After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly (review)

Abstract

overwhelmingly large assortment of cultural stuff. Bould posits that Villeneuve’s Arrival “exemplif[ies] contemporary cinema’s turn to misdirection, manipulation and mind-games, to narrative complexity, to uncertainty and instability” and is characteristic of contemporary digital culture, ruled by “the logic of databases and networks, of sampling, iteration, and gameplay. This generates “productive pathologies” including “paranoia (lateral thinking, making connections), schizophrenia (living with multiple modes of consciousness) and amnesia (running through protocols and procedures without personal or interpersonal engagement)” (116). The book does quite a bit of this as well, but in a very productive way, as Bould draws lines of connection between such seemingly disparate texts as Knausgard’s fiction and Sharknado. As a scholar of Asian Studies, I am struck by one assumption or aphasia in this book that is illustrative of the challenges of scale when trying to tackle the environmental humanities and global literature at the same time. That assumption regards the centrality of Europe to the history of art and civilization, and unfortunately to the history of the extractive industry as well. Bould’s definition of the “mundane novel” seems to be based on a history that excludes the very first novel in the world—Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (c.1021 CE)—or any number of other novels. Drawing on Ghosh, Bould rightly notes that people at the global margins are already and will be the first to experience the impacts of global climate change, positing that the ideal author of climate fiction might be an Asian writer “of historical fiction, of contemporary-set fiction embedded in history, and of sf in which the future frames the past” (59). Bould does not unpack what he means here, and I generally enjoy that feature of this book. Left to unpack it myself, and ready as I am to take umbrage at the slightest hint of Asia as the Other, this strikes me as a techno-orientalist imagination of Asia as simultaneously peripheral to modernity and at the vanguard of modernity's horrific long-term consequences. This does not invalidate Bould’s thesis, and it would be impossible to do justice to every work of fiction in, say, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Suffice to say that Asia is not the periphery. Asia is not the exception. There is in fact a massive “dataset” out there that just proves Bould’s thesis to be all the more accurate. Overall, reading The Anthropocene Unconscious feels like the paperbound equivalent of watching someone who is really smart, really silly, has nothing to prove to any goddam tenure committee, and can write lyrically or throw some serious verbal jabs, get high and surf the internet through a screenshare. It is damn good fun. And it should be fun, because the serious stuff about the environmental humanities is so terrifying that I cannot really bear to read it. Save the children!—Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State University