Speculative Matter: Generic Affinities, Posthumanisms and Science-Fictional Imaginings

Abstract

<p>The boundaries of science fiction, as with any genre, are relational rather than fixed, and critical engagements with Western/Northern technoscientific knowledge and practice and modern human identity and being may be found not just in science fiction “proper,” or in the scholarly field of science and technology studies, but also in the related genres of fantasy and paranormal romance. This thesis offers an interdisciplinary examination – a science-fictional and posthumanist reframing – of the lines of affinity and relationality between these discursive and imaginative domains. Bringing together genre theory and critical posthumanism – itself informed by postmodern and poststructuralist feminism, postcolonialism, science and technology studies, and critical animal studies – with readings of several series in print (Christine Feehan’s Ghostwalkers, Kim Harrison’s The Hollows, and Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity) and on television (Fringe, True Blood, and Sanctuary), I argue that such narratives’ powerful abiding interest in the domains of knowledge, experience and imagination that lie within, along and outside the margins of scientific orthodoxy, registers a broader cultural apprehension of the conditions and critical perspectives by which Western/Northern humanism, anthropocentrism, modernity, and technoscientific authority have been and can be seen to be destabilized.</p>