ABSTRACT
Traditionally, contemporary science fiction (SF) has been mainly classified into two main types of texts: apocalyptic narratives and technological utopias. However, some novels exceed these categories, as they show a different response to what I consider to be a transmodern perspective on a near-future world in which human beings explore the universe and interact with other life forms. This is the case of Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), as the interspecies encounters between human beings and alien biologies that take place in a number of different worlds provoke a subsequent implosion of biological and ontological categories that requires an ethical and active response from readers, what Donna Haraway has called “response-able” practice (2008, 2016). In Mitchison’s novel, the communication with non-human beings such as the inhabitants of planet Lambda 771, whose evolutionary descent is very dissimilar from that of human beings, requires a particular state of mind. Situations and phenomena like the encounters with alien radial beings or non-human grafts, and the strong desire to establish a relationship with non-human species – which are quite abundant in the novel – as well as the inevitable interference of the observer/observed, imply an ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies and thus call forth for a transmodern ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad 2007).
