Apocalypse now: Covid-19 and the SF imaginary

The following conversation was conducted via Google Docs between 1st May and 23rd June 2020. The participants were Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Jennifer Cooke (Loughborough University) and Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck College, London). Gerry is President of the SFRA; his books include Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), co-edited with Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia E. Butler (2016), and most recently The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), co-edited with Eric Carl Link. Jennifer is a poet and academic; her first book was on Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009) while her most recent is Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity (2020). Caroline’s books include Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (2019) and, with Tony Venezia, China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015); she is also editor of Alluvium and co-founder with Martin Eve of the Open Library of Humanities.