Category Archives: Future of medicine

My final schedule for LonCon3

This is going to be fun!

Hard Right

Thursday 20:00 – 21:00, Capital Suite 13 (ExCeL)

Hard science fiction is at its core dependent not on science, but on a world with inviolate rules. These rules can manifest as scientific realities or social constructs, but either way, these kinds of stories are often predicated on solving problems, or not, in the face of tradition. Science fiction critic Paul Kincaid has argued (here) this idea is very similar to the worldview of conservative ideologies. While hard sf is not the domain of right wing authors, is there a link between the two? Is that link historical or fundamental?

Neyir Cenk Gokce (M), Charles E. Gannon, Hannu Rajaniemi, Alison Sinclair, Jaine Fenn

Mythbusters: What are the Biggest Missteps in SF&F Writing?

Friday 10:00 – 11:00, Capital Suite 8 (ExCeL)

Swords that go schiiing! as they're drawn, hay bales lying around in medieval times, and flames in a vacuum: just a few examples of factually erroneous writing. The panelists will look at the most anachronistic and scientific blunders and descriptions that just don't make sense, but continue to be used over and over again. Do these obvious errors serve a purpose within the larger context of story? Are they comforts from which an author can build discomfort?

Ian Nichols (M), Andrew Barton, Amanda Kear, Alison Sinclair, Amy Sundberg

The Press vs Science

Friday 20:00 – 21:00, Capital Suite 15 (ExCeL)

In this panel we discuss the representation of science in the press, and how it works for good and for ill.

Martin McGrath (M), Katie Mack, Moira O'Keeffe, Alison Sinclair

Doctors in Space!

Saturday 13:30 – 15:00, Capital Suite 3 (ExCeL)

Medicine is one of the areas of science and technology intimately connected to ordinary human life, yet – Star Trek aside – SF and fantasy narratives about healthcare are less common than you might expect. What are the challenges and opportunities of writing the physician as protagonist? How can genre explore the political and practical constraints that operate on medicine as a system and a profession?

David G. Shaw (M), Michael Blumlein M.D., E.C. Ambrose, Todd McCaffrey, Alison Sinclair

Kaffeeklatsch

Sunday 17:00 – 18:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)

Alison Sinclair, Jack Campbell

Readercon 23 schedule, July 13-15, 2012

Readercon is coming up in a couple of weeks, once more at Burlington Marriott, in Burlington MA, just north of Boston. This year, I’ll be there for Friday as well, although the epic journey from downtown Boston to Burlington after the Express bus has stopped running means that I’ll miss most of the Thursday evening programming. The menu is once more full of meat and potatoes as well as spicy crunchy bits not served elsewhere. The full schedule is here, and my part of it is . . .

Friday July 13

11:00 AM    G    Subversion Through Friendliness Glenn Grant, Victoria Janssen (leader), Toni L.P. Kelner, Alison Sinclair, Ruth Sternglantz

In a 2011 review of Vonda N. McIntyre’s classic Dreamsnake, Ursula K. Le Guin quotes Moe Bowstern’s slogan “Subversion Through Friendliness” and adds, “Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy—instant gratification, as it were. Subversion through friendliness is paradoxical, slow-acting, and durable. And sneaky.” Is subversion through friendliness a viable strategy for writers who desire to challenge norms? What are its defining characteristics? When do readers love it, and when does it backfire?

6:00 PM    ME    Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction Author; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Jim Freund, Alexander Jablokov, Alison Sinclair, Gregory Wilson (leader)

Building on last year’s talk at Readercon about promotion for the speculative fiction author and drawing from an upcoming SFWA Bulletin article, Gregory A. Wilson and discussants will focus on the pros and pitfalls of podcasting for fantasy and science fiction authors, looking at some examples of successful podcasts in the field, different types for different purposes, and the basics of getting started with podcasting.

Saturday July 14

7:00 PM    ME    Kurzweil and Chopra, Ghosts in the Same Shell Athena Andreadis (leader), John Edward Lawson, Anil Menon, Luc Reid, Alison Sinclair

Transhumanism (TH) has been a prominent strain in contemporary SF; cyberpunk is in many ways the fiction arm of the movement. Athena Andreadis and discussants will explore core concepts of TH (longevity, uploading, reproductive alternatives, optimization projects from genome to organism), investigate which are strictly in science fiction versus science territory, and examine the larger outcomes of these tropes within the genre as well as in First Life, aka the real world.

Sunday July 15

10:00 AM    G    Making Science Sound Like Science Jeff Hecht, Katherine MacLean, Eric Schaller, Alison Sinclair, Allen Steele, Eric M. Van (leader)

The science fantasy of the 20th century tried to make the magical and impossible sound scientific and plausible. Thanks in part to that legacy and in part to the increasing complexity of scientific discoveries and developments, when we write about 21st-century science in ways that are meant to sound scientific and plausible, it often comes across as magical and impossible. How can we make quantum entanglement feel at least as real as the ansible? What can we learn from science fantasy about imbuing writing with not just truth but truthiness?

12:00 PM    G    Paranormal Plagues John Benson, Richard Bowes, Alaya Dawn Johnson, James D. Macdonald (leader), Alison Sinclair

Some paranormal novels portray vampirism, lycanthropy, and even zombification as infectious diseases that work in ways directly opposite to real-world diseases, such as making the infected person physically stronger and longer-lived. The idea of a disease we can choose to have and choose to share is also compelling. Yet these paranormal diseases are rarely explored in comparison to real-world ones (other than in the innumerable vampires-and-AIDS stories of the 1990s). Is disease just a narrative convenience, or does it relate to real-world medical issues such as the (overhyped) evolution of multiple-drug-resistant bacteria and the persistent incurability of illnesses like HIV, cancer, and influenza that we were supposed to have beaten by now?

1:00 PM    G    Mapping the Parallels Greer Gilman, Walter Hunt (leader), Alison Sinclair, Howard Waldrop, Jo Walton

Stories of parallel worlds are often actually stories of divergent worlds. As such, they contain implicit ideas about how and why divergences can happen: questions of free will and personal choice, theories of history, and speculation about the core constants of the universe. The range of divergences, and the reasons behind them, also serve as at least a partial map of the kinds of possibilities considered worth telling stories about. With this in mind, let’s talk about what has been done, or could be, with the idea of parallel worlds in fiction—both classic and contemporary examples in SF&F, women’s fiction, MG/YA, and more. How do the differences in usage of the trope—such as the scope of divergence (personal vs. societal vs. scientific, human-centric vs. extra-human), the degree to which the causes of divergence are explained, and the ability to travel between divergent worlds—play out across parallel and divergent world stories? How do they express ideas about what is possible?

. . . And I am resolved to know my customs allowance to the nearest cent, this trip! Unlike last.

No Cure for the Future

As someone with a background in medicine and bioscience, I am beginning to develop the same testiness about Frankenstein that I did about The Lord of the Flies as a teenager. That book seemed to be constantly thrust on us as approved reading, with a persistence that to skeptical sixteen-year-old me suggested my elders’ disguised hostility. See, said the subtext, you’re all savages. Sometimes it seems the way Frankenstein keeps coming up in literary discussions of medicine suggests a similar hostility.

Which is all preamble to No Cure for the Future, a collection of essays on the subject of medicine and science fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, in which, yup, Frankenstein comes up once again.

I do wonder whether a collection on, say, space exploration, would give quite so much prominence to the nineteenth century’s balloons and cannons, as discussion on medical SF gives to its equivalents: Maupassant, Conrad. The one author who definitely looks forward as opposed to back or sideways is Greg Bear, in describing the future he posited in \ (Slant), and Queen of Angels, where he came up against the implications of psychiatry’s potential perfectability of mental health. My reading of \ will await a future entry.

In their interesting “No Cure for the Future: How Doctors Struggle to Survive in Science Fiction”, Kirk Hampton and Carol MacKay argue that the portrait of the doctor in SF is of an impotent, compromised individual. The doctor in the future is an anachronism – a helpless primitive, baffled by miracles, or alternatively protected by a local “time bubble”, an environment or circumstances in which their particular (old fashioned) skills are useful. Stories involving doctors invariably involve what they characterize as “an energy vacuum, a time-lock and a state of social ostracism” – their environment is extremely confined and jeopardized, they are working against time, and they are usually in an isolated or adversarial role. Westfahl’s article on the Sector General stories, “Doctor’s Ordeals: The Sector General Stories of James White”, extends this theme, taking an alternative read of stories that are generally regarded as optimistic, and interpreting the working environment as chaotic and crazymaking!

I wonder if Bear doesn’t have the right of it, though, and the reason that the doctor in SF has to be constrained is not because of their weakness, but of their potential power to defeat the limitations of the fundamental human condition. Pain, disability, weakness, illness, madness, mortality are an intrinsic part of the stories we tell. Can one tell a story without them?

Redesigning humanity

(this is an unfinished post retrieved from nearly 2 years ago!) As I said on the panel at Westercon in July, unless we make some explicit attempts to build an alternative infrastructure, our first efforts at engineering ourselves are liable to be driven by the same mechanisms and subject to the same regulation as present day drug developments. The first efforts at bioengineering are occurring now, and they are attempts to repair genetic diseases where the disease is caused by a defect in a single gene that causes loss of function (it produces too little, or a non-functioning enzyme or other protein). The challenges are evident; some of gene therapies most successful trials have been stopped because young patients treated for SCID have developed leukemia because the vector carrying the defective gene into their DNA has inserted itself close to an oncogene (gene associated with cancer). So there are considerable technical challenges to be worked out. But as long as the intent remains therapeutic, biological therapies could fit more or less comfortably into the present framework that regulates and delivers health care, and will probably be carried along as that framework evolves. And as long as the intent remains therapeutic, the majority of us will remain comfortable with the idea. And as, perhaps, knowledge expands to multigene disorders, many of us will become beneficiaries.

Beyond the tidy bounds of therapy, things start to get fraught. For one, the most prevalent multigene disorder of all is that thing that most of us (outside Hollywood, at least) acknowledged (willingly or otherwise) as natural: aging. I don’t expect to see effective and accessible life-prolonging therapy in my lifetime, though I’d dearly like to be around in a 100 years to rescind this statement; even if it is achieved, I expect the cost will be prohibitive, and the treatment initially accessible to only the privileged. Which may spare the Earth another explosion of human population, if it is slow to disseminate, but will not spare humanity the resulting social disruption.

Anti-aging therapy straddles therapy and enhancement; it is, I expect, within most people’s acceptance-zone that we extend life, or if we cannot extend life, then extend healthy life. But then there’s outright enhancement. We’re already struggling with the distinctions, as, for instance, whether children who are exceptionally small but otherwise normal should be considered candidates for treatment because of the perceived and demonstrated social penalties of small stature.