Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

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.

Once again, SF and a newly-emerging discipline collide and find they are different ways of looking at the same things: augmentation, diet, disability, embodiment, euthanasia, prosthesis, reproduction, shock, surveillance, trans identity, trauma, biopolitical governance and neoliberal depredations... An essential addition to every medical humanities and SF studies bookshelf and reading list.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsOutline of the CollectionGavin Miller and Anna McFarlaneScience Fiction Studies and the Medical Humanities: Interdisciplinary FuturesGavin Miller and Anna McFarlanePart I. Health and Pathology1. Pregnancy as Analogy and Portrayals of Pregnancy in Science FictionAnna McFarlane2. Taking Stock of Future Shock: The Medicalised Rebirth of ‘Cultural Lag’Gavin Miller3. Objects, Embodiment, and Patterning Disability in William GibsonStuart Murray4. ‘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 OverManali Karmakar5. Wellbeing and WorldbuildingJo Lindsay Walton6. TraumaGlyn MorganPart II. Technologies7. State-Mandated Health: The Tyranny of Chemical MealsAline Ferreira8. ‘Model for the Future’: Post-Disability and Non-Normative Female EmbodimentJulia Gatermann9. PsychotechnologyRob Mayo10. Bodies, Right or Wrong: Medicine, Gender Identity, and Science Fiction’s Representation of Transgender PossibilityWendy Gay Pearson11. Science Fiction and BioethicsAri Schick12. Cyberpunk: Techno-Biopolitics and Posthuman MultiplicityIngvil HellstrandPart III. Across Media13. Metabolically Other: Race, Consumption, and ‘Superpower’ in ComicsPatrick S. Allen14. Contemporary Theatre and Medical Science FictionIan Farnell15. Going with ‘the Crowd’: Representations of Unexplained Illness and Future Diagnostic Promises in Netflix’s DiagnosisMaaike Hommes16. No Flesh Shall Be Spared: In-Game Bodies and Neoliberal HealthPaweł Frelik17. (Dis)ability, Prosthesis, and Human Enhancement in Deus Ex: Human Revolution Lars SchmeinkPart IV. Across Time18. Medicine in Proto-Science FictionTimothy S. Miller19. Overturning Hippocrates: Euthanasia and the Utopian TraditionPatrick Parrinder20. Unveiling a Parallel: Eugenics and Republican Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Feminist DystopiaJennifer M. Reeher21. Medicine and the Scientific RomanceEmilie Taylor-Pirie22. War, Wounds, and Waldos: Science Fiction and Prosthetic ModernismPaul March-RussellPart V. Across Space23. Overture to a Brave New World – Utopian Ends, Dystopian Means: Transhumanist Biopolitics in Paolo Mantegazza’s Italian Proto-Science Fiction Narrative The Year 3000Manfred Milz24. Sucking Salt and Breathing Seawater in Caribbean SFFrances Hallam25. Dissecting the Future in Chinese Science Fiction: Lu Xun, Transnational Surrogacy, Male Pregnancy, and Strange ChildrenMia Chen MaNotes on ContributorsIndex