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Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction
Winner, 2019 Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book Prize
Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants' liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art.
Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity.
The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism's manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction.
A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.
Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants' liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art.
Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity.
The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism's manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction.
A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.
- GenresNonfictionEcologyPlants
304 pages, Paperback
Published December 3, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 31, 2020
The breadth of this text is both its allure and greatest flaw.
May 21, 2022
This isn’t normally the kind of book I’d review on Goodreads (or even read casually), but it only has one text review and I think that’s a shame.
Radical Botany takes on an ambitious project of tracing the growing awareness of the life and animation of plants in 17th and 18th century science and literature (mostly French) as the basis for the inclusion and examination of plants in speculative fiction.
The authors analyze a broad range of works, from the playful fictions of Cyrano de Bergerac—the figure whose life formed the basis for Edmund Rostand’s play of the same name—through the “plant horror” of Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. At every step, they strive to show how plants have functioned as both a mirror for human ambitions and anxieties, and as a form of life that transcends human affective categories and concerns.
Radical Botany is a very theory-dense work, best approached with a grounding in modern and post-modern theory to appreciate the traditions on which they draw, and the conclusions they come to about our always evolving relationship with plants and the biosphere.
Radical Botany takes on an ambitious project of tracing the growing awareness of the life and animation of plants in 17th and 18th century science and literature (mostly French) as the basis for the inclusion and examination of plants in speculative fiction.
The authors analyze a broad range of works, from the playful fictions of Cyrano de Bergerac—the figure whose life formed the basis for Edmund Rostand’s play of the same name—through the “plant horror” of Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. At every step, they strive to show how plants have functioned as both a mirror for human ambitions and anxieties, and as a form of life that transcends human affective categories and concerns.
Radical Botany is a very theory-dense work, best approached with a grounding in modern and post-modern theory to appreciate the traditions on which they draw, and the conclusions they come to about our always evolving relationship with plants and the biosphere.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews