This article examines the body/tool interface in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates (2009), focusing on how the two movies use the highly plausible novum of the thought-controlled external prosthesis to represent anxiety about loss of bodily autonomy and self-identity. While both movies reify digital information-transfer as enabling humans to enjoy the full-bodied sensory experience of their remote-controlled alternative bodies, each movie struggles differently with the problem of the leftover, passive human body that engages with the device. Both films vacillate around the special case bodies of their heroic, white, male protagonists: Surrogates, which propels along a typical Bruce Willis action flick trajectory, is premised on the idea that humans can fully experience whatever their surrogates are experiencing, yet its body/tool interface undermines this premise. The contradiction in Avatar is that while humans actually do feel more (and better) in their avatar bodies than they do in their own bodies, the movie is also premised on the concept of the body itself as expendable—except when it is not. Representations of the body/tool interface in both films reveal how each movie tries (and fails) to simultaneously reify information transfer and preserve human identity and autonomy.
Opening with paired scenes of trans* cyborg orgasm and closing with a call for an ecstatic queer cyberpunk future, this essay argues that queer cyberpunk science fiction can challenge prevalent anthropocentric conceptions of intelligence, desire, and identity by envisioning future intelligence that is at once transgender, transhuman, and transcorporeal. Through a reading of two contemporary queer cyberpunk texts, Autonomous by Annalee Newitz and The Membranes 《膜》 by Chi Ta-wei 紀大偉, the essay engages literary, queer, trans*, and posthuman theory to analyze the speculative future-looking trans* imaginings of three nodes: hybrid human boundaries, authenticity / autonomy, and transitioning brain-body dynamics.
This paper examines how Emily St. John Mandel’s novels—Station Eleven (2014) and Sea of Tranquility (2022)—reconfigure human subjectivity through the lens of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory. While Station Eleven depicts a world where nature reclaims urban spaces, dissolving anthropocentric semiotic systems, Sea of Tranquility explores technologically mediated Umwelten in moon colonies, where artificial environments falter. Drawing on biosemiotics (Kalevi Kull, Wendy Wheeler) and Umwelt transitions (Morten Tønnessen), I argue that Mandel’s works stage speculative futures where human identity is contingent on adaptive semiotic engagement with nonhuman agencies, whether organic (reclaimed forests, viral ecologies) or technological (time anomalies, dome-lit biospheres). By analyzing Mandel’s material landscapes from the Travelling Symphony’s Shakespearean performances to Olive’s holographic book tours, this paper demonstrates how sf narratives operationalize Uexküllian phenomenology to critique anthropocentrism. Where Station Eleven reveals the unmaking of human Umwelten through ecological resurgence, Sea of Tranquility interrogates the remaking of subjectivity in synthetic environments. Both novels, we contend, employ post-apocalyptic settings to expose the fragility of human semiotic dominance, offering a distinct contribution to sf’s engagement with posthuman ecologies and phenomenological worldbuilding.
Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962) presents a vegetal world that has become favorable for plant life while increasingly hostile to animals, especially humans, which has usually been interpreted as a form of “stasis,” a death-world shaped by Aldiss’ wartime experiences in the jungles of Southeast Asia. This article challenges such a reading, arguing instead that Hothouse imagines an emergent, transformative world that exceeds static categorization. Rather than a landscape of arrest, it constitutes an embryonic post-anthropocentric ecology characterized by the dissolution of boundaries between animal and plant, life and matter, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. This world remains perpetually open to processes of merging and metamorphosis. Engaging with contemporary debates in new materialism, the article reads the banyan world of the novel as a speculative framework for contemplating nonhuman agency (Jane Bennett), unthought (N. Katherine Hayles), dark ecology (Timothy Morton), and the Chthulucene (Donna J. Haraway).
The 2017 live-action remake of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell offers an interesting case study in the shifting conceptualization of posthuman identity through its re-characterization of the cyborg figure Major Kusanagi. The film’s purposeful revisioning of the Japanese anime is not only the superimposing of Hollywood sensibilities onto other cultures, but also serves to negotiate the human-machine interaction in the context of posthumanism. This essay offers a contextual reading of both films, and argues that cyborg representations have the potential to both challenge and reinforce current belief systems. Cyborgs epitomize the tension between the blurring of traditional boundaries and the techno-capitalist restructuring of global power relations. Oshii’s anime speculates on the transcendence of humanist limitations in an optimistic vision of human-machine symbiosis, while Sanders’s remake establishes Mira’s (Kusanagi’s) humanity through her gender identity and her family origin. Such a narrative closure signals the “coming home” of the “illegitimate” cyborg/human, and betrays a neoliberalist market logic. In this way, the issue of posthuman identity in Sanders’s film is displaced by a quest for authenticity and social belonging.
The article explores Michael Anderson’s slick sf thriller Logan’s Run as an imaginative thought experiment playing out the debate on the 1970s “energy crisis.” Released in the anxious year of the United States’ bicentennial, the film depicts both the computerized utopia of the 1970s’ “technologists” and “neo-Malthusian” fears of nuclear war, pollution, and overpopulation. What the two sides have in common is the central problem to so much of the energy humanities: an inability to understand the foundational importance of energy to any society, which the field has theorized as an “energy unconscious.” Logan’s Run examines that unconscious, which takes the form of the population in the film’s domed city living in a literal bubble of ignorance about the basic facts of their own lives. When main characters Logan and Jessica escape that spectacular city through the “backstage” of the tidal mechanisms by which the city is supposedly powered, they discover how such an intentionally ignorant population might be easily manipulated by greater forces content with keeping them unconscious, through open “conspiracies” that the city’s inhabitants prefer not to see.
People typically decide what to say or do by following certain normative principles, two opposing categories of which are the deontological and the consequentialist. Deontological ethics entail an acceptance of some absolute morality, namely, what people have been taught is good and evil. By contrast, consequentialists value the expected outcomes of one's actions; for them, "the ends justify the means." Sf sets itself apart by frequently dramatizing the conflict between these two ethico-political positions. Linking the deontolog ical-consequentialist dilemma to an expansion of E.M. Forster's familiar flat/round charac-ter typology-an expansion based on a theory of personality change proposed by William James-the essay argues that literary characters can be more than merely flat or round. They can be "polyhedral" as well: three-dimensional but with multiple facets that fail to integrate smoothly into a convincingly mimetic whole. Such polyhedral characters tend to be unsta-ble, sometimes deontological, sometimes consequentialist. Two works published in 1949, George Orwell's uber-canonical Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fredric Brown's provocative first sf novel, What Mad Universe, showcase polyhedral main characters who drift between ethical positions. Focusing on their characterological instability casts the two novels in a new light: Orwell's is less negative than usually thought, and Brown's less positive and more ambigu-ous. To add context to its discussion of the two 1949 novels, the essay briefly examines C.L. Moore's short story "Shambleau" (1933), Yoko Ogawa's novel The Memory Police (1991), and Ray Milland's film Panic in Year Zero! (1962), all of which feature polyhedral characters who demonstrate similar ethical/moral fluctuation.
This article examines the intersection of disability and animality in Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (1966) and it contributes to emerging discussions in critical disability and animal studies. By analyzing the intertwined experiences of Charlie and Algernon, the novel highlights the shared oppressions faced by disabled people and animals; it also challenges the flawed perception of both groups as lacking. The article further explores their cross-species cooperation and "hum(an)imal" becoming as positive representations of disability-animality interactions. Finally, it considers how these reimagined connections inform broader questions of shared vulnerability and interdependence, as well as advocating for a new ethical frame work grounded in crip futurity.
This paper examines Hao Jingfang's speculative fiction-particularly "Folding Beijing" and "Xian Ge" as a critical lens through which to analyze contemporary Chinese science fiction's negotiation with modernity. It explores how her narratives represent fragmented space-time structures to critique progress, social stratification, and the lim-its of human identity within technocapitalist societies. By foregrounding marginalized perspectives, Hao's fiction challenges Enlightenment rationalism and offers a vision of humanity shaped by sociohistorical conditions rather than universalist ideals. The study further contextualizes her work within a broader global framework, positioning Chinese sf as both culturally specific and globally resonant. Drawing on theories of modernity, morality, and environmental ethics, this analysis argues that Hao's fiction calls for a reconfiguration of human-nature relations and a renewed moral imagination. Ultimately, the paper situates Hao Jingfang's work as a compelling response to the crisis of the Anthropocene and the failures of modernist ideology.
