Description
As the world passes a tipping point and changes to the climate become inevitable and adaptation strategies have become the dominant policy framework, we contend that adaptation narratives (re)produce an anthropocentrism that fetishizes human agency. While we have inflicted damage upon the climate, adaptation narratives tell us, it is still within our power to effect some level of control over a (changing) environment. To critically engage with this continuing fascination and fetishization of human agency, we turn to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and the novel Borne as a resource for thinking through human-nature relationships. Reading VanderMeer’s work and its horror through the register of the uncanny, we plot anthropocentric anxieties that nature may begin to forcibly adapt us to it. In doing so, this paper illustrates how science fiction (and popular culture more broadly) help make sense of contemporary environmental politics by disturbing anthropocentric illusions of power and control.
