Part of the L is for the Way You Look at Me Reading Group

Love, Fear, Entanglement: A Speculative Exploration of Parasitism follows the previous events in the frame of L is for The Way You Look at Me, which moved from fermentation to deterioration, from the loosening of scientific rationalism to the reimagination of love. This last reading group session in the series unveils a discursive space of phantasmagoria—potentially induced by the cumulative microbial intoxication of previous sessions. Led by speculative fiction writer Regina Kanyu Wang, a Xingyun Award recipient and Hugo Award finalist, this reading and writing workshop examines the coexistence and entwinement of speculation and reality, love and fear. Taking Daoist philosophy, scientific research in biology, and microbiology as guiding threads, Wang explores non-binary perspectives that serve as entry points into speculative futures where the distinctions between symbiosis and parasitism, biosphere and digital sphere are essentially blurred.

Departing from three short science fiction stories/essays, including Wang’s ‘A Cyber-Cuscuta Manifesto’ (2020), Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Blood Child’ (1995),  and Scott F. Gilbert’s ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’ (2024), the workshop invites participants into an intersubjective journey of speculative writing in which different ways of coexistence are imagined, and new biological and affective entanglements are made.