The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4744-8507-4 (ISBN)
The medical humanities are becoming increasingly important as their first wave is interrogated by a critical approach that aims to uncover the wider possibilities of the field. In conversation with this debate, this volume explores the ways in which science fiction studies can contribute to such discussions. Science fiction challenges techno-optimism and offers a non-realist avenue for the expression of illness experience. Science fiction also estranges its readers from their societies and the medical possibilities inherent in those societies, inviting consideration of how medicine may be complicit with, or opposed to, other structures of power. By engaging these concerns, this Companion volume offers a unique viewpoint on the power of the future to shape the present.
Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include science fiction, history of the psychological disciplines, book history, and the cultural history of UFOs. He is the lead editor of the Edinburgh University Press series, Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine, and the author of Science Fiction and Psychology (2020) and Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-century Scotland (2020). Anna McFarlane is the James Murray Beattie Lecturer in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow and author of the monograph Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades (2021). Her research on traumatic pregnancy and its expression in fantastika was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she is a Visiting Collaborator on the Wellcome Trust funded Future of Human Reproduction project at the University of Lancaster. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2020) and Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022). Donna McCormack is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. Their research interests include chronic illness and the medical humanities, queer and crip theories, biotechnologies (specifically organ transplantation), postcolonial and anticolonial theories, and contemporary science and speculative fiction. Their first monograph is Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (2014) and they have coedited special issues of Somatechnics, BMJ Medical Humanities and European Journal of Cultural Studies.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Outline of the Collection
Gavin Miller and Anna McFarlane
Science Fiction Studies and the Medical Humanities: Interdisciplinary Futures
Gavin Miller and Anna McFarlane
Part I. Health and Pathology
1. Pregnancy as Analogy and Portrayals of Pregnancy in Science Fiction
Anna McFarlane
2. Taking Stock of Future Shock: The Medicalised Rebirth of ‘Cultural Lag’
Gavin Miller
3. Objects, Embodiment, and Patterning Disability in William Gibson
Stuart Murray
4. ‘At the front lines of the sleep apocalypse’: Sleeplessness, Biomedical Ambivalence, and Consumer Culture in Charles Huston’s Sleepless and H. G. Bells’s Sleep Over
Manali Karmakar
5. Wellbeing and Worldbuilding
Jo Lindsay Walton
6. Trauma
Glyn Morgan
Part II. Technologies
7. State-Mandated Health: The Tyranny of Chemical Meals
Aline Ferreira
8. ‘Model for the Future’: Post-Disability and Non-Normative Female Embodiment
Julia Gatermann
9. Psychotechnology
Rob Mayo
10. Bodies, Right or Wrong: Medicine, Gender Identity, and Science Fiction’s Representation of Transgender Possibility
Wendy Gay Pearson
11. Science Fiction and Bioethics
Ari Schick
12. Cyberpunk: Techno-Biopolitics and Posthuman Multiplicity
Ingvil Hellstrand
Part III. Across Media
13. Metabolically Other: Race, Consumption, and ‘Superpower’ in Comics
Patrick S. Allen
14. Contemporary Theatre and Medical Science Fiction
Ian Farnell
15. Going with ‘the Crowd’: Representations of Unexplained Illness and Future Diagnostic Promises in Netflix’s Diagnosis
Maaike Hommes
16. No Flesh Shall Be Spared: In-Game Bodies and Neoliberal Health
Paweł Frelik
17. (Dis)ability, Prosthesis, and Human Enhancement in Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Lars Schmeink
Part IV. Across Time
18. Medicine in Proto-Science Fiction
Timothy S. Miller
19. Overturning Hippocrates: Euthanasia and the Utopian Tradition
Patrick Parrinder
20. Unveiling a Parallel: Eugenics and Republican Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Dystopia
Jennifer M. Reeher
21. Medicine and the Scientific Romance
Emilie Taylor-Pirie
22. War, Wounds, and Waldos: Science Fiction and Prosthetic Modernism
Paul March-Russell
Part V. Across Space
23. Overture to a Brave New World – Utopian Ends, Dystopian Means: Transhumanist Biopolitics in Paolo Mantegazza’s Italian Proto-Science Fiction Narrative The Year 3000
Manfred Milz
24. Sucking Salt and Breathing Seawater in Caribbean SF
Frances Hallam
25. Dissecting the Future in Chinese Science Fiction: Lu Xun, Transnational Surrogacy, Male Pregnancy, and Strange Children
Mia Chen Ma
Notes on Contributors
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 04.03.2025 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities |
| Zusatzinfo | 7 black & white illustrations |
| Verlagsort | Edinburgh |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 170 x 244 mm |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton |
| Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-4744-8507-3 / 1474485073 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-4744-8507-4 / 9781474485074 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
aus dem Bereich
