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book: The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
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The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

  • Edited by: , and
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025

About this book

The first volume to interrogate the intersections between science fiction and the medical humanities

  • Critically interrogates the technological optimism of the medical and biotechnological professions
  • Brings science fiction into an interdisciplinary conversation across the disciplines comprising medical humanities
  • Explores representations of medical progress from the classical and medieval worlds to the contemporary, and across a variety of media, including film and television
  • Focusses on discrete case studies of science fiction technologies and pathologies important to the genre and/or to the technoscientific imaginary, including transplantation, cloning, and epidemics
  • Interrogates how science fiction shapes our imaginary relationship to the medical past, present and future.
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.

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    v
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    List of Figures

    viii
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    Acknowledgements

    ix
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    Outline of the Collection

    xi
    Gavin Miller and Anna McFarlane
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    Science Fiction Studies and the Medical Humanities: Interdisciplinary Futures

    xv
    Gavin Miller and Anna McFarlane
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  • Part I: Health and Pathology
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    1. Pregnancy as Analogy and Portrayals of Pregnancy in Science Fiction

    1
    Anna McFarlane
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    2. Taking Stock of Future Shock: The Medicalised Rebirth of ‘Cultural Lag’

    19
    Gavin Miller
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    3. Objects, Embodiment, and Patterning Disability in William Gibson

    31
    Stuart Murray
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    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

    44
    Manali Karmakar
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    5. Wellbeing and Worldbuilding

    56
    Jo Lindsay Walton
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    6. Trauma

    74
    Glyn Morgan
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  • Part II: Technologies
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    7. State-Mandated Health: The Tyranny of Chemical Meals

    89
    Aline Ferreira
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    8. ‘Model for the Future’: Post-Disability and Non-Normative Female Embodiment

    106
    Julia Gatermann
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    9. Psychotechnology

    123
    Rob Mayo
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    10. Bodies, Right or Wrong: Medicine, Gender Identity, and Science Fiction’s Representation of Transgender Possibility

    139
    Wendy Gay Pearson
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    11. Science Fiction and Bioethics

    155
    Ari Schick
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    12. Cyberpunk: Techno-Biopolitics and Posthuman Multiplicity

    170
    Ingvil Hellstrand
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  • Part III: Across Media
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    13. Metabolically Other: Race, Consumption, and ‘Superpower’ in Comics

    185
    Patrick S. Allen
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    14. Contemporary Theatre and Medical Science Fiction

    200
    Ian Farnell
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    15. Going with ‘the Crowd’: Representations of Unexplained Illness and Future Diagnostic Promises in Netflix’s Diagnosis

    213
    Maaike Hommes
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    16. No Flesh Shall Be Spared: In-Game Bodies and Neoliberal Health

    226
    Paweł Frelik
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    17. (Dis)ability, Prosthesis, and Human Enhancement in Deus Ex: Human Revolution

    237
    Lars Schmeink
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  • Part IV: Across Time
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    18. Medicine in Proto-Science Fiction

    253
    Timothy S. Miller
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    19. Overturning Hippocrates: Euthanasia and the Utopian Tradition

    271
    Patrick Parrinder
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    20. Unveiling a Parallel: Eugenics and Republican Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Dystopia

    283
    Jennifer M. Reeher
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    21. Medicine and the Scientific Romance

    299
    Emilie Taylor-Pirie
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    22. War, Wounds, and Waldos: Science Fiction and Prosthetic Modernism

    316
    Paul March-Russell
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  • Part V: Across Space
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    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

    329
    Manfred Milz
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    24. Sucking Salt and Breathing Seawater in Caribbean SF

    353
    Frances Hallam
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    25. Dissecting the Future in Chinese Science Fiction: Lu Xun, Transnational Surrogacy, Male Pregnancy, and Strange Children

    363
    Mia Chen Ma
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    Notes on Contributors

    377
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    Index

    382
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 18, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781474485081
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
432
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474485081
eBook ISBN: 9781474485081
Keywords for this book
Literary Studies
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
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