ABSTRACT
How does a riddle stand? What prosthetics and people does it lean on? This chapter analyzes Adam Roberts’s novel Bête, which structures its imagining of animal human hybridity around a riddle. Riddles, according to Roberts, make the commonplace strange and allow us to rethink the everyday. While the novel pushes understandings of humanity’s ecological positioning in the world of animals, it does so by recentering notions of Man in the posthuman. The novel uses disability and its women characters, disabled and nondisabled alike, as a crutch on which one man leans to stretch toward the posthuman.
