Learning to Live With the Animals in SF

Abstract

Sherryl Vint’s Animal Alterity continues the project of her previous book Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (2007). Where the first book explored the technological posthuman, the new one looks at the biological posthuman. Animal Alterity, like the earlier book, is concerned with the ethical implications of expanding the circle of subject beings; it could have been subtitled Animals, Subjectivity, Science Fiction instead of Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Also like the previous volume, the new book is distinguished by its rigorous coverage of scholarship in cultural studies, philosophy, and science fiction, and by its use of a wide range of relevant sf. Indeed, one of the great values of Animal Alterity is its bibliography, and I look forward to mining it for my own work. The book itself has a great deal to offer scholars in both Human-Animal Studies (HAS) and science fiction, fields that have, I believe along with Vint, a symbiotic relationship. The volume is organized into an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion, offering a thorough overview of the many ways in which the sf-HAS hybrid functions. The introduction, “Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and Human-Animal Studies,” establishes the link between HAS and science fiction. Vint points out that while sf representations of animals “can provide insight into the way the discourse of species informs other ideologies at work, ... some sf texts themselves perform the work of HAS, striving to gesture beyond normative conceptions of animal and human being” (8). The introduction makes clear that Vint’s focus throughout will be ethical, and that this approach will take into account materiality—as in embodiment and as in dialectical materialism. “In reconnecting with animals,” she says, “we are also reconnecting with our embodied being, with what might be thought of as our animal nature; this new way of conceptualising human subjectivity and our relation with the rest of the living world thus has important affinities with scholarship on posthumanism” (9). Furthermore, “resistance to the biopolitical regime of neo-liberal capitalism requires acknowledging the degree to which species difference has been foundational in structuring the liberal institutions one might wish to contest” (17). Typical of the work as a whole, Vint’s book demonstrates solid theoretical foundations for her position, as when she points out that: