Animal Death: Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula award-winning novel The Windup Girl (2009) sets up a dialectical situation which it then disrupts. This is important for two reasons. First, dialectic formations are often also assemblages or networks, meaning that their constituent parts are defined by how they interact with each other rather than by the essence which is withdrawn from such interactions. In the previous chapter, symbiosis was seen as a powerful tool for change. However, the way it was described often bordered on a dialectical structure, as did the doubling of double-vision and the contradiction of crisis energy. The Windup Girl offers a different strategy, the short circuit. In brief, this means that one of the terms of a symbiosis disrupts the symbiosis. This disruption takes the form of spatial and temporal tensions, as described above and developed below.

Tension and Phase: Doris Lessing

The previous chapters laid out a number of ways in which objects can be surprising. The dismantling of language, vision and the world is one strategy for creating this surprise. In the Anthropocene the world is falling apart around us. If we are to go forward, this falling apart will need to become a part of the solution, meaning part of a vision of a less destructive future. This chapter aims to correct this. Following a number of arguments laid out in Graham Harman’s Immaterialism, Doris Lessing’s novel The Cleft (2007) is used to develop the notion of when an object enters a new phase of its existence, and when such change does not take place. The symbiosis of one object and another potentially causes change to occur. However, this only takes place when certain conditions are met.

Divine Paraphrase: Cormac McCarthy

In Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a boy and his father struggle to survive in a world decimated by an unspecified catastrophe.This post-apocalyptic world is dark, but relatively so because it is perceivable. The pre-apocalyptic world, as represented by the language of the father, is different. The father’s world is full of objects which are known and useful. The father’s world is a place of light and speech, while the boy’s world consists of darkness and silence. However, rather than reading the post-apocalyptic world as one of loss, its darkness is taken as a sign of potential. While this interpretation goes against the grain of most of the novel, it is supported by the repeated figuration of the boy as God. Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux are the main philosophers used to develop this argument.

Double-Vision: Neil Gaiman

A number of works by Neil Gaiman include incomprehensible elements within a comprehensible story. Such inclusion in sf is here called the Zug effect. This effect appears in Gaiman’s work when diachronic events are represented synchronically. In his novel Anansi Boys (2005), Gaiman calls these events moments of ‘double-vision’. These moments consist of the co-presencing of the changed and the unchanged within a single being at one moment in time. In other words, a world is developed in which both the knowable and unknowable appear together. While change is everywhere around us, in germination, growth and decay, the term ‘double-vision’ indicates the potential of seeing more than one side of a transformation simultaneously, thereby presenting a moment of stasis within change. One of the important consequences of Gaiman’s double-vision is that the movement of change then becomes easier to see.

Introduction

The real monsters are not aliens from outer space but humans on Earth. Nuclear radiation poisoning, environmental catastrophes and genetic manipulation gone wrong are only some of the ways that science fiction horrors are being realised. Yet if humans have become the new monsters, what happens when their dominance is removed? Are there other organisations of knowledge, time and space which could lead to a better future than the one now being created? The philosophical field of speculative realism takes this issue to heart by questioning the anthropocentrism of the present. Science fiction literature often complements this trend by imagining alternative worlds in which humans are no longer the only organisers of knowledge. The combination of both of these perspectives can lead to strategies for imagining a world different from the tragedy we are now making....

Subtraction and Contradiction: China Miéville

China Miéville’s second novel Perdido Street Station (2000) addresses the idea of essence from three different perspectives which mirror a number of concepts of speculative realism. The essence being insisted on here is what is most hidden, strange and fluid; as Harman says, ‘“essence” simply means that any object has real properties that are not exhausted by their current appearance in the mind or their current impact on other entities more generally’ . The main issue that the character Lin has in capturing Mr Motley in a sculpture of him she is making is that she cannot think how to represent essence while seeing his parts in motion. This is because she is a figure of +what Harman calls fission and fusion, meaning the separation and joining of an object and qualities.

Conclusion

A bottomless abyss exists in every inch. Cixin Liu, Death’s End (2010) Speculative realism and sf have one main feature in common. Both challenge an anthropocentric view of the world by considering non-human objects worthy of serious thought. This book has developed this connection through a reading of various works that fit into the continuum between sf and fantasy. More specifically, it is an investigation into the role that ambiguity plays in divesting the world of human domination....

Transcription: Kim Stanley Robinson

The reading of tension in sf continues in this chapter, which looks at a number of books by Kim Stanley Robinson, along with two early works by J. G. Ballard. The focus is on the transformations that take place when tension is foregrounded. This tension is seen as something that lies on the surface of things, rather than at any kind of depth. By focusing on the surface, the causal connection between objects and qualities is developed, along with the way that it can lead towards change. The concept of transcription is borrowed from musicology in order to develop a model for such transformation. In the Anthropocene, transcription is seen as essential in order to begin living in the new scales of time and space that are being thrust upon us.

The Zug Effect

The Zug effect is part of only certain moments in science fiction which are open to representing ambiguity. Thus the book offers a different definition of sf because it focuses on the roles of ambiguity and the unknowable in the genre; thus it will lead to a different set of questions and answers. In other words, rather than foregrounding the way sf extrapolates current scientific facts into future plots, this book searches out objects which resist incorporation into any past, present or future scientific understanding. Such objects are key for speculative realism because they indicate an independence from human thought or perception. Authors such as Joanna Russ, Damon Knight, Samuel Delany and Kim Stanley Robinson are used to develop this argument.