Ecocrises and Posthuman-Animal Futures in Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Schoen’s Barsk

Abstract

Drawing on Suvin’s notion of “cognitive estrangement” in Science Fiction and the place of the animal “other” in conceptions of posthuman theory (after Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Vint, and Wolfe), this proposed chapter examines how two recent Science Fiction texts present posthuman-animal figures within imaginative future worlds in ecocrisis. Both Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Lawrence M. Schoen’s Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard present posthuman future scenarios that include important reconsiderations of the place of animals within human-animal relationships.

In the former, Bacigalupi looks to a not-too-distant future Thailand as the setting, providing a tension between the surrounding multinational domain where gene-spliced species are rampant and a kingdom that attempts to selectively cordon itself off from ecocatastrophe. In this narrative, animal and other organisms are suspect: tailored for particular roles (such as labouring animals like megodont, who are a refiguration of an earlier elephant workforce) or part of bio-economic warfare. In such a world, the titular “New People” windups are popularly equated with the denatured nonhuman world created by human technology; Bacigalupi’s text presents both the problems of a biological neo-imperialism and reactionary opposition that relegates lifeforms (including varieties of the “human”) into categories to be feared and eradicated.

Likewise, Schoen’s future scenario posits a new position for the descendants of our “natural” animals: his text is as much “Postanimal” as it is “Posthuman,” depicting a galaxy inhabited by apparently “uplifted” species sometime after the epoch of human dominance; this post-extinction scenario, however, seems still to reflect an analogue of human patterns of imperial power and attempted decolonization. The future interspecies Alliance presented in this book seems to mirror an aggressive military-economic power structure across thousands of planets; the planet Barsk presents a resistance, a marginalized race of neo-elephants whose specific gifts and resources present a threat to the wider hegemony, partly in their cultivation of a biological “lifeboat” and “nativism” at odds with the wider intergalactic society. Schoen’s thought experiment clearly references a dialogic of colonial power and decolonial “newness” (after Bhabha) while also presenting problems of ethology’s stereotypes of animal behaviour and the issue “subaltern” animal Umvelts: how can the animal others speak to us except through anthropomorphic utterance?

While both writers respond to crises of the Anthropocene by placing nonhuman animals and posthumans in the crux of their discussions, their choice of development of Posthuman concerns demonstrates differing complications with the place of such beings and the possibility of “solutions” to these crises.