Misfit Futures: Technology, Disability and Science Fiction

Abstract

Science fiction has long been read as a literary genre that portrays disability through cyborgs, prosthetics, malfunctioning machines and cured bodies. The paper argues that, in staging scenarios where technology interacts with humanity, SF challenges what ability implies and induces a sense of disability in the reader. Drawing on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s reconceptualization of disability as a “misfit”, the paper analyses how an encounter with non-human cognition, alien language and unfamiliar technology estranges and disables “normal” bodies. This experience, identified as second-order disability here, is not equivalent to the lived experience of disabled people but it unsettles the reader, disrupting the assumptions about what ability entails. Science fiction does more than represent disability: it enacts disability, not merely as a social process but as a cognitive process, therefore making it a powerful pedagogical tool for inclusive and special education. The paper extends this argument to explore how SF redefines and/or problematizes embodiment in the wake of prosthetics and artificial intelligence. It studies the man-machine relationship in two canonical science fiction films: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and I, Robot (2004), where HAL, the malfunctioning machine and Del Spooner, the prosthetically enhanced human, are read as inverse case studies in the logic of comparative ability to provide insights about what ability comes to imply in an artificially enhanced world.