How to Heal People with Science Fiction

Can science fiction shape future reality? Some people think so. Take the retired military officers who have actually credited novels such as Doctor Strangelove, Fail-Safe, On the Beach, and War Games for helping them to avert accidental war. Recently, a Norwegian physiotherapy professor named Filip Maric, a futurist and professor of global cultural studies at the University of Oslo named Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, and a Canadian health and ecosystems researcher named Jenna Webb got together to see how science fiction and speculative futurisms could be used to re-imagine healthcare. They call their approach “healthpunk,” and published a paper on the approach in Lancet Planet Health.

Today, human health is deeply intertwined with planetary health, and planetary health is in trouble, which means we need to find radical new solutions, they argue. The team of researchers trained students and healthcare professionals in the tools of science fiction and published several anthologies of the creative fictions their participants wrote. They believe that their healthpunk training program could be used to develop and implement new approaches to the health of people and the planet that address interconnections between global health and social and ecological issues.

I spoke with Maric about whether science-fiction approaches to health should be literal or allegorical, the potential ethical risks of relying on speculative storytelling for problem-solving, and how their approach draws on so-called CoFuturisms, which borrow from non-Western and Indigenous traditions.

What is healthpunk?

It’s a framework for trying to think about health in new ways, using different methods for thinking than we’ve used before, drawing specifically on science fiction and speculative fiction as a way to think through new healthcare challenges and new healthcare practices.

How does it relate to other forms of punk?

This notion that we need something considerably different from the status quo is the fundamental punk spirit. But beyond that, in this whole world of fiction genres and futurism, punk isn’t an uncommon suffix. There’s solarpunk, steampunk, all of these different punk genres, and all of them ultimately suggest that something different needs to go on, other than what’s happening at the moment.

You argue that deliberate training in science-fiction storytelling might help students and academics to use certain tropes more successfully, like zombie apocalypse, alien contact, or time travel. How could using these specific tropes be helpful in this context?

We’re not really saying that we need to use those tropes more effectively, but healthcare professionals like myself, living and working in public health or another medical or health profession, we’re not trained to think with science fiction, let alone write science fiction or speculative fiction. At best, we might be readers, some of us might be really into it by happenstance. If we’re given the task to suddenly write the science-fiction story without prior training, without expertise, potentially without being a fan or without having contact with science fiction that we perceive as meaningful, it’s been my impression over the last few years of us doing this, that you always end up hitting a certain limit of how far you can go. You don’t end up exploring the world-building that goes into science-fiction practice.

In the lens of planetary health, this little group of people that’s been working with this, we’ve been experimenting sort of playfully, throwing it around, trying a little bit of this, a little bit that, and thinking about it. But now we need to be more deliberate about bringing those worlds together—the world of planetary health and the world of science fiction and speculative fiction—to generate something more.

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