Event Description
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has played a significant role in American culture since the 1960s. The field’s founders popularized it as a science that could answer an extraordinary question. However, it is as science fiction that radio communication with extraterrestrials entered the popular consciousness as the subgenre De Witt Douglas Kilgore calls the C/SETI novel. He arguea that resolving mid-twentieth century anxieties about racial conflict is an important preoccupation of the form. In this talk the speculative fictions of James Gunn’s The Listeners (1972) and Carl Sagan’s Contact (1985) make human unification across race the desired outcome of communicating with an older, wiser sentient species. The C/SETI novel speaks directly to the desperate political hopes of the postwar era.
Event Speaker
De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. For more information, please visit the series webpage or email Alexander Geppert at [email protected]. Hosted by the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University.
