Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism develops the theoretical perspective of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction novels by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jeff VanderMeer, in which the human species suddenly transforms in response to new or changing environments. Narrating dramatic ecological events of human-to-nonhuman encounter, invasion, and transmutation, these novels allow the reader to understand the planet as an unstable stage for evolution and the human body as a home for bacteria and viruses. Idema argues that by drawing tension from biological theories of interaction and emergence (e.g. symbiogenesis, epigenetics), these works unsettle conventional relations among characters, technologies, story-worlds, and emplotment, refiguring the psychosocial work of the novel as always already biophysical. Problematizing a desire to compartmentalize and control life as the property of human subjects, these novels imagine life as an environmentally mediated, staged event that enlists human and nonhuman actors. Idema demonstrates how literary narratives of transmutation render biological lessons of environmental instability and ecological interdependence both meaningful and urgent―a vital task in a time of mass extinction, hyperpollution, and climate change. This volume is an important intervention for scholars of the environmental humanities, posthumanism, literature and science, and science and technology studies.
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Article
Robertson, Benjamin;
(2010)
“Some Matching Strangeness”: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler's Kindred
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Article
Markley, Robert;
(2012)
“How to go forward”: Catastrophe and Comedy in Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy
(/isis/citation/CBB001252273/)
Article
Erika Lorraine Milam;
(2019)
Old Woman and the Sea: Evolution and the Feminine Aquatic
(/isis/citation/CBB398603741/)
Article
Luckhurst, Roger;
(2006)
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects
(/isis/citation/CBB001030928/)
Book
Burling, William J.;
(2009)
Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays
(/isis/citation/CBB001252281/)
Article
Idema, Tom;
(2015)
Toward a Minor Science Fiction: Literature, Science, and the Shock of the Biophysical
(/isis/citation/CBB001550675/)
Chapter
Wheeler, Wendy;
(2011)
The Book of Nature: Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001202035/)
Article
Cabin, Robert J.;
(2013)
Nature Is Dead. Long Live Nature!
(/isis/citation/CBB001320839/)
Book
Marek Tamm;
Peter Burke;
(2018)
Debating New Approaches to History
(/isis/citation/CBB400076497/)
Book
Russell Winslow;
(2017)
Organism and Environment: Inheritance and Subjectivity in the Life Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB178727188/)
Article
Hale, Piers J.;
(2003)
Labor and the Human Relationship with Nature: The Naturalization of Politics in the Work of Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert George Wells, and William Morris
(/isis/citation/CBB000340700/)
Article
Haila, Yrjö;
(2000)
Beyond the Nature-Culture Dualism
(/isis/citation/CBB000111058/)
Book
Musil, Robert K.;
(2014)
Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America's Environment
(/isis/citation/CBB001422328/)
Article
Lisa Garforth;
(2019)
Environmental Futures, Now and Then: Crisis, Systems Modeling, and Speculative Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB582046293/)
Article
Marco Caracciolo;
Gry Ulstein;
(2022)
The Weird and the Meta in Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts
(/isis/citation/CBB470743040/)
Book
Natania Meeker;
Antónia Szabari;
(2019)
Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB038984582/)
Book
Jerome Whitington;
(2019)
Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower
(/isis/citation/CBB993069891/)
Article
J. Baird Callicott;
(2021)
The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic(s)
(/isis/citation/CBB388880977/)
Book
Anna McFarlane;
Lars Schmeink;
Graham Murphy;
(2019)
The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB960721928/)
Chapter
Jørgensen, Dolly;
(2013)
Environmentalists on Both Sides: Enactments in the California Rigs-to-Reefs Debate
(/isis/citation/CBB001420340/)
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