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Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal By Sherryl Vint (Liverpool University Press, 2010, 269 pp, £65.00) Reviewed by Tom Sykes
In recent decades, intellectuals in various fields have felt the need to critique conventional thinking about the relationship between humans and animals. In Straw Dogs (2002) - tellingly subtitled Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals - John Gray argues that humans have tended to arrogantly assume that they rule supreme over all other forms of life on Earth, with environmental catastrophe being the most dangerous consequence of this fallacy. The Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer has called for the extension of the utilitarian imperative ('the greatest good for the greatest number') to any creature that is able to experience pain, and comparing the "speciesism" of Western thought to racism and sexism. In the area of literary studies, critics such as Carrie Rohman have turned their attention to "textual representations of animality, an animality that resides both in humans and in nonhumans, though humans have tended historically to repress and disavow their own animal being" (Rohman 16).
The stage has been set, then, for a critical re-examination of human-animal relations as they are constructed in sf, and Sherryl Vint's Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal steps up to the role with brio, urgency and originality. Taking her theoretical cues from the discipline of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) and its project to interrogate the "human-animal boundary" that all too often justifies the exploitation and destruction of "non-humans with whom we share the planet" (2), Vint argues that a number of sf texts make a progressive contribution to this project by dint of their non-anthropocentric sentiments, their imaginings of 'other' subjectivities, and their inventions of alternative ecologies, societies and value systems.
Into this category of progressive sf Vint places Karen Traviss's Wess'har War (2004-8) cycle of novels. Its setting, the planet Bezer'ej, is protected by the wess'har, an environmentally-aware alien species devoted to equality with all other beings, including a colony of humans known as gethes. Furthermore, Traviss's...