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is celebrating it's 200th anniversary this year. There's around 2 panels devoted to her in nearly every time slot. What else is intriguing is how few presentations there are on fantasy fiction . . . a strange thing for a conference on the fantastic in the arts. Instead, there's a lot of science fiction, a lot of work on transmedia storytelling, and a lot of film and television criticism. While that's still all pretty important, however, it does mean that very few of the panels have been as directly related to my own research interests as the ones from last year. Last year, for example, there were a half dozen Tolkien papers, perhaps more, spread throughout the conference. This year there's only three, collected together in one panel.

Still, day 2 starts in less than an hour, and I pumped for it.