Gary Westfahl, an internationally renowned science-fiction critic from UC Riverside, has been invited to campus Friday, Feb. 18, to talk about fiction written about Mars and beyond. Westfahl will give his morning lecture, "Reading Mars: Changing Images of the Red Planet in 20th-Century Science Fiction" to a new upper-division science-fiction class taught by English lecturer Amy Clarke. She invites those interested in the topic to drop by 9-10 a.m. in 6 Olson Hall. The campus community is also invited to attend Westfahl's public lecture 4-5 p.m. in 6 Olson Hall on "The Not-So-New Frontier: Space Travel in Science Fiction Film and Television." The visit by the author of Cosmic Engineers: A Study of Hard Science Fiction is the first off-campus guest of a new campus interest group called the Science Fiction Consortium, created by faculty members interested in studying fiction and film. Westfahl's visit is sponsored by the Teaching Resources Center with funding from the Undergraduate Instructional Improvement Program. Award winning Davis author Kim Stanley Robinson will speak at Clarke's class March 10 about his book, Red Mars. Again, the campus community is invited. The consortium invites any campus community member to join it. A campus science-fiction Listserv is in place and plans are in the works for monthly book discussions, speakers and other events. "Anybody with any kind of interest in science fiction, films, literature or comic books is invited," Clarke says. The idea of coalescing a community of science fiction aficionados was first triggered in spring of 1998 when a panel and film festival were mounted in conjunction with the Charles Schneeman exhibition at the Nelson Gallery. "A whole bunch of us crawled out of the woodwork," Clarke says. The consortium has also identified members through Nora McGuinness' Integrated Studies seminar on science fiction, which has drawn on guest speakers from campus. Besides Clarke, founding members of the consortium include Alan Elms, professor of psychology; Kathy Plummer, a lecturer in environmental design; Kyu Hyun Kim, an assistant professor of history and East Asian language and culture interested Japanese science fiction; and Kenneth Firestein, librarian in health sciences