ABSTRACT
In the 1966 cult film Fantastic Voyage, which inspired Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel of the same name, a scientist is the victim of an assassination attempt. In order to repair the damage to his brain, a team of medical specialists is shrunk to a microscopic scale and injected into his bloodstream. Thus, years before the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human project was initiated, science fiction offered viewers a mind-bending journey through the human vascular system. The scientific team zooms past monstrous blood cells and white corpuscles in a miniaturized submarine, racing against time, provoking meditations on scale in various forms that include space travel—in this case, inner space—the magnitude of the task at hand, size, and time. This kaleidoscopic odyssey also prompts an analysis of the phenomenology of perception, as we psychologically project our corporeal selves made miniature into the patient’s circulatory system and flow between gargantuan protoplasmic particles. Despite its somewhat camp aesthetic and the comparatively limited cinematic effects of its time, the fantasy of shifting scales that Fantastic Voyage offers us is so compelling it has penetrated the cultural imagination.
