Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels and film. John Wyndham’s triffids, Algernon Blackwood’s willows and Han Kang’s sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations and inhabit our metaphors – but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. Plants in Science Fiction is the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction, and its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics and cultural life at large – questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders and boundaries; erecting and dismantling new visions of utopian and dystopian futures.
Зміст
Contributors
Introduction – Katherine E. Bishop
Abjection
Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale – Jessica George
‘Bloody unnatural brutes’: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids – Jerry Määttä
Botanical Tentacles and the Chthulucene- Shelley Saguaro
Affinity
Between the Living and the Dead: Vegetal Afterlives in Evgenii Iufit’s and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads – Brittany Roberts
Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling, and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction – T. S. Miller
Alternative Reproduction: Plant-time and Human/Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han – Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook
Accord
Sunlight as a Photosynthetic Information Technology: Becoming Plant in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume – Yogi Hale Hendlin
The Question of the Vegetal, the Animal, the Archive in Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz – Graham J. Murphy
Queer Ingestions: Weird, Vegetative Bodies in Jeff Vander Meer’s Fiction – Alison Sperling
The Botanical Ekphrastic and Ecological Relocation – Katherine E. Bishop
Selected Bibliography
Index