Primate Visionary: Peter Dickinson’s Eva and the Environmental Uncanny

Abstract:Peter Dickinson’s YA novel Eva is thematically concerned with the bioethics of the posthuman in an age of ecological catastrophe. Eva also in many ways exemplifies the new materialist challenge to species ontologies, not least in its affirmation of how transspecies neuroplasticity undoes ontological divisions between humans and apes and so destabilizes taxonomy and selfhood. But Eva also demonstrates, in its visionary placement of the human within the nonhuman and subsequent meditation upon the complexities of symbiogenetic form, that the most effective YA speculative fiction engaging ecological catastrophe and its impact on the adolescent body may have to do so by engaging an environmental uncanny whose “interventions” (Ghosh, 31) of the nonhuman confound conventional strategies of representation.