*CFP* CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS, THE EDINBURGH COMPANION TO SCIENCE FICTION AND THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES

The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities will be a key intervention, analysing and exploring the fruitful intersection between science fiction and the field of the medical humanities. The medical humanities are becoming an increasingly important area as their first wave is interrogated by a critical medical humanities approach (for example, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, 2016). 

This volume will be in conversation with that debate, and will explore 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 the 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. Meanwhile, the promised technoscientific improvement of medical technologies invites extrapolations that may be more influenced by a reified science-fictional imaginary than by a genuinely democratic shaping of future possibilities. By engaging these concerns, this volume offers a unique viewpoint on the power of the future to shape the present.

The collection is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. This is an outcome of the Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project at the University of Glasgow (2015-2017) and potential contributors may wish to consult the project’s blog and the special theme issue of BMJ Medical Humanities (42.4, 2016) produced by the project for some scholarly context.

Submissions are welcome addressing any of the chapter headings listed below. If you find the collection appealing but would like to address a subject not listed, feel free to contact the editors via the mailbox below for further discussion. We hope this collection will pay due consideration to World SF and represent the diversity of science-fictional futures and fandom, so would be particularly interested in ideas that engage with the Global South, Chinese SF, Afrofuturism, Africa, and the African diaspora, fan and convention culture.

Abstracts of 250 words should be emailed to arts-sfmedhumscollection@glasgow.ac.uk with an accompanying CV by Friday 28 February. Complete drafts of 6000 word chapters will be due 30 November 2020.

• Late-Nineteenth Century 
• Graphic Novels 
• Life Extension 
• Film and Television 
• Science Fiction Horror 
• Medical Press and Advertising 
• Dystopia 
• Susceptibility 
• Soviet Science Fiction 
• Mutation 
• Indigenous Science Fiction 
• Nutrition 
• Global Health 
• History of Art 
• World SF

Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2020

Contact email: arts-sfmedhumscollection@glasgow.ac.uk