ABSTRACT
Twenty-first-century fiction has taken a prominent and widely visible speculative turn, often within a dystopian cultural imaginary, with a prominent ecocritical approach, engaging with postanthropocentric relationalities and thus, I argue, distinct hope. The chapter explores intersections between notions of a transgressive utopianism (Lucy Sargisson) and recent critical perceptions that destabilise a persistent binary logic and value difference, multiple belongings, and fuzzy boundaries. New Materialisms, Posthumanisms, and Anthropocene Studies problematise the relationalities between human, non-human, inhuman, machines, and other life forms and remove humankind from the exclusive narrative centre, emphasising interrelations between all materialities. As a point of departure, the chapter first turns to art, the Polish artist Paweł Althamer’s exceptional multi-material sculpture Paweł i Monika (2002), and then to 21st-century speculative novels, namely Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Tiger Flu (2018), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013), Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach (2014) trilogy and Borne (2017), as examples of a broadening of the imaginative space by ambiguating the human status and interrogating the potentialities of transfusion, symbiosis, blending, webbing, and cooperation between species, life forms, cultures, and genders. The novels use transgression, slippage, realigned relationalities to highlight entanglements, undermining the very notion of singularity. Beyond the dystopian narrative mode, the texts invite readers to reassess fixity, categorisations, separateness, and provide empowerment through “critical hope” (Ojala), a hope inspired not only by “social dreaming” in a broad disciplinary sense yet restricted to “groups of people” (Sargent 3), but by a kind of proleptic speculative and fantastic realism that extends to a planetary dreaming.
