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Despite Philip K. Dick’s penetrating portrayal of trauma in his most recognized work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? (1968), most critics avoid this topic, debating instead the novel’s treatment of “authentic” human subjectivity. To address this gap, this article aligns the novel’s much discussed binaries—human/android, authentic/artificial—with the its principal but overlooked concerns: trauma and ethics. Dick uses his fictional post-apocalyptic culture to articulate and critique cultural practices of trauma-deferment, which displace the effects of trauma onto the illusory model of a testable, privileged anthropocentric humanism. These deferment practices postpone the realization that the human has always already been the posthuman . In order to keep the myth of human exceptionalism alive, the animal and the android become part of an ideological dialectic that defers traumatic experience by reifying the essential human as superior to the android (who cannot empathize) and empathetic toward the animal (whose vulnerability necessitates human care). Engaging recent developments in posthuman theory, I argue that, in Do Androids Dream ?, unmediated traumatic encounters perform a temporary erasure of the essentialized human subject, which, in turn, opens humans up to trans-subjective engagements with the android and the animal that facilitate a radical posthuman ethics of expansive vulnerability.

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Tony Vinci explains how Lev Grossman’s The Magicians suggests a new way of reading YA fantasy, not just as a privileged anthropocentric human reading escapist literature, reifying the boundary between reality and fantasy. Since the now-commodified set of expectations for fantasy to be unsettling are no longer as effective for readers, Grossman’s meta-fiction enables readers to view all realities as linguistic constructs. Thus when Quentin Coldwater and his magicians-in-training friends cross over into Narnia-like Fillory, they are encouraged to acknowledge the porous border between reality and fantasy, to recognize the “posthumanist ethics of vulnerability and radical openness to the Other, within and without.” But Quentin resists, even as a magical animal-human, clinging to traditional humanist values, and refuses to experience “becoming-with Otherness.”

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