Description: 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.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes: 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.--Mark Bould, UWE Bristol