Chapter 6 reaches the end of our foray into Heidegger’s analysis of technology. The chapter examines Sloan’s memoirs of General Motors and identifies a cybernetic fantasy of control in the ghost-written account, laid bare by the increasing inability of technological systems to reveal anything; and where humans are not even the ordinary fabricators anymore, the earth merely becomes a globe, that is gridded and dug over. The invention of the radio that for Heidegger heralded an epoch of the nearness of the distant and the gigantic, soon eclipsed any real nearness to being and to the world (and so also the possibility of pluralistic appearances in spaces such as the polis), was itself soon itself eclipsed by technologies no longer need to bring ‘any-thing’ near, where things and pictures and meaning and desires and ends are giving way to patterns and correlations; the cycles of the Gestell become one continual switching (there ‘is’ nothing as such to extract, unlock, store etc.., save for information).

This chapter focuses on the novel of the twenty-first century to suggest that we are seeing now a new way of understanding the forms in which the novel pictures the world. The chapter opens with an exploration of the terms in which climate change and advances in the medical creation of artificial life have together shifted our understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. In light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that the eco-crisis sees the collapse of culture into nature, the chapter suggests that the contemporary novel is involved in the picturing of a world that becomes thinkable when the opposition between nature and culture has been overcome. It then goes on to read this new kind of world picturing, as it comes to expression in twenty-first-century novels by three of the major writers of the contemporary novel – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo. It is possible to see in these writers, the chapter argues, the culmination of the prosthetic imagination as I have traced it through the history of the novel, a culmination in which the capacity to picture the world is won from the novel’s intimacy with the resistance of our bodies and environments to the forms in which we seek to make them imaginable and habitable.