Kaisa Kortekallio

Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of mutant narratives. Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of embodied estrangement. Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.

This article analyzes two novels by the British writer Simon Ings, Hot Head (1992) and Hotwire (1995), from perspectives provided by second-order systems theory, philosophy of neuroscience and posthumanist philosophy. In Ings' cyberpunk fiction, the use of a particular novum, a programmable cerebral tissue called “datafat”, enables elaborate experimentation on different theories of mind and matter. Due to this experimentation, Ings’ work is able to convey a conception of cognition as an emergent effect produced in material processes that are both human and non-human. Ings’ work asserts the human subject as a complex system in a complex technological ecology and, consequentially, presents us with a model for subjectivity that might be called “posthuman”.

Drawing on feminist, enactivist and posthumanist theories of reading, the essay develops theoretical and methodological tools for bodily and reflective reading of fictional figures. It introduces the notion of “readerly choreography,” which stands for the iterative experiential patterns that fictional narratives suggest. The primary purpose of the notion is to provide a better grasp of readerly dynamics typical to genre-derived works of fiction — including the cases in which generic frames of expectation and experience are estranged and reconfigured. The essay’s contribution to theory is presented on the basis of a reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004). This short story plays on the conventions of action-adventure, exaggerating the toughness and physical capabilities of technologically enhanced, posthuman action heroes. Owing to this exaggeration, it becomes difficult for readers to continue to perform the habitual experiential patterns of excitement, action-derived pleasure, and identification with the heroic protagonist. In other words, “The People of Sand and Slag” estranges the readerly choreography of action-adventure narratives.

A year or two ago, a fellow graduate student told me about a fabled overseas event called ICFA. “It’s a great conference,” she said, “there is one pool for humans and another one for alligators.” What she left unsaid is that you do not actually get to mingle with the alligators. Despite this major disappointment, the conference proved enjoyable for a young scholar interested in posthuman perspectives, posthumanist thought, and evolutionary theories in fiction. It was quite easy to dive through the program equipped with these filters, and emerge covered in enticing ideas. As the ideas are absorbed, they may induce quite interesting metamorphoses – perhaps allowing for tighter entanglements with the nonhuman in the future. The Thirty-Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (a.k.a. ICFA 36) took place in Orlando, Florida, on March 18-22, 2015. The event brought together some 500 scholars, authors and editors of more than 20 different nationalities. This year’s theme, “The Scientific Imagination,” was thoroughly examined in the keynote talks by Guests of Honor James Morrow and Joan Slonczewski, and Guest Scholar Colin Milburn. Already in the opening panel, chaired by Gary K. Wolfe, they touched upon a variety of topics that would soon prove central to the conference as a whole – the most central, perhaps, being the relation of science and imagination as complementary rather than oppository modes of inquiry. “Science emerged from magic,” Morrow pointed out – listing alchemy, herbal medicine, and the psychological influence practiced by all witches and shamans as examples of early scientific thinking. Scientific thinking requires a certain amount of imagination, the ability to speculate on the potential. On the other hand, Morrow proposed that the modern scientific method is based on restraining the imaginative aspect of thinking – it has to rely on only objective (that is, multiperspectival) observations of phenomena. A true empirical scientist, according to Morrow, is one who, upon seeing a white sheep on a meadow, says not “I see a white animal” but “I see an animal that is white on one side.” Speculation and extrapolation – including that of the sciencefictional kind – enter the picture when one wants to know about the “dark side of the sheep.” Based on observations about earlier sheep, we can infer that it is likely that the other side of the sheep is white too. But only likely – it can be something else entirely. We have to keep checking. Joan Slonczewski, being a biologist as well as a fiction author, raised the issue of the nonhuman. Natural-scientific research keeps telling humanity that “the universe is not about us”. This might also be what takes at least some science fiction apart from the more humanist mainstream fiction – it usually busies itself with something other than human-human relationships. Depending on the perspective, humans can be seen as invasive animals, a geological force, or even a vector for microbial evolution. Provoking less discussion than one would expect, Slonczewski asserted that “microbes invented multicellular beings to have a vehicle for themselves.” Among the remarkably nonanthropocentric panelists, this was met with appreciative

ion is of course an essential component in all theorizing, for no theory can account for the infinite multiplicity of our interactions with the real. But when we make moves that erase the world’s multiplicity, we risk losing sight of the variegated leaves, fractal branchings, and particular bark textures that make up the forest. (Hayles 1999, 12.) Hot headissa Malise muuttuu vaha vahalta informationaalisemmaksi olennoksi. Jo alussa han on kasitteellistetty ja abstrakti hahmo siina, miten hanen kirjallinen persoonallisuutensa muovautuu poliittisten ja sosiaalisten voimien ristipaineessa. Tama on kuitenkin viela sosiaalista konstruktiota, strukturalismia: kaikkine muuntuvine osasineenkin Malise on yha ihminen, ruumiissa ja hengessa. Datafat kuitenkin aiheuttaa ratkaisevan murroksen pelkistaessaan hanen persoonallisuutensa kopioitavaksi ja muokattavaksi koodiksi. Malisen hahmoa muovaavat voimat vaihtuvat tarinan edetessa sosiaalisista ja poliittisista institutionaalisiin ja tietoteknologisiin. Alkuasetelma on Euroopan poliittisessa tilanteessa ja isasuhteessa, joista siirrytaan sotilaallisten ja tieteellisten instituutioiden kautta kohti ”tarinakoneita”, voimakkaita datafat-ohjelmistoja joissa hanen kopioitu tajuntansa kasvaa uusiin suuntiin ohjelmiston metaforisen logiikan ehdoilla. Datafatin luomana informationaalisena konstruktiona han on editoitavissa kuin mika tahansa teksti. Hanet on yksinkertaistettu materiaalisesta ihmisesta malliksi, koodiksi, komponentiksi kyberneettisessa jarjestelmassa. Ingsin kerronnassa datafatia ei kuitenkaan kasitella pelkastaan loogisena apparaattina vaan se saa myos myyttisia piirteita, jotka saavat Malisen

ion is of course an essential component in all theorizing, for no theory can account for the infinite multiplicity of our interactions with the real. But when we make moves that erase the world’s multiplicity, we risk losing sight of the variegated leaves, fractal branchings, and particular bark textures that make up the forest. (Hayles 1999, 12.) Hot headissa Malise muuttuu vaha vahalta informationaalisemmaksi olennoksi. Jo alussa han on kasitteellistetty ja abstrakti hahmo siina, miten hanen kirjallinen persoonallisuutensa muovautuu poliittisten ja sosiaalisten voimien ristipaineessa. Tama on kuitenkin viela sosiaalista konstruktiota, strukturalismia: kaikkine muuntuvine osasineenkin Malise on yha ihminen, ruumiissa ja hengessa. Datafat kuitenkin aiheuttaa ratkaisevan murroksen pelkistaessaan hanen persoonallisuutensa kopioitavaksi ja muokattavaksi koodiksi. Malisen hahmoa muovaavat voimat vaihtuvat tarinan edetessa sosiaalisista ja poliittisista institutionaalisiin ja tietoteknologisiin. Alkuasetelma on Euroopan poliittisessa tilanteessa ja isasuhteessa, joista siirrytaan sotilaallisten ja tieteellisten instituutioiden kautta kohti ”tarinakoneita”, voimakkaita datafat-ohjelmistoja joissa hanen kopioitu tajuntansa kasvaa uusiin suuntiin ohjelmiston metaforisen logiikan ehdoilla. Datafatin luomana informationaalisena konstruktiona han on editoitavissa kuin mika tahansa teksti. Hanet on yksinkertaistettu materiaalisesta ihmisesta malliksi, koodiksi, komponentiksi kyberneettisessa jarjestelmassa. Ingsin kerronnassa datafatia ei kuitenkaan kasitella pelkastaan loogisena apparaattina vaan se saa myos myyttisia piirteita, jotka saavat Malisen

Arkikokemus ei helposti saa kiinni kaukana sulavista jäätiköistä tai kapitalistisista tuotantoketjuista päivittäisten appelsiiniemme takana. Antroposeenikeskustelussa kuuluu usein väitettävän, että tällaiset ilmiöt ovat ruumiillisen kokemuksen "tuolla puolen", liian suuria, hitaita, hajaantuneita tai kaukaisia. Mutta entä jos kokemuksen heikkous onkin vain yrityksen puutetta? Entä jos oleellinen kysymys ei olekaan "mitä kokemukselle tapahtuu" vaan "mitä kokemukselle voidaan tehdä"? Spekulatiivinen fiktio, vaikkapa Paolo Bacigalupin The Windup Girl, voi auttaa tekemään kokemuksesta oudompaa ja siten auttaa pääsemään kiinni antroposeenin ilmiöihin.Peer reviewe