ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how Greg Bear’s novel Darwin’s Radio (1999) portrays our cybernetic interconnectedness with microbiological, evolutionary, and geological hyperobjects, producing what the authors call ‘network ontologies.’ Advancing this view, Martin and Horn read the SHEVA virus in the novel with a focus on synergistic interactions between human and nonhuman agents, being host environments and pathogens, respectively. Drawing analogies between Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects and autopoietic systems as theorised by Niklas Luhmann, Lynn Margulis, and Bruce Clarke, they argue that Darwin’s Radio presents hyperobjects as multi-layered sets of relations between signifiers. The authors thus contend that those relations pave the way for emerging possibilities that lead to new configurations of meaning. For them, the SHEVA virus forces us to reconsider notions of distributed nonhuman agency, which undermines anthropocentrism. The virus disturbs the idea of human essence by inducing mutations. The chapter concludes that the novel helps us rethink the socially constructed boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, while giving us insights through a discussion of a world without Homo sapiens.
