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?