ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne through the framework of multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s related proposals to queer the conventional modest witness of modern science and to acknowledge our present epoch as “the Chthulucene”—an alternative to the Anthropocene. I argue that Borne registers the Chthulugenic nature of our late-capitalist present and, as it does so, offers a critique of traditional modest witnessing while advocating, as an alternative, a practice of witnessing that entails a radical openness to one’s environment and the diverse creatures who inhabit it.
