ABSTRACT
The stories analyzed in this book, in which human transformation occurs in the interplay between humans and their new and/or changing environments, bring a fresh, environmental dimension to discussions around posthumanism, which are still today dominated by the theme of technology. Not only do these stories thematize concrete environmental problems such as climate change; they also provide a means for rethinking the nature of literature and narrative by building on biological theories that foreground the formative role of the environment in development and evolution. In each of these stories, the nonhuman—be it a planet (the Mars trilogy), viral DNA in the human body (Darwin’s Radio), an ecosystem (The Southern Reach), or another species (Lilith’s Brood)—gains a sense of agency, destabilizing the human as a center of the story and blurring boundaries between self and world, human and nonhuman, nature and culture. These stories displace anthropocentric models of narrativity, bringing nonhuman bodies at various scales into view as actants or characters and even (in the case of The Southern Reach) as narrators. At the same time, they refuse to reduce life to the lives of actants, emphasizing instead the evolution of the relationships out of which individual actors grow. Moving beyond discourses of “influence” and “impact,” these stories instantiate different ways of thinking environmental posthumanism, an approach that centers on the mutually transformative relationship between humans and environments.
