Quinones Lecture with Ken Liu

The Future Is Implausible: Why Science Fiction Always Gets the Future Wrong (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

Monday, September 22nd at 5:30PM

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Through a series of images drawn by artists from the past imagining life in the future, Ken asks the audience to think through provocative questions about the science fictional imagination. What do SF authors tend to get wrong about the future? What do they tend to get right? Is SF about “predicting” the future? Just why is the future so difficult to pin down?

Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he has also won top genre honors abroad in Japan, Spain, and France.

Liu’s most characteristic work is the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity. His debut collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also penned the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. His latest book is All That We See or Seem, a techno-thriller about the fight against loneliness in the age of AI.

Lerner Lecture with Scott Ellsworth

Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America

Monday, October 27th at 5:30PM

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

During the last fraught months of the Civil War, the fate of the United States was far from secure. Tens of thousands of Rebel troops were still in the field, the Lincoln presidency was collapsing, and a peace movement was gaining traction in the North. Using long-forgotten evidence, best-selling author and historian Scott Ellsworth unveils a startling new interpretation of the Lincoln assassination, and pays tribute to the remarkable coalition of loyal Americans--men and women, Black and white, native-born and immigrant--who defeated the Confederacy, destroyed slavery, and gave the nation a new burst of freedom.

Scott Ellsworth has been described by Booklist as “a historian with the soul of a poet.” A New York Times bestselling author, he has written about a wide range of subjects, including civil rights, race relations, mountaineering, and basketball. He published his first book, Death in a Promised Land, about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, while he was a graduate student in Duke. He returned to that subject in 2021 with The Ground Breaking, which was longlisted for both the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. His newest book, Midnight on the Potomac, is a revealing new interpretation of the last months of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Scott and his wife, Betsy, are the parents of Will Ellsworth, CMC ’24. Scott has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on the TODAY Show, PBS’s The American Experience, NPR, MSNB, Fox, CNN, the BBC, and other news outlets. He teaches in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Golo Mann Lecture with Robert Long

More information coming soon!