Academic Spotlight: Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure edited by Kathryn Allan

(The title for this post is insanely long…)

While perusing Amazon.com earlier this morning, I came across this interesting edited collection.  There isn’t a lot of information currently available about the collection, except this brief blurb:

In science fiction, technology often modifies, supports, and attempts to “make normal” the disabled body. In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars – with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history – discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical “cures,” technology, and the body in science fiction. Bringing together the fields of disability studies and science fiction, this book explores the ways dis/abled bodies use prosthetics to challenge common ideas about ability and human being, as well as proposes new understandings of what “technology as cure” means for people with disabilities in a (post)human future.

Kathryn Allan, the editor, is probably best known as @bleedingchrome on Twitter, and, in academic circles, is one of those rising new voices (she presented at ICFA this year and has one of those PhD things).  She is, apparently, one of the few science fiction scholars working in disability studies — an interesting field I imagine.

I’ll try to put together an interview with Kathryn in the relatively near future (the book doesn’t come out until August).  For now, enjoy the blurb and the cover!