It is a pleasure to introduce this roundtable‚ based on papers from the International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science held at the University of Birmingham in 2024 under the auspices of “Health Humanities,” a variant term for Medical Humanities.1 It is a century since “Medical” and “Humanities” first came together in this singular expression that initially referred to scholarly work spanning the borderlands between medicine, medical history, literature, art, and philosophy.2

As Lucy Grace writes, “Our lives are a bundle of stories.”1 In fact, even the self, that seemingly solid and continuous “I” we carry through the world, is a story, a narrative we construct and reconstruct by piecing together memories and experiences into what feels like, as Guy Saunders writes, “a single unified self.”2 We are thus all storytellers at heart, and the story we are most often telling, retelling, and revising is ourselves. As cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett argues in Consciousness Explained, our selves are “magnificent fictions,” not “independently existing soul-pearls” but “artifacts of the social processes that create us.”3 We do not discover who we are; we narrate ourselves into being.

I introduce three essays arising from a literature-and-science roundtable on forest ecology and engagement, linking the essays particularly through their delineation of the varieties of disciplinary attention and their extension of community beyond the human. Some further lines of investigation, prompted by but moving beyond the immediate topics of the essays, are offered. Artisanal making is put forward as a third pole of environmental ethics and sustainability discourse to balance inputs from science and the humanities.

The Victorians were devoted to spectacles, from large-scale dioramas to the more modest magic lantern shows which became the staple of the popular lecture circuit. Taking advantage of developments in a whole range of new optical technologies, they offered their audiences both education and entertainment.1 Playing with illusion and a sense of wonder, they broke down the barriers between stillness and life, absence and presence, opening up new vistas for imaginative participation. This roundtable brings together award-winning creative practitioners who continue in this tradition, working in diverse ways with the latest developments in optical technologies, while also using their respective forms of expertise to explore the legacies of Victorian science and culture, reanimating the past for contemporary audiences. All three articles show how humanities projects can draw on artistic forms to enhance research and to widen public participation.

This article explores how predictions about future nanotechnological and neuropharmaceutical applications to medicine further anti-ageing discourse in the present. Products of both research areas enable physiological augmentation, with uses way beyond accepted traditional goals of medicine. But most “nanodreams” have not come to fruition, yet; as such, much popular scientific writing about nanotechnology is “thoroughly science-fictional” in how it imagines its future. Projections about these technologies contribute to devaluing the ageing experience and neglecting the need to address challenges of ageing in the present. To make these points, this article will read two speculative texts alongside one another: a piece of creative science fiction and a predictive popular science account. Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind propagates brain–computer interfaces, and Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists deals with neuropharmaceuticals. Such parallel reading risks conflating different genres, narrative forms and contexts, obfuscating the purpose and possibilities of either genre. But it helps illustrate how ideas of an augmented human species have begun structuring social belief systems that shine through creative writing that joins in pitching, rather than effectively critiquing, these technologies as holding the fountain of youth.

Anatomy has always been a complex subject to teach and learn. Historically, anatomy has been taught via cadaveric dissection, a modality that has declined in recent years due to a shortage of body donations and a pedagogical shift in using virtual reality and technological tools. Today, the teaching of anatomy in medical schools worldwide incorporates the medical humanities. While theoretical knowledge of anatomy is certainly necessary in the healthcare setting, recentering the focus of healthcare from mechanistic models of the body to its transposed context in literary forms such as poetry offer an alternative way of viewing the body, from a mechanistic model to a holistic one that unites the body’s biology with a patient’s selfhood. Through an analysis of two ekphrastic poems about Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’s famous anatomy lessons by contemporary American poet Linda Bierds, I argue that the body (cadaver) that has been deconstructed through anatomical dissection can be reconstructed in poetry via a “poetic dissection.” As a case study, Bierds’s poems demonstrate how the sensory experience of anatomical dissection can reframe dissection as a poetic tool, enhancing the ways in which anatomy, and by extension medical humanities, are taught in medical schools.

Not only do politics and society struggle to make sense of current and future existential challenges, but science, especially in inter- and transdisciplinary endeavours, tackles the multifarious and often inextricably linked emergencies of our time. This contribution explores the intersection of cutting-edge microbiome science and literary works of art and its vital role in Public Humanities agendas. By the example of Adam Dickinson’s unique poetry collection Anatomic (2018), the paper demonstrates how the emerging, rapidly growing, and paradigm-shifting knowledge of the microbiome is a symbol for the porousness of science and literature, which not only fuels scientific and aesthetic innovation by enabling manifold exchanges beyond disciplinary and academic boundaries but also points towards its specific precariousness. As not only the borders of science and literature become porous as a prerequisite and result of circulatory processes of collaborative knowledge production but also the borders of (human) bodies as the sites of this knowledge-making do, there seems to be nothing less to negotiate than what it means to be human per se pointing towards modes of being human yet to be imagined by science and literature, within and beyond Academia alike.

This article examines the roles of nonhumans in the development, testing, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. I show how specific groups of nonhumans, particularly primates, were strategically made visible and invisible to American publics, and how some groups were rendered more valuable than others. By studying the narratives of science that circulated during the pandemic, I argue that COVID-19, and the US response to it, illustrate a central facet of modern crisis, namely, that the current moment is marked by a growing awareness of human exposure to and vulnerability with nonhuman beings, coupled with an active and persistent denial of togetherness. To be a human subject in the twenty-first century involves acknowledging the interconnectedness that constitutes everyday life, while living in ways that openly reject this reality.

It is possible that the traditional linear format of the novel is no longer sufficient to tell more-than-human stories about global energy use and Anthropogenic thinking. How can academic and research findings be brought into public consciousness to challenge damaging fossil fuel ideologies? These notions reference deep-time: the fossil part of fuel. Telling stories, suggests Anthony Nanson, possesses an important “consciousness-enhancing function…and has a part to play in public debates on the environment and energy.” Erin James asks whether the Anthropocene calls for new narratives that “can help bridge imaginative gaps” and consequently “have important real-world consequences.” What if the written text were fragmentary or digital or accessed randomly; if words ran a different way on the page; if fiction were mixed with fact, or illustration with poetry? I examine the approach of a graphic novel (Here, McGuire 2014), film-poem (The Green Hollow, Sheers 2018) and eco-biographical memoir (The Outrun, Liptrot 2016) in referencing more-than-human timescales. I consider whether a geological imaginary provokes reading and writing of fossils, landforms, literary forms, structures, traces, and futures in a manner that, Marco Caracciolo suggests, ruptures the linearity of protagonists’ experience of reality and their sense of demarcation between human and nonhuman.

Writing from Australia, where acute climate crisis intersects with enduring colonial legacies, in this article we present our ongoing investigation into how environmental changes reshape scientific, literary-cultural, and philosophical discourses, while foregrounding the underutilized potential of humanities. We argue that humanities frameworks provide essential tools to address the current climate inaction by deconstructing the foundational discourses of Western culture that reinforce that inaction. Among the interrelated discourses we consider under our model, this article focuses on the relationship between the “invulnerable” body and human and non-human bodies made vulnerable by the power dynamics and material conditions of climate crisis. Through case studies of Noongar artist-writer Claire Coleman’s science fiction novel, Terra Nullius (2017) and Ellen van Neerven’s narrative “Water” (from Heat and Light, 2014), we demonstrate how literary narratives dismantle dominant symbolic regimes to foster more effective engagements with climate crisis. Our analysis ultimately gestures towards the urgent and growing corpus of Australian speculative fiction that explores these critical themes.

This essay takes as its starting point the experience of designing and teaching the extension course “Regenerative Ecologies: Imagining Sustainable Futures through Science Fiction,” offered at the Federal University of Pelotas in late 2024 as part of Brazil’s triadic model of teaching, research, and extension in higher education. Bringing together participants from the humanities, natural sciences, health sciences, and environmental studies, the course created a space where speculative narratives could be read alongside diverse forms of expertise and lived experience, fostering ecological awareness, critical engagement with science and technology, and the exercise of accountability and collective responsibility. From this context, I explore the role of science fiction as a critical and imaginative tool for public engagement with science and draw upon philosophy of science to argue that science fiction supports ethical reflection, strengthens scientific communication, and cultivates the “moral imagination” essential to responsible science, enabling readers to anticipate the social and environmental consequences of scientific and technological advancements. Through this case study, I highlight how speculative narratives can bridge the gap between scientific practice and public participation in the co-creation of sustainable futures, while also showcasing the affordances of public higher education outreach initiatives in Brazil.

This essay takes up the question of how literature can help us adapt to a world in which climate change is an ongoing reality. Climate literature offers a promising realm in which scholars are reckoning with the central humanistic problem of how we make sense of a world undergoing the chaos of climate change. This essay explores the climate literature anthology Tales of Two Planets for how its stories and essays model a practice of narrative agency—the ability to consciously identify, dispense with, and create the tales we tell ourselves about climate change. The narrative agency that climate literature like Tales of Two Planets promotes has the potential to widen its readers’ locus of control in environments where there is very little to begin with.

This article outlines the way in which the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest Laboratory in Oregon has nurtured a conversation between writers, artists, and scientists. The Andrews was the birthplace of New Forestry, a concept and philosophy that has impacted writing on (and in) old-growth forests. In this article, I also introduce some of the key themes and core concerns of a literature connected to New Forestry and produced at this experimental forest laboratory.

This roundtable contribution considers methodologies for expanding Shakespeare’s heritage reach beyond England, through the framework of the “Birnam’s Oak // Scotland’s Shakespeare” project, a community-based project in Perthshire designed to create an expanded model for Shakespeare heritage by cohering a more interdisciplinary range of heritage narratives (local, global, literary, ecological). This piece outlines the project’s narrative strands in relation to co-curricular educational programming: a four-session programme designed for year 5 and year 7 pupils.

Metaphors abound for mycorrhiza in both science and fiction. From the “wood wide web” to “mother trees,” “social networks” to “neurological networks,” analogies expand and transform public understanding of the complex and elusive interactions between plants and fungi occurring under our feet in forest ecosystems. However, the line between metaphor and the more-than-metaphorical, fact and fiction, is not always clear, causing heated debates about the role of metaphor in the scientific imagination and science communication. As a mycologist and literary scholar, we enact an interdisciplinary symbiosis inspired by mycorrhiza themselves to explore the mycorrhizal metaphors in the past decade, which are entangling and enriching both science and fiction, from Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) to Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020), Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) to Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree (2021). We reaffirm the fundamental value of metaphors in how scientists and nonscientists alike seek to understand fungi in a world increasingly fascinated by and dependent upon them.

Arguably, recent and prospective developments within artificial intelligence are a fascination within contemporary technoculture. The dawning of a new era that is characterised by the various impacts of these technological and scientific advances leads to questions about the type of subject that will inherit and inhabit the consequences of these developments. This paper will examine the role that speculative fiction plays as a site of critical engagement in investigating some of the more urgent questions posed by the intersection between humans and technology, such as the social consequences of projected technologies and the possibilities of changing embodiment, and particularly how these issues prove to be of immense importance for the gendered subject. The essays contained within Jeanette Winderson’s non-fictional publication 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next (2021) provide a perceptive insight into both the promises and the pitfalls of AI technology for the future female and embodied experience. Winterson’s thought-provoking contemplations will be read alongside her fictional novels, The Stone Gods (2007) and Frankissstein (2019), to consider how she utilises the genre of speculative fiction to explore existing representations of gender whilst working to define new transhuman subjects. A recurring theme throughout these novels is the way in which AI, despite its liberating and transcendent potential, is imagined as the inevitable perpetuation of female subjugation.

Richard Powers’ latest novel, Playground (2024), foregrounds two realms of scientific issues in the public sphere—the oceans and AI. In that sense, it looks in large part like a follow-up to two of his previous works: The Overstory (2018), an analogous treatment of the environment as represented by forests, and Galatea 2.2 (1995), which describes the creation of a very early version of an AI. Here, the focus appears to be an elaborate scheme to fill the South Pacific with floating cities, to allow wealthy people to escape the tribulations of the real world, with the development of a Facebook-like app as a secondary theme. The exposition proceeds via three narrative streams: the stories of a software engineer, a pioneering deep ocean explorer, and a tiny Polynesian island designated as the home base for the floating cities project. As the plotlines evolve, the reader is led to anticipate how the pieces will connect up—until a totally unexpected plot reversal near the end forces a drastic reappraisal of what the book is primarily about, suggesting that despite the elaborate portrayal of risks to the oceans, AI may, in fact, well prove to be the greater threat.

This paper analyzes the 2024 Mellichamp Mind and Machine Initiative at UCSB, a pioneering AI-inclusive literary competition accepting human, AI, and hybrid works. As Head Judge, I explore key questions confronting the panel: Will AI render human writing obsolete? Can machine-generated literature exhibit creativity or remain mechanical? Are AI and human writing distinguishable? What does authorship mean in an era of AI collaboration? The paper examines judges’ interpretive frameworks, biases, and expectations, contrasting them with outcomes observed in submissions. It also considers how AI challenges traditional notions of the author and fosters new creative possibilities.