A Post-Anthropocentric Explication of the Posthuman World-Building in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s the Doors of Eden

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present study seeks to analyze Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel The Doors of Eden (2020) to describe how posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism can go hand-in-hand in contemporary speculative fiction. The novel itself is a masterpiece in world-building where the action takes place against the background of an eternally proliferating multiversal reality. Parallel worlds, sentient monsters, posthuman, non-human entities abound in the novel, and this will be seen as complementary and conducive to the posthuman universe-building in the narrative. Through the analysis of the novel The Doors of Eden, I have attempted to show how posthumanism can effectively dismantle and destroy a human-centered worldview by incorporating tropes of monstrosity, alienness, immersive virtual reality, mind-uploading, and integration of mind and machine – all of which eventually come together to define and reinforce the post-anthropomorphic paradigm. For the purpose of the explication, the author has adopted various theoretical insights from the renowned contemporary theoreticians among which Rosi Braidotti’s criticalposthumanism, Barad’s intra-action and agential realism, and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and, Lenton & Latour’s Gaia 2.0 hypothesis will be important.