The Erotics of Becoming

Evolutionary theory has often figured in science fiction as a powerfully resonant topic, a privileged point of departure for the staging of a variety of highly charged concerns and conflicts. In some narratives, the positing of a shared kinship between humans and other animals provokes revulsion at the implied refusal of any claim to human preeminence in the greater scheme of things. But the erosion of “Man” as a putatively ontological category and the prospect, moreover, of reality as a Joycean “chasosmos” of perpetual change or metamorphois can also be depicted affirmatively. The theoretical elaboration of an evolutionary universe need not exclusively elicit horror and anguish. It may also prompt the speculative imagination to extrapolate a future for what might be dubbed “the post-human body becoming.” This essay examines a number of exemplary responses in SF to the advent of modern evolutionary thought. Discussion focuses in particular on John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing and Octavia Butler’s more recent Xenogenesis trilogy as evolutionist narratives offering respectively traumatized and affirmative perspectives on a world in which, as Heraclitus long ago put it, “everything flows and nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” (EW)

Art · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• Life beyond Humanity

  Open Access•Loredana Filip•Miranda•2025

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