Jonathan Hay, Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) xiv + 240pp. £85.00 Hb. £28.99 Pb. £76.50 Ebook: PDF/Epub/Mobi. ISBN 9781350465954
The science fiction (SF) genre typically contains a fantast technological or scientific element: constructed or evolved, not conjured through magic. Darko Suvin defined this feature as the novum. Jonathan Hay’s monograph stands in posthumanistic opposition to Suvin’s influence in SF criticism, reconsidering the works from the Golden Age (1940s to 1950s) to the present. The first three chapters provide case studies from Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson respectively. Chapter four contains analysis of the BBC TV show Doctor Who and Annapurna Interactive’s videogame, Outer Wilds.
Darko Suvin’s seminal work, Metamorphosis of Science Fiction (1979), was a watershed moment for SF criticism. Metamorphosis introduced concepts that came to define SF for decades to come, like the novum and cognitive estrangement. Working in tandem with the novum, cognitive estrangement creates a rational framework that distinguishes the storyworld from the reader’s lifeworld. The appeal of this framework is obvious to anthropocentric readings of SF.
Posthumanism opposes the anthropocentric worldview of humanism and instead re-evaluates our relationship to technology, the environment, and other non-human beings. From this perspective, Hay argues that Suvin’s theories are obsolete. Building on foundations laid by N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, and Donna Haraway, the book declares its readers as (post)humans. Hay’s term implies we are already becoming posthumans, subject to the novum decay seen within SF storyworlds and our science fictional (SFnal) lifeworlds today. The introduction provides an appraisal of SF criticism alongside the extended rebuttal of Suvin’s theories. The following chapters argue how the novum becomes habitual, diminishing through repeated use.
The first two chapters investigate novum decay in the two coherent universes of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Universe and Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle. Beginning the analysis with these works, whose respective stories’ worldbuilding establishes imagined universes of shared history and characters, helps to found Hay’s concept of novum decay for use with the disparate storyworlds of Kim Stanley Robinson in chapter three. The robot is a recurring figure in the Foundation Universe, a technological marvel in early encounters, but after repeated exposure, characters and readers alike become habituated to their presence. When former ‘technological marvels’ instead become ‘casual acquaintances’, then ‘supervising robots is as picayune a task as boiling water on a hob’ (46). Such novelties eventually become mundane aspects of domesticity or habit, like the former marvels of aircraft, smartphones, or Wi-Fi.
Next, in the Hainish Cycle, we learn how LeGuin rejected the tropes typical of Asimov’s Golden Age SF with ‘visions of the (post)human future’ (77). By choosing ‘symbiotic relationships with the natural world through practices of daily life’, the Hainish Cycle ‘devalues linear ideologies of progress and decentres the role of technological “progress”’ (115). Among the varied accounts of novum decay in this chapter, Hay’s intriguing corpus linguistic concordance analysis stands out.
We are told that snow is an important, yet hitherto ignored, motif in the Hainish Cycle.Hay reasons that critics typically disregard the function that ‘familiar and naturalistic components of SF texts play’ (107) in constructing the genre’s rhetoric. Locating ‘snow’ and its conjugates 427 times supports a claim that ‘the worlds detailed within the novels of the Hainish Cycle are pervaded by imagery of snow’ (107). It seems generous to claim the ‘predominance of snow’ (107) from these results: the term only appears in half of the 24-novel sample and just six include occurrences in double digits. Nonetheless, it is significant that this familiar and naturalistic feature of the Hainish Cycle has escaped critical attention. Through concordance analysis, Hay demonstrates a useful method future scholars could deploy to investigate other potential gaps and silences in SF that traditional reading practices might miss—keeping in mind that results require proper weighting.
Chapter three traces novum decay in Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre, across storyworlds that are related, yet siloed. Unlike the coherent universes of Asimov and LeGuin, Robinson’s works use repetitive schemas across incongruous timelines and storyworlds. For Hay, these reiterations of ‘the minutiae of daily life’ frame contemporary SF as ‘saturated by banality’ that moves ‘beyond traditional generic parameters’ (153). Characters that never meet, existing in novels that do not share the same imagined universe, ‘summatively gesture towards a future palimpsest of posthuman possibility’ (117). The palimpsest—a scroll or manuscript repeatedly erased and overwritten—symbolises the theme of recurrent experiences this chapter investigates.
In discussing Science in the Capital, Hay offers a fascinating insight into how Robinson’s updated editions of the trilogy erode the storyworld/lifeworld boundary. Revisions and omissions aimed to reflect more accurate climate science about an ‘Anthropocene norm that the reader already understands’ (150), reflecting how far the climate crisis progressed since the original publication date. The analysis suggests that novum decay reflects the Anthropocene condition, permeating boundaries between fictional and lived experiences, such that the ‘cautionary SFnal rhetoric of Robinson’s original text’ (151) has already become part of our lifeworld history. Robinson’s repeated schemas run as parallels or asymptotes: narrative trajectories, across distinct storyworlds, that never quite meet. The stories we tell ourselves about the climate crisis struggle to keep up with its progress.
Building on the analysis of deleted elements from Robinson’s work resonates with the final chapter’s investigation of memory, redacted in Doctor Who (BBC 2005-2022) and recursive in Outer Wilds (Annapurna Interactive 2019). As distinctive media products, TV show and videogame respectively, they possess specific affordances that determine how each recruits ‘viewers’ and players’ cerebral plasticity as a cognitive archive of their SFnal novelty’ (195). For clarity, this means making audiences/players aware of their changing memories of, and responses to, the storyworld. Hay proposes this forms an agential and participatory relationship to the text.
Doctor Who is well known for its eponymous time traveller and benefactor of Earth and humanity. Here, Karen Barad’s concept of in-phenomena informs Hay’s reading of participatory narratives as intensifying cognitive engagement. This is a more explicit participatory mode than is revealed by Robinson’s revisions because few readers are likely to read multiple editions of a novel outside of scholarly contexts. The central mode of audience agency in Doctor Who develops when the ‘show’s previous chronology is rewritten’ suggesting viewers become ‘one-half of a cognitive/textual archive’ (178). This claim requires an assumed audience to have seen and remembered all the episodes of a long-running show. Fulfilling that condition suggests that this kind of participatory viewership is plausible and, indeed, more likely than the granular readings required to make similar claims about Robinson’s future palimpsest.
Outer Wilds creates recursive memories through its gameplay mechanics. Play occurs within a time-loop, lasting 22 minutes before resetting. An autoethnographic account reveals the sequential progress through these narrative re-iterations. The analysis culminates in Hay’s recount of speedrunning the recursive narrative, framed as a performative instance of novum decay. Speedrunning involves ‘repeatedly running the game from start to end’ (190) to complete it as quickly as possible. Readers first encounter the term, undefined, to describe a character in New York 2140 (Robinson, 2018) who turns their daily walking routine into a ‘continually evolving work of performance art’ (144). Having proclaimed speedrunning as performative, it feels like there was room to capitalise on this connection beyond this fleeting foreshadowing.
Rendering speedrunning as an aesthetic to highlight how mundane lives become re-inscribed with competitive meaning—even if only against the self—is itself a playful and interesting analytical development. The practice remains a niche endeavour within the wider gaming community and coupling its analysis with an autoethnographic study whose sample size is invariably one establishes quite a narrow basis upon which to draw conclusions, with Hay admitting the experience is ‘entirely phenomenologically grounded and inimitable’ (186). Part of the analysis invites consideration of ‘a strat which elides a full minute of gameplay’ (190). Considering its repeated use, ‘strat’ evidently means ‘strategy’, but this remains undefined. Given the precision and density of this book’s analysis, deploying gaming vernacular without clarification seems an unusual choice. Considering how the autoethnographic report contrasts with the preceding analysis is, however, refreshing. Grounded in experience, its reporting style also reads like an act of resistance against humanistic scholarship, in keeping with the rest of the book’s tone.
To conclude, Hay stakes a claim for novum decay as a ‘significant intervention’ (19) in SF criticism. Suvin’s concepts became seminal because they describe ‘the rhetorical tendencies of a broad array of SF texts’ (14), but Hay insists they cannot account for the (post)human complexity of life in the Anthropocene. The monograph resonates with suggestions from Sheryl Vint and Adeline Johns-Putra, among others, that SF has become the realism of our time, and in our post-pandemic and crisis-climate epoch the ‘primacy of habitualization seems more relevant than ever’ (1). Tackling numerous examples of novelty becoming mundane over an extensive corpus, Hay shows that novum decay deserves critical attention.
This book will suit those already immersed in any of the title’s three conceptual touchstones, and already well-read in their supporting theories. More accessible vocabulary and phrasing would benefit the generalist or undergraduate reader. A glossary to extend the brief list of terms located under ‘Abbreviations’ (xiv) would also help the interdisciplinary readership this title should interest. The granular level of analysis provides insightful commentary on the works of these distinct authors and producers, anchored (but not dogmatically) in the rising tide of posthumanist discourse concerning SF. If Suvin’s legacy truly denies ‘the mundane embeddedness of our species’ then Hay’s rebuttal and alternative framework for SF criticism represents a timely intervention contributing vocabulary and concepts that may become habitual to future scholars of SF.
Ryan Walsh
