Cross-Infections of Vegetal-Human Bodies in Science Fiction

Abstract

It is particularly disturbing when seemingly inert plants escape the category of nourishing food and instead become transmitters of vegetal diseases infecting our human bodies or transforming us into plant-human hybrids or even plant-infused zombies. This article analyzes the ecological and alimentary implications of three sf texts in which plants infect human bodies or use them as a kind of walking soil from which to sprout: Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl (2009), Olivia Vieweg's German-language graphic novel, EndZeit [EndTime, 2018], and Nnedi Okorafor's graphic novel LaGuardia (2019). Presenting plant-human relations as either utopian and kinship-based or as horrific cross-species disease vectors creating human-plant zombies, these texts reveal aspects of the ecological fact that human bodies are always monstrously chimerical. All living things are, in fact, composed of multispecies entanglements with other beings such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, as well as the species they consume, as described by Anna Tsing et al. in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017). Bacigalupi, Vieweg, and Okorafor transform our ecological entanglements with and dependence on plants into both disturbing and celebratory sf visions of bodily invasion.