SF/F Now & Irradiating the Object: M. John Harrison - 21-23 August, 2014

I'll be heading down to the University of Warwick from the 21-23 August, 2014, to give a paper at each of these conferences. Here are the proposals:

SF/F Now

New Aberrant Animal Types in Our Experimental Gardens’*: Genetic Engineering, Terraforming and the Human-Animal Relationship

Stories of terraforming once seemed far removed from the urgency underlying the two major environmental concerns of our contemporary times: climate change and genetic engineering. The question of the relationship between humankind and nature lies at the core of the terraforming narrative, and the recent interest in geoengineering as a response to anthropogenic climate change has begun to dispel the perceived obscurity that terraforming bears to the here and now. These stories throw light on the discursive patterns that substrate perspectives toward the ecological integrity of Earth, and they comment on, and sometimes critique, orientations toward planetary adaptation.

The science underpinning terraforming is closely connected to that of climate change. The ways these stories imagine the material basis and the motivations that drive terraforming projects offer a range of responses to contemporary issues related to science and society. But the relationship of the sf narrative of terraforming to society is not only one of direct commentary and critique. These works offer an experimental space for testing ideas, a feature mirrored by the notion of terraforming as an experiment. They offer a case study for the way that sf involves itself with society, and the way in which specific works engage others, both within and without the sf tradition.

In this paper I extend my PhD research into the significance of terraforming by refocusing my approach – which combines environmental philosophy with sf and utopian scholarship – through the lens of the Human-Animal relationship explored by critics such as Sherryl Vint and Joan Gordon. In this way I aim to build on my current postdoctoral research on the Leverhulme funded project ‘People, Products, Pests and Pets: The Discursive Representation of Animals’ at The University of Birmingham. I consider the importance of the adaptation of organisms, primarily through genetic engineering, as a core component of the terraforming strategy, and the ways in which this approach relates to that of planetary modification. In what ways do terraforming narratives bring together human orientations toward the environment and toward animals, and how does this relate to contemporary societal concerns? How far does the representation of animals mirror or speak to the growing significance of genetic modification as an intervention into the bodies of contemporary life-forms, and how does this reflect on the ethics implicated in the relationships between humans, animals and others?

*Wells, H.G., The Shape of Things to Come <http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301391h.html>.

Irradiating the Object: M. John Harrison

‘Something that Looked Partly Like a Woman Partly Like a Cat’*: Deliquescence, Hybridity and the Animal in the Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy.

Acknowledged features of Harrison’s style include his postmodern vacillation between the concrete and metaphorical and his narrative experimentation. Empty Space refuses to provide the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy with a definitive sense of closure, nor does it make clear the connections and the significance of the stories and characters that inhabit the narrative. It suspends the possibility of resolution and makes interpretation based on unilateral literal or figurative readings ambiguous. Harrison’s strategy throughout the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy involves the mirroring of themes, narrative trajectories, and distinct temporal and spatial zones to build liminal spaces resonant with nostalgia, missed or mistaken routes, and confusion.

Animal motifs such as the dog and the cat reappear throughout these spaces, providing one of the ways in which the stories that make up the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy are stitched together across the three volumes. Hybridity and transformation, along with the mirroring of animal motifs, take us into the open, expanding the sense of traversable space in the narrative worlds of the trilogy. Representations of human-animal relationships and the specific ways that the (post)human is represented as animal provide vectors for the Kefahuchi Tract’s interrogation of human nature in a confused landscape in which the markers of identity continually shift. The ambivalence associated with the body, apparent in the many monstrous transformations and especially marked in Empty Space with the deliquescence of physical form, challenge readers to engage with issues of interpretation and significance.

Focussing Harrison’s work through questions associated with the Human-Animal relationship in sf opened up by Donna Haraway, Sherryl Vint and Joan Gordon points to the importance of narrative disruption and concepts such as companion species, hybridity, and the grotesque. Considering uses of animal motifs and bodily transformation, I apply a framework that links the figure of the animal in the trilogy to Istvan Csicery-Ronay’s extension of the Bakhtinian grotesque within the overall framework of the sf grotesque-sublime that he constructs. I aim to consider how representations of actual animals in the Kefahuchi Tract are used, how the animal features in the novels in metaphorical and monstrous ways, and to what end. Ultimately, I aim to explore some of the ways in which Harrison mobilises the animal and sf’s grotesque-sublime to build worlds that are ambivalent, yet which resist containment and closure.

*Harrison, M. John, Nova Swing (New York: Bantam, 2009), p. 268.