Reviewed by: Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life by Steven Shaviro Roger Luckhurst Life, Jim, But Not as We Know It. Steven Shaviro. Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life. Goldsmiths, 2021. 181 pp. £17.50. This elegant and lucid book modestly offers eight chapters of eight close readings of science-fiction texts, structured around questions of life and embodiment—or what the British sociologist Nikolas Rose would call “the politics of life itself,” as it becomes a scientifically manipulable, controllable, and commodifiable thing with the advances of the biosciences. In typical Shaviro style (this is his eleventh book), the short stories, novellas, novels, and one Afrofuturist hip-hop album considered are principally instruments for [End Page 126] reading science-fictional futures in a philosophical mode. These are not genre studies or cultural histories of sf texts but, as the minimalist introduction states, texts read as “thought experiments” (1). The readings here share a theoretical frame and reading practice with those critical theorists loosely associated with speculative realism or object-oriented ontology (OOO), such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker. Indeed, Harman’s pleasingly odd exercise in close readings of Lovecraft’s stories in Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) might be the model for Shaviro’s approach here. Eugene Thacker talked about writing not a philosophy of horror, but about the horror of philosophy, its very limits, pushing to expose the unthought of its system of thought, using Gothic fiction and occult grimoires as theory-fictions to break open the constraints of disciplinary knowledge. Similarly, Shaviro is not writing philosophy through sf, but reading sf as a kind of philosophical speculation, thus testing the limits of both philosophy and literary or textual criticism. Whether you get on with this mode or not, these close readings are always worth the time and will be vital reference points for those exploring these texts and writers. The first two chapters explore the limits of the Kantian philosophy of human cognition in two texts that stage dramas of explicit breeches of Kant’s transcendental frames of human thought. These are Charles Harness’s “The New Reality” (1950) and Adam Roberts’s audacious working out of Kant’s limits of philosophy in The Thing Itself (2015). The philosophical ground of this attempt to think beyond the Kantian frames of thought will be familiar to those well-versed in their OOO or willing to spend time with post-post-post-structuralists such as Quentin Meillassoux. This is the critique of limits of correlationism, the fatal mistake, so the OOO crew argue, introduced into Western philosophy by Kant that the world can only be understood through human frames, given the phenomenological prison of our limited conceptions of time and space. Sf as a vehicle for post-Kantian thought can stage moments of the sublime that exceed Kant’s act to recuperate even these moments of cognitive limit or collapse. These moments in sf hint at genuine alterity, or else dramatize the impossibility of representation of what Meillassoux calls “the great outside,” that rich world of things themselves that carry on perfectly well beyond human limits. So far, so familiar: Shaviro has expertly explored this conceptual terrain in previous works, such as The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014) and Discognition (2016). Chapters three and four focus on Clifford Simak’s “Shadow Show” (1953) and Ann Halam’s Dr Franklin’s Island (Gwyneth Jones’s 2002 YA rewrite of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau [1896]). This pair explores how “life itself” might become a manipulable object of oppressive conjunctures of bioscience and corporate capitalism, while suggesting that there is a kind of darkness or alien alterity to life that escapes this capture. These are science-fictional spins on work in Gothic or horror studies that explore how terror can be generated out of this sense of life as an alien vitalist force that surges up and through the human body, transforming and remaking it. But where Lovecraft’s response is a reactionary and racialized terror at hybridity or [End Page 127] trans-species genetic transfer, Simak’s short story exposes the Cold War ideological fusion of biological sciences with the militiarization of research...
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Sep 27, 2024
Ying-Tung Lin + 3
Open Access
