Science Fiction Criticism
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Resisting such fates for humans and for animals requires a reconceptualization of subjectivity, and what Rosi Braidotti calls “future-oriented perspectives, which do not deny the traumas of the past but transform them into possibilities for the present. It is not the heavenly future at which we aim, but rather a more sustainable one, situated here and now” (268). Matthew Calarco argues that HAS’s project of tracing the genealogy of the human–animal boundary across institutions, practices and discourses enables us to understand this distinction more fully in its various, contingent and specific manifestations, and also “help to uncover alternative ways of conceiving of human beings and animals that have been ignored, covered over, and distorted by dominant discourses” (140–141). This book participates in such a project, exploring what Teresa de Lauretis identified as sf’s capacity to be “potentially creative of new forms of social imagination, creative in the sense of mapping out areas where cultural change could take place, of envisioning a different order of relationships between people and between people and things, a different conceptualization of social existence, inclusive of physical and material existence” (161). Each of the chapters explores the tension between, on the one hand, the gravitational pull of the sedimented weight of the species boundary and its attendant metaphysical and ethical boundary, which shapes the ways in which animals can and do appear in sf; and, on the other, the potentially subversive and new ways of conceiving species interrelations made possible by the genre’s creative extrapolations, its ability to provide us with a future-oriented perspective that we might also achieve in the here and now. I have selected texts from across the spectrum of sf from early scientific romances and pulp magazine stories through golden-age novels to twenty-first-century works. Some of my examples are by authors who are well established within the sf tradition such as Frederik Pohl and Ursula K. Le Guin; others are authors from the early pulps who have since largely disappeared from academic considerations of the genre, but whose appearance in venues such as Amazing Stories signals the importance of animal themes to the emerging genre; and finally some texts, such as those by Karel Cˇapek and Kirsten Bakis, represent the more literary tradition within the genre and often find an audience outside its boundaries. Throughout I have organized my analysis of these works in terms of their thematic concerns, comparing and contrasting various ways animals serve to answer some of sf’s questions about alterity, subjectivity and visions of another world. Thus texts from different historical and national contexts mingle in each chapter, serving to illustrate the richness of sf’s engagement with the question of the animal.
Chapter 1 considers texts that foreground the problems of consumption as one of the demarcations of the human–animal boundary. The anxiety that accompanies visions of humans consumed by other beings speaks to the disquiet that haunts our relationship to animals as food. Further, these texts reveal the deep connection between the ethics of eating another and the metaphysics of subjectivity based on exclusion of the animal, which has significant consequences for our conception of the human as well.
Chapter 2 focuses on the difficulty of defining sentience in a nonhuman being, offering a model of becoming-other in the image of becoming-animal that promises to transcend the isolation of the human subject as defined through the human–animal boundary. The recognition of sentience in animal others thus promises a transformation of human subjectivity that simultaneously enables a revolution in intersubjectivity, ultimately changing the relation of self/world. The experience of becoming-animal offers a glimpse of the utopian desire that Jameson suggests animates our imagining of alien bodies.
Chapter 3 turns to the question of language as one of the key criteria that has been used to differentiate human from animal being. Texts that narrate animal language and the experience of the world as perceived through this different semiotic filter, like the images of animal sentience, propose other ways of experiencing the world and thus work toward the sustainable-but-otherwise future that Braidotti desires. Sf’s power to allow the animal to speak enables a powerful fantasy of communication with an alien other that might be realized in our material world.
Chapter 4 reflects on the various ways that discourses about gender and discourses about animality intersect, overlap and challenge one another. The parallel oppressions of women and animals suggest many sites for allied intervention and resistance to a biopolitical regime that constructs both as producers of surplus value. Sf animals in many of these texts offer a counter discourse of animal being that resists the hegemonic construction of “animal” by dominant anthropocentric discourse in a manner similar to feminist responses to patriarchy.
Chapter 5 similar explores the parallels between colonial discourse and the representations of animals. At root, both colonial racism and speciesism share a desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of excluded—because dehumanized—others, and thus struggles over resources and the status of labor unite them. Animals in sf texts who emerge as colonized others and exploited labor classes serve to dramatize the damaged relationship between humanity and the rest of the world that is the product of such discourses, and some offer visions of another way to structure our social relations.
Chapter 6 evaluates the uses of animal aliens in sf texts, considering them productive sites for thinking through sf’s relationship with alterity and its desire to imagine a world of different subjects and different social relations. At times, alien animals serve only to reinforce a discourse of human exceptionalism, but other texts speak to a continuing desire to connect with another being whose subjectivity is unlike our own. In their staging of various ways that humans and animal aliens negotiate an ability to share the world—or refuse or fail to do so—these texts offer insight into the struggles we face in the twenty-first century as we come to recognize that humanity is part of a biosphere and in many ways dependent upon the existence of other beings.
Chapter 7 looks to the other common trope of incorporating animals into sf, reversing the position of humans and animals such that humans are treated by alien beings in ways similar to how we treat animals. Such texts resemble those discussed in the previous chapter in that they offer visions of how we might reconfigure our relationship with other species in the complex multispecies world in which we live but from which we have separated ourselves. Like texts discussed in earlier chapters, these reversal tales emphasize that transforming the relationship between humans and animals requires reconceptualizing what it means to be human, striving for an animal-oriented posthumanism.
Chapter 8 centers on the human-made animals that populate much of sf and increasingly parts of our material world as well. This chapter most fully explores the roots of sf as a genre linked to the rising culture of science and its values of technical rationality. The animals in laboratories and the spaces of biological manipulation that serve as the settings for such tales draw our attention to the links between the human–animal boundary and the biopolitical ethics of rational calculation that also informs the biopolitical governance of people as populations.
Finally, my conclusion looks to sf texts that offer lines of flight out of this configuration of human subjectivity based on the denial of the animal, and out of the damaged and damaging relationships to the world and other beings that it produces. I argue that closely considering the animals in sf offers promising ways in which we might reconceptualize human subjectivity, trying for a posthuman identity that addresses the pressing ecological problems of the twenty-first century. The conjunction of animals and sf produces other possible futures and envisions one of the longings that animates so much of the genre, a vision of communicating with a nonhuman species.
Notes
1. This project focuses on animals in sf, excluding texts that are explicitly fantasy or children’s literature from its scope. At the same time, however, I recognize that the boundary between sf and other speculative literatures is permeable and continually in flux. I follow Roger Luckhurst in defining sf as “the literature of technologic
ally saturated societies” (3) and thus dating its emergence to the late nineteenth century. Beyond finding this definition compelling. I also find it useful for positioning the relations between sf and HAS. The transformations wrought by the penetration of technological and scientific innovations into human lives during this period has been matched by equally radical transformation of both animal lives and the context in which human-animal social relations occur—or often no longer occur.
2. Regarding terminology, there is a considerable debate within the field of HAS regarding what language is appropriate to refer to humans collectively as distinct from nonhuman beings. Many people reject the terms “human” and “animal” as already ceding too much anthropocentrism and reinforcing a boundary whose deconstruction is precisely the point of much of this work. The distinction of human versus nonhuman is sometimes used, and occasionally I shall follow that usage when I am attempting to draw parallels between the discourse of speciesism and non-animal but similarly nonhuman others found in sf; although this terminology solves the problem of the conflation of widely disparate forms of life into the single category of “animal,” thereby obfuscating differences among them, it still retains a special and set-apart space for humans which remains problematic. For the most part. I will use the terms “human” and “animal” while recognizing their limitations, as these terms connect to the history of human/animal separation in philosophy and history upon which I draw.
3. Interestingly, Gernsback felt it necessary to append an editorial note to this story which was published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories suggesting that the author was having a bit of fun with speculations about a cat-race. Given Gernsback’s insistence elsewhere—often in the absence of compelling evidence—of the plausibility of the “scientific” premises of many of the stories he published, this anxiety about the non-centrality of Homo sapiens is intriguing.
4. See Calarco for an extensive overview and critique of this philosophical history.
5. For more on native ways of conceptualizing human/animal relations and sf uses of these ideas, see Dillon.
6. The phrase is Teresa Mangum’s, who argues: “when empire and technology go terribly wrong, these dystopias unleash the truth about the violence and abuse animals often faced” (156–157). I agree with her analysis, but am also using the term in a broader way to encompass this and the other more positive ghostly presence of a desire to connect to being both like and unlike us.
7. James Serpell, building on Steven Mithen’s argument that anthropo-morphism is a defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, points out that it has defined the sorts of social relations that modern humans have with other species: “By enabling our ancestors to attribute human thoughts, feelings, motivations, and beliefs to other species, [anthropomorphism] opened the door to the incorporation of some animals into the human social milieu, first as pets and ultimately as domestic dependents” (124).
8. A similar point can be made about genetic reasons for similar behavior that can be traced back to a common shared ancestor. Elliot Sober argues that although cladistic parsimony does not provide “a blanket justification for attributing human characteristics to nonhuman organisms” (95), nonetheless “parsimony does favor anthropomorphism over anthropodenial. If two derived behaviors are homologous, then the hypothesis that they are produced by the same proximate mechanisms is more parsimonious than the hypothesis that they are produced by different proximate mechanisms” (95–96).
9. See Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order (1995) for an impassioned defence of humanism and a resistance of animal rights based on his belief that the “uniqueness” of humans must be protected to ensure the possibility of any ethics whatsoever. For an incisive critique of Ferry, see Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites (2003). For a more historical and less philosophical exploration of these issues, see Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison (1997). For a polemic from the opposite point of view from Ferry’s, see Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka (2002).
10. For good overviews of some of the historically variable ways animals have figured in humans’ material, intellectual and artistic lives, see Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World (1984), Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate (1987), the collection Companion Animals & Us edited by Anthony Podberscek, Elizabeth Paul and James Serpell (2000), Erica Fudge’s Perceiving Animals (2002), Linda Kalof’s Looking at Animals in Human History (2007) and the Berg six-volume Cultural History of Animals series (2007).
11. See David Ulansey, “The Current Mass Extinction,”
12. See De Vos 183.
13. See Simmons and Armstrong 12.
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