4 - Nonhuman Entanglements in Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: Bête (2014) and By Light Alone (2012)

Summary

Science fiction (sf) is notoriously hard to define. As Sherryl Vint explains, it is a genre which is ostensibly interested in science, but also, importantly, in the ‘mythologies of science’. Alongside being a literary genre which has evolved over time – often propelled, especially in the early years, by the idiosyncratic visions of editors and publishers – it is also ‘a cultural mode that struggles with the implications of discoveries in science and technology for human social lives and philosophical conceptions’. As Adam Roberts describes in his book, Science Fiction (2000), one of the fundamental markers of sf tends to be an ‘encounter with difference’. Drawing on Darko Suvin’s foundational concept of the ‘novum’, he continues:

This encounter is articulated through a ‘novum’, a conceptual, or more usually material embodiment of alterity, the point at which the SF text distils the difference between its imagined world and the world we all inhabit. This serves as the basis of many critics’ affection for the genre, the fact that SF provides a means, in a popular and accessible fictional form, for exploring alterity.

While the most recognisable forms of alterity in sf might be the ‘final frontier’ of outer space and the otherworldly others to be found there, a growing body of research has been focused on alterity closer to home: the hidden lifeworlds and subjectivities of nonhuman animals (NHAs) and plants. This ‘nonhuman turn’ in sf operates in tandem with a contemporary wave of sf and sf criticism focused on environmental concerns. These strands have coalesced in the shadow of imminent anthropogenic climate catastrophe in our current geological epoch, which has been (controversially) termed the Anthropocene. As plants and NHAs are increasingly entangled with technoscience and biotechnological inventions, sf accordingly struggles with the implications of those inventions not only for human lives, but also for the lives of the nonhuman others themselves. And as phenomena like global warming and pandemics disrupt supply chains and food systems, the need to acknowledge human entanglements with the nonhuman world is becoming undeniable. Importantly, then, sf also struggles with humans’ philosophical conceptions of how to relate to and understand the lives of nonhuman others, often questioning species boundaries and hierarchical relationality.