Mutant Narratives in Ecological Science Fiction: Thinking with Embodied Estrangement

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Using an innovative multidisciplinary approach which is deeply invested in posthumanist thought, this book demonstrates how reading science fiction shapes the way we engage with lived environments. In dialogue with works by widely studied science fiction authors Greg Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer, it draws out how they function as mutant narratives. The first to systematically integrate three fields feminist posthumanism, cognitive narratology, and science fiction studies it offers a complex and coherent understanding of readerly experience as material, embodied, dynamic, and imaginative. Covering a range of urgent topics, including climate fiction, New Weird fiction, and new phenomenologies of the body, this book is the first to demonstrate how readerly experience acts as a site for ethical and political reorientation in the time of climate change.

Reviews

Kaisa Kortekallio's book develops an innovative blend of posthumanism, narrative theory, and enactivist philosophy. Kortekallio's prose foregrounds choreographic metaphors, and that's no coincidence: the moves contained in her readings of "mutant narratives" offer unique affective training for reimagining the human in times of ecological crisis * Marco Caracciolo, Associate Professor of English & Literary Theory, Ghent University *
What are eco-narratives for Mutant Narratives develops the best case we have for literatures power to attune readers minds and bodies to the unsettling realities of the Anthropocene. Interweaving virtuoso close readings and bold theorizing, its argument that the experience of literature trains us for posthuman life is as brilliant as it is urgent. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American & Comparative Literature, University of Leuven *

Author Bio

Kaisa Kortekallio is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Sciences, University of Turku, Finland. She has published on contemporary ecological speculative fiction, New Weird fiction, more-than-human subjectivity, and narrative experientiality.