After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly

Abstract

Reviewed by: After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly Anna McFarlane Posthumanism Before Posthumanism. Thomas Connolly. After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin. Liverpool UP, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 2021. viii+ 227 pp. $130 hc. [End Page 558] The relationship between posthumanism and science fiction is well established. The project of posthumanism—to rethink the figure of the "human" and to find something that might come after that figure—has now developed into a critical posthumanism that does not simply try to think of what comes after the human, but thinks of posthumanism as a critical tool for deconstructing the human historically and aesthetically. Science fiction has never been far away from these developments. Donna Haraway famously drew on speculative fiction in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1984), taking inspiration from authors such as Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy. N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999) contains a critical reading of embodiment and transcendence in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). While this relationship between science fiction and (critical) posthumanism is suggestive, the tendency has been for scholars of posthumanism to draw upon contemporary sf texts, only occasionally recognizing the longer history of posthuman forms in the genre, perhaps through texts such as James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) or Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953). In After Human, Thomas Connolly seeks to redress this oversight with a study of posthumanism in sf from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. He uses posthumanism as "a hermeneutical principle aimed at assessing the ideas, values, and notions that surround the human or non-human in these works" (21), a move described as analogous to Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function or Tom Moylan's concept of the "critical utopia." Connolly uses the figure of the Oncomouse™ as a way into the knotty terrain of critical posthumanism and its stakes. The Oncomouse™ is a genetically mutated mouse, created by a Harvard research laboratory and designed to produce tumors at an accelerated rate, allowing scientists to quickly produce cancerous growths for experimentation under lab conditions. This lifeform was trademarked upon its creation in the 1990s and became a focal point for cultural critics, who tended to view the Oncomouse™ as either "a Frankensteinian threat to the sanctity of human life, or as a locus of subversive resistance to the very techno-industries that created it" (12). Connolly aims to pave a third way that allows the relationship between "nature" and "culture" to be navigated in a more nuanced fashion. He begins by clearly mapping out the terrain of critical posthumanism in exceptionally clear writing. This is a contested and developing academic field, and Connolly is adept at honing in on the most important issues at stake and introducing readers to some of the key thinkers in the field, including Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles. He then undertakes something of a whistlestop tour of some of critical posthumanism's philosophical forebears, with a particular focus on the appearance of techné and technicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical thinking. Situating critical posthumanism within a longer philosophical tradition is clearly important to Connolly's project as he seeks out posthumanism avant la lettre in his chosen texts, and some of these figures doubtless loom large, particularly Martin Heidegger. Others, however, such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, are less significant for Connolly's study, [End Page 559] although name-dropping them here perhaps opens future lines of research in establishing the roots of critical posthumanism. Connolly's introduction is particularly strong in its description of the role that "new" or "vital" materialism has come to play in critical posthumanism. In Connolly's narrative, posthumanism becomes a tool for moving beyond the linguistic turn, for recognizing the importance of materiality and entanglement, becoming a place to query distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the individual and the "environment." Connolly's understanding of science fiction, then, as a literature habitually preoccupied with technology (17), allows him to weave sf and...