Science fiction, a genre known for its extrapolations into the future, seem Science fiction. For a genre that is known for its seemingly equitable futures, it sure seems to take issue with age and aging. Indeed, disability studies scholar Alison Kafer notes that “Whenever I tell people I have been working on a book about…
Tag: science fiction
Is Your Baby Even Human? The Science, and Science Fiction, of Observing Babies
Naomi Michalowicz // Babies are full of potential. Every parent, looking at their infant child, will inevitably ask themselves, who will this baby become? What will he like doing? What will her strengths, abilities, and skills, turn out to be? It’s impossible not to wonder what the future holds for a small baby when their…
Special Issue Review: Chemistry, Disability, and Frankenstein
Diana Rose Newby // Chemistry, Disability, and Frankenstein, theme issue of Literature and Medicine, vol. 36, no. 2, fall 2018. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley concludes with well wishes for her creation’s second life: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (25). Today,…
Painful Memories and Memorable Pain
Gabi Schaffzin // The following contains spoilers for Amazon’s Homecoming series. Proceed with caution. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory. This started after I recently finished bingeing on the Amazon series, Homecoming, a quick but worthwhile watch for the psychological-thriller fan in all of us. Briefly, the show, directed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail,…
Love in the Time of Science Fiction
Anna Fenton-Hathaway “I think we’re gonna be surprised by how deeply emotional we’ll [be] . . . with the things that we’re gonna invent, coming soon, the robots and things like that, because we’re gonna program emotion into them. . . . [W]e’re not really ready for how much love we might have for…
Cyborgs Pt. 2: Cellular Agencies in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
Kathryn Cai Reviews of Chang-rae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea note its “bureaucratic aesthetic,”[1] its unsatisfactory narrative trajectory in which nothing seems to build, and Fan as an opaque, “monochromatic,”[2] and ultimately unsatisfactory heroine lacking in interiority,[3] particularly compared to the “adventure” heroines, such as Katniss Everdeen, that populate conventional heroic and dystopic…
Bad Readers or Bad Sci-Fi?
Anna Fenton-Hathaway 1. A recent lunch conversation skittered around awhile before landing, not atypically these days, on how we should all be preparing for the AI apocalypse.
“Those Are the Terms”
Anna Fenton-Hathaway When Ursula Le Guin’s 1973 “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” appears on a Science Fiction and Bioethics syllabus, what should medical students think? First, they might reasonably ask, is this even science fiction? bioethics?
Embracing the Fiction in Sci-Fi
I recently returned from the annual conference for the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Science fiction has been, as you can imagine, a rather common theme here and I was excited to see that this year was no exception. Like last year, there was a panel…
The Reproductive Sublime in Anthropocenic Literature, Part II: Theorizing a Reproductive Sublime
Livia Arndal Woods Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful defines the sublime as “whatever is in any sort terrible…[and] productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (34). The particular strength of this emotion is the result of the sublime’s…