The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

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.