Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal

Animal Alterity uses readings of science fiction texts to explore the centrality of animals for our ways of thinking about human. It argues that the academic field of animal studies and the popular genre of science fiction share a number a critical concerns: thinking about otherness and the nature of human being; desiring communication across species difference; and interrogating the social and ethical consequences of changes in science and technology. We are living in a complex set of contradictory and conflicting relations with non-human animals. This book maps this complex terrain, arguing that we are better able to perceive options for a transformed politics if we perceive our various material relations with non-human animals within a deeper understanding of the functions of the category ’animal’.

Sherryl Vint is Associate Professor Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, and Science Fiction University of Toronto Press, 2006) and co-editor of the journal of Science Fiction Film and Television published by Liverpool University Press).