Disability of varying kinds permeates Wallace’s writing, which persistently displayed varying degrees of emotional, cognitive, physical or metaphysical disability. Although having no discernible interest in disabilities studies as an academic discipline, Wallace’s writing evidences a persistent conception that persons are definitionally disabled by the motor, volitional and agentive impediments posed by the simple but universal fact of embodiment, with which, he argues, we all “crave” to be “reconciled.” Employing various approaches from phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl) to disabilities studies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard J. Davis), this chapter offers illustrative examples of the three primary forms of atypicality in Wallace’s works: anomalous bodies, cognitive disability, and textual malformation. Through these, this chapter provides a context of disability within which Wallace’s works are situated and which enables insights into his wider literary and humanistic concerns.

The invention of imaginary worlds may be understood as a powerful tool for exploring experience, discovering the self, and creating knowledge and meaning. An imagined world is an earth or universe or a system of make-believe ideas and things that may be contemplated in the mind, though it remains veritably unexperienced. In childhood, worldplay (paracosm play) refers to imaginative pretense that is persistent, cumulative, and constructive (maps, stories, drawings, and more may be generated). In adulthood, worldplay refers to the world-building narratives of writers and artists; to the plausible reconstructions, scenarios, and probable worlds of social scientists; and to the theoretical suppositions and possible worlds of scientists. As such, worldplay presents a unique opportunity to probe what-if cognition. Indeed, as the history of its study indicates, world invention as play and as creative strategy tells us much about development of imaginative thinking and the growth of creative competence across the lifespan.

Mark Bould’s chapter on “Speculative Fiction” begins with Jonathan Lethem’s literary critical counterfactual in which the genre border between science fiction and mainstream literature never existed and all novels about science were considered one group. As Bould points out, the very term slipstream itself was coined by Bruce Sterling to refer to the disconcerting works of science fiction that played across the edges of varied genre definitions. Heady mixtures of literary conventions have informed all regions of fiction since then, as speculative fiction draws on and critiques archaic and futurist literary movements representing empire, environmentalism, disability, illness, violence, as well as racial, gendered and sexual alterities.

Busy with our own world, we often think that animals are just a part of it, minor players in the large, smart, progressive lives of humans. But if we flip the point of view, things change. What are the animals’ worlds that remain inaccessible to us? Be they wild or domestic, animals hold for themselves seething multitudes of points of view that work below the surface of our own ways of understanding them. An encounter with an animal is a moment in which we come to recognize that animals have lives beyond us. In this look from myriad nonhumans, we realize there are more points of view than our own, and that there are other ways of dwelling on earth that are just as important to these animals as ours are to us. This allows us to better consider the ecosystems of which they and we are a part and to change the narrative about how we live with other animals on this shared earth.