Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism by Tom Idema

Abstract

633 BOOKS IN REVIEW Life Lessons. Tom Idema. Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism. New York: Routledge, 2019. 186 pp. $120 hc, $54.95 ebk. Tom Idema’s Stages of Transformation offers readings of four works of posthuman sf, together with a broader argument that speculation on the posthuman, whether in sf writing or more generally, needs to get away from technologically-based fantasies of the Singularity and of jacking into the network, and instead pay greater attention to biological and environmental themes. The book is well-written, and accessible without sacrificing complexity. Its readings are good and interesting, but I think it is the overall thesis that makes this book an important one. In successive chapters, the author considers Kim Stanley Robinson’s MARS trilogy, Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, Jeff VanderMeer’s SOUTHERN REACH trilogy, and Octavia Butler’s XENOGENESIS/LILITH’S BROOD trilogy. All of these works have been widely discussed by previous critics, but Idema provides some new insights about all of them. The sequencing of the book is also interesting, as Idema moves from Robinson’s political epic of terraforming, to Bear’s biological mysticism, to VanderMeer’s fabulation of ecological catastrophe, and finally to Butler’s wrenching vision of traumatic contact. This makes the works seem highly diverse, but Idema convincingly finds a common thread running through all of them. He achieves this largely by shifting his focus away from what might seem the most obvious features of these works. Idema’s reading of the MARS trilogy soft-pedals the political discords and contentions that feature so prominently in these books, as they do in most of Robinson’s other novels. Instead, Idema is most interested in how the scientific and engineering program of terraforming the planet itself becomes transformed as the human actors, whatever their politics, are increasingly forced to take account of Mars itself not just as an object-background to be altered or preserved, but rather as an active participant in the project of development and change. What starts out as a narrative about the potentials and the politics of human-directed technology becomes, instead, a “more-than-human drama that occurs mostly outside of human vision and control” (63). This necessarily means shifting the focus away from the utopian dynamics that are arguably Robinson’s own most central concern. In his account of Darwin’s Radio, Idema is most concerned to defend the novel against charges of being either reductively genetic-determinist on the one hand, or overly spiritualistic on the other. The novel imagines a worldwide phenomenon in which pregnant women find their fetuses altered in strange and surprising ways. Bear focuses the novel on renegade scientists who reject the general consensus that the genetic alterations constitute a plague or epidemic that desperately needs to be suppressed. Instead, they regard it as a new step in directed evolution; potentialities long buried in the human genome have been activated as a result of environmental stress. Idema shows how the novel traces out the complex politics behind large-budget scientific and medical research; in this way, Idema contends that Bear is covering much of the same ground as STS 634 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) (science and technology studies), in seeing science as a social process rather than as the simple uncovering of facts. The chapter on the SOUTHERN REACH trilogy is, to my mind, the strongest section of the book. Idema is well attuned to the way that VanderMeer’s uncanny writing disables the pretensions of the traditional humanist subject extending rational mastery over a world of objects. The discussion focuses on the figure of the biologist, who is the narrator of the first volume of the series, and whose metamorphoses are tracked in the subsequent volumes. She is a scientist, but in the course of the narrative she finds herself unable to keep separate from the organisms and environment that are supposed to be the objects of her study. Rather, she is more or less absorbed into, or interpenetrated by, the ambiance, as she allows herself to be changed by it. Idema shows how VanderMeer’s writing, by being evocatively precise without being objective...