Abstract
This chapter argues that speculative fiction is a mode for reflecting on how the imagination informs scientific research, technological development, and the social changes they sustain. Crucially, imaginative texts serve not only as incubators for scientific advances, but also enable us to reflect on the kinds of futures we wish, collectively, to create. It reads Ben Winter’s Underground Airlines and Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones to demonstrate how speculative fiction helps to keep the impact of cultural biases on sociotechnical change in view. Both novels offer visions of futures made possible by biotechnology, critiquing the ways this new industry enables intensified exploitation of labor by commodifying parts and processes of the biological body. Such practices mirror and repeat histories of gendered and racialized exploitation.
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Vint, S. (2020). Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science and Fiction. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_22
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