By Jo Lindsay Walton
It is Wednesday. I am in Helsinki. So is everybody else.
There are a few issues of Vector and FOCUS on the freebies table, courtesy of Dave Lally; but, of course, not for long.
I put in time in Messukeskus 209, the academic track. On Wednesday, Merja Polvinin introduces the Finnish Society for SFF Research (Finfar), its journal Fafnir, and the theme of the next five days. The theme is ‘estrangement.’
Speculative fiction isn’t about other worlds, it’s about this world! In speculative fiction, we encounter real, familiar things, only made strange! There is a kind of political value to such encounters. In the movie Elysium, we encounter something real and familiar (unjust access to healthcare), only that thing is made strange.
By making the world strange, we can unsettle the distinction between what is possible and what is not. By making the world strange, we can see the world for what it really is, including all its promise and possibility.
At least, that’s the idea. Over the five days, I am struck by how accommodating and flexible and familiar the concept of estrangement has become.
Polina Levontin is also an environmental scientist, whose research often explores methods of modelling and analysing risk, and of synthesising and presenting different forms of knowledge for purposes of supporting decision-making. She has a PhD in Fishing and Fisheries Sciences and Management from Imperial College London, as well as Master’s degrees in Environmental Science, in Algebra and Number Theory, and in Comparative Literature. Polina’s recent SF criticism has focused on the 
vector-bsfa.com 