Illustrative Examples
Background

The category of ‘the human’ has always been historically malleable and
politically charged. How we represent, understand and use animals is an urgent
one for ethics.

What we call animal has long been used to define what we call human and
hence to bound the extent of our ethical duties to others.

As our material relationships with animals change, we need to revisit this
philosophical heritage and to think seriously about what sort of ethical world we
want to construct in the twenty-first century.

Aliens we encounter in science fiction texts are similarly ways of marking the
boundaries of what it means to be human.

Science fiction is concerned with exploring the social consequences of
developments in science and technology, a part of culture that is rapidly
changing our relations with other species.

Science fiction enables writers to create an imaginative space in which to
explore alternative models through which we might conceive ourselves and
animals, models which open up the space for a different set of social
relationships.
Goals

to explore the consequences of our changing material relationship with
animals that result from our new technological and philosophical relationships
with them

to consider the role literature plays in helping us understand the human-animal
bond, with a specific focus on science fiction literature as a literature concerned
with the social consequences of science and technology and with alterity

to assess to what degree and how such fictional characterisations of animals
can further our understanding of the human-animal bond
Categories of Representation
Animals can appear in science fiction in a number of ways:

Aliens may be represented in terms that we typically associate with animals

Human characters as ‘animals’ through the eyes of the alien protagonists

Texts explore the implications both social and philosophical of the ever-eroding
boundary between animal-being and human-being through the narration of
genetic fusion, xenotransplanations and other technoscience developments.
I have organized my study of animals in science fiction into seven categories,
each of which explores one model of how we construct our material relation to
animals. These models exist in tension with one another and each reveals a
facet of how the category of the animal has been used to create meaning and
enforce boundaries in human culture.
1. Sentimentality (family members, pets, companion species)
2. Spirituality (totem, symbol, exotic)
3. Instrumentality (object, tool, resource)
4. Competitiveness (rival species, pest, invader)
5. Evolutionary discourse (blurring species boundary, uplift, degeneration)
6. Technoscience (pharming, xenotransplantation, genetic engineering)
7. Environmentalism (fellow sentient creatures, extinctions, successors)
‘Nothing in their previous lives has accustomed the apes to looking at
themselves from the outside, as if through the eyes of a being who
does not exist. So, as Köhler perceives, the riboons and the junk are
there not for the visual effect, because they look smart, but for the
kinetic effect, because they make you feel different – anything to
relieve the boredom. This is as far as Köhler, for all his sympathy and
insight, is able to go; this is where a poet might have commenced,
with a feel for the ape’s experience’ (Coetzee 74).
Context/Methodology

J.M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello (2003) argues for the power of the
‘sympathetic imagination’ – an identification with the object of contemplation that
gives insight into its nature, identity and truth through a kind of direct experience
– over the rational mode of philosophical inquiry as a way of coming to terms
with our ethical situation vis-à-vis animals.

Akira Lippit’s Electric Animal (2000) contends that modernity can be defined by
‘the disappearance of wildlife from humanity’s habitat and by the reappearance
of the same in humanity’s reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and
technological media such as the telephone, film, and radio’ (3).

John Simons in Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation
(2002) asks us to consider how literary studies would be transformed if animal
rights were taken seriously and we saw animals not as mirrors for human nature
but in terms of the ‘tracks’ they leave in our texts.

Philip Armstrong in What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (2008) uses
such an approach to read founding myths of modernity (Robinson Crusoe
(1719), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Frankenstein (1818), The Island of Doctor
Moreau (1896) and Moby Dick (1851)) to explore how the human/animal
boundary has shaped our literary sensibilities, arguing that a return to
sentimentality over ironic distance marks the 21st century.

Cora Diamond argues that there are things that are too difficult in reality for our
philosophical hermeneutics to confront, such as the massive suffering we cause
other species in ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ (2008).

Derrida suggests in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) that the
human/animal boundary founds metaphysics and that thinking about the animal
is ‘what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of’ (7), categorising all
discourse into texts signed by those who ‘no doubt seen, observed, analyzed,
reflected on the animal, but who have never been seen seen by the animal’ (13)
versus those poets and prophets ‘who admit to taking upon themselves the
address that an animal addresses to them’ (14).

My work begins from these premises and grounds its arguments in the utopian
traditions that inform science fiction scholarship, and within the technoscientific
and philosophical cultures contemporary with the publication of individual texts,
seeing the fiction as an argumentative intervention into our material and semiotic
relations with animals and the world that we build from them.
‘In problematizing, as I have done, the purity and indivisibility of a line
between reaction and response, and especially the possibility of
tracing such a line, between the human in general and the animal in
general , one risks – anxiety about such an idea and the subsequent
objections to it cannot but be forthcoming – casting doubt on all
responsibility, every ethics, every decision, and so on’ (Derrida 126).
These examples provide a brief overview of some of the ways that science fiction
texts can contribute to our understanding of the ethical, material and social
consequences of our changing relationship with animals.
Technocultural fusion

Bruce McAllister’s ‘The Girl Who Loved Animals’ (1988)

a 20-year-old woman from a broken home and in an abusive relationship
accepts a contract to become the surrogate mother of a mountain gorilla fetus

inter-species kinship raised as possibility but within context of radical
economic exploitation for both animals and some humans

erasure of human/animal boundary or movement of disenfranchised humans
to animal ‘side’ of this line?
‘I asked her if she knew what The Arks were, and she said no. I
started to tell her about the intensive-care zoos where for twenty
years the best and brightest of them, ten thousand species in all, had
been kept while two hundred thousand others disappeared – the
toxics, the new disease, the land-use policies of a new world taking
them one by one – how The Arks hadn’t worked, how two-thirds of the
macrokingdom were gone now, and how the thing she carried inside
her was one of them and one of he best’ (McAllister 90).
Non-human agency

Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius (1944)

a dog is experimentally modified to near-human intelligence and raised within
a family as an equal, but finds the larger world cannot accommodate him as a
social equal, especially when he becomes romantically and sexually involved
with a woman, and he is eventually killed in a violent confrontation

parallels with Frankenstein: despair at outcast status turns Sirus against
humanity and raises questions about technology outpacing ethics

miscegenation as ultimate taboo

exploration of dog-being as radically other than human, not inferior to human
‘Long ago he had idealized humanity. His silly, uncritical, canine
loyalty had made him do so. But now his practised nose had found
out the truth about the species. They were cunning brutes, of course,
devilishly cunning. But they were not nearly so consistently intelligent
as he had thought. They were always flopping back into sub-human
dullness, just as he was himself. And they didn’t know themselves
even as well as he knew himself, and not half as well as he knew
them’ (Stapledon 105).
The ethics of love

Harlan Ellison’s ‘A Boy and His Dog’ (1969)

a boy and a telepathic dog, legacy of a weaponry program, survive in a post-
apocalyptic landscape of urban trash and all-male gangs; contact with a dual-sex
underground community briefly threatens their homosocial bond but in the end
he chooses to feed the girl to his starving dog rather than abandon the dog

interrogation of the complex intersections of gender and sexual identity with
the discourse of animality

reversal of human/animal hierarchy: the dog is more educated than the boy
and teaches him
‘That put it on a different stick. We couldn’t go back, and with Blood in
that condition we couldn’t go forward. And I knew, good as I was solo,
I couldn’t make it without him. And there wasn’t anything out here to
eat. He had to have food at once, and some medical care. I had to do
something. Something good, something fast’ (Ellison 937).
Interspecies identification

Karen Traviss’ Wess’har War series (2004-2008)

a human colony preserving the only copy of a genetic database of species
now extinct on earth is caught up in interworld politics of ecological justice which
enforces a deep ecology version of justice without distinction among species

re-configuration of what it means to be a person, beyond species identity

extension of ethical duty through shared sense of embodiment made possible
by virus which gives humans experience of embodiment as other creatures
‘Whoa. Let’s rethink our attitude to species, shall we? This isn’t
roadkill. It’s a child. Do you know what this is in human terms? You
come across the scene of an accident. There’s dead baby. So you
pick up the body and take it away because you’re curious. You don’t
report it, you don’t try to contact the parents, you just take it, and slice
it up for a few tests. Do you understand?’ (Traviss City of Pearl 207).
Discussion

Although literature to a large degree represents our projections in its
depictions of animals and thus speaks more to human values than animal
realities, such projections are nonetheless an important force shaping our
material interactions with animals.

We must beware turning animals merely into symbols in our engagement with
them, allowing them to remain ‘Platonic’ in Elizabeth Costello’s words, a state in
which ‘our eye is on the creature itself, but our mind is on the system of
interactions of which it is the earthly, material embodiment’ (99).

Our rapidly changing relationships with non-human animals must be
understood through a greater knowledge of the philosophical heritage of the
category ‘animal’.

We are living in a complex set of contradictory and conflicting relations with
non-human animals; we are better able to perceive options for what Donna
Haraway (2003) has called ‘more livable politics and ontologies in current life
worlds’ (4) using the imaginative resources of fiction to overcome our quotidian,
taken-for-granted modes of interaction with other species.

In our complex material and semiotic interactions with animals, we create a
variety of concepts of the animal to suit our various and contradictory needs; yet
simultaneously, animals are more than discursive constructs: they have a real,
flesh-and-blood existence in our shared world, even if it is often not
acknowledged in the lives of many humans (for instance, those who do not see
the animal in the food they eat or the medical treatments they accept).

In this cultural moment of rapidly increasing knowledge of other species
combined with their even more rapid disappearance, increasing rights for
privileged animals coupled with entirely non-natural animals created as
laboratory tools or artistic expression, it is imperative that we find ways to
understand the various animal others we construct, both semiotically and
materially, and to engage with the ethical dilemmas within which we are
immersed.
References
Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2008.
Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker and Warburg, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. Bronx:
Fordham UP, 2008.
Diamond, Cora. ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.’ Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia
UP, 2008. 43-89.
Ellison, Harlan. ‘A Boy and His Dog.’ The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective. Los Angeles: Morpheus International,
[1969] 2001. 905-938.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Lippit, Akira. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.
McAllister, Bruce. ‘The Girl Who Loved Animals.’ Vanishing Acts. Edited by Ellen Datlow. New York: TOR, [1988] 2000. 75-
97.
Simons, John. Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002.
Stapledon, Olaf. Sirius. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1944.
Traviss, Karen. City of Pearl, 2004; Crossing the Line, 2004; The World Before, 2005, Matriarch, 2006, Ally, 2007, Judge.
2008. All EOS NY