ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses two short stories from Olga Tokarczuk’s latest collection, Opowiadania bizarne (Stories of the Bizarre) published in 2018. Their subtle dystopian qualities are understood in the light of Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” and Staying with the Trouble. Both Haraway and Tokarczuk grapple with our place in the ecosystems we share with other species, attempting to redefine our ontological position in relation to the advancing technology and to adopt the right diction to express our subjectivity towards the environment. I link Haraway’s Chthulucene, the epoch in which the human and non-human could be inextricably linked in “tentacular” practices, with Tokarczuk’s idea of tenderness related to her concept of the tender narrator.
