Speculative Flesh Ecologies
Flesh, Indistinction and Speculative Fiction
Author(s) Samantha Hind
Language: English
Genre(s): Literary Criticism
Series: New Dimensions in Science Fiction
- October 2026 · 288 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781837724314
- · eBook - pdf - 9781837724321
- · eBook - epub - 9781837724338
This study introduces the original rubric of ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ by bringing together the concept of ‘flesh’, the ethical approach of ‘indistinction’, and a strand of twenty-first-century speculative fiction interested in human and nonhuman ontologies and ethical relationships. It challenges human/nonhuman distinctions, and explores the wide range of multi-species possibilities imagined by the ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ of contemporary speculative fiction. Through five kinds of flesh in speculative fiction – human, animal, plant, thing and cultured – this book demonstrates the value of ‘speculative flesh ecologies’ as an approach for understanding and embracing the seemingly disparate ontologies of humans and nonhumans, making present new forms of ethical thinking that explore what it means to live as, with and through other fleshy beings.
Abstract
Acknowledgements
Declaration
Introduction
Some Strange Planetary Oven
An Edible Creature
Speculative Flesh Ecologies
Fleshing out the Field: Speculative/Flesh/Ecologies
Fictional Slipperiness
A Life with Cibi
“We Wouldn’t Ever Eat Anybody, Would We?”: Human/Animal Flesh and Indistinction in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2008)
Welcome to the Open Slaughterhouse
Indistinction
Red and Salty Meat Inside
The Dog Could Catch Something to Eat
I Am Meat
We’ve Made Meat for Everyone!
To Survive Without Causing Harm to Any Other Living Thing
We Have Seen the Land Where Pain is Not Even a Memory
“I Gave Them Fruit”: Plant Flesh and Grafts in Sue Burke’s Semiosis (2018) and M. R. Carey’s The Book of Koli (2020)
Our Green Planet
Grafts
A Niche in this Ecology for Ourselves
Before the Roots Went in Too Deep
I Gave Them Fruit
Our Green Planet
“The Pigs Ate Everything”: Thing Flesh and Vital Materialism in Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs (2019) and Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011)
Plastic Islands
Vibrant Matter
Becoming Part of the Island
She Felt Like She was Eating the World
The Pigs Ate Everything
Five Pigs Roamed Freely
“Actual Real Proper Meat”: Cultured Flesh and Simulacra in Mat Blackwell’s Beef (2016) and Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s ‘A Series of Steaks’ (2017)
The Future of Meat is Here
Simulacra, Simulation, and Hyperreality
Proper Meat
Fake Beef
Corpse Meat
Purebred Hereford
IT’S ALIVE
A Happy Cow
Corpse-Eating Guilt
Conclusion
Resurrected Meatballs
The Future of Speculative Flesh Ecologies
Bibliography