Beyond SF: Reading the posthuman in crime fiction

Abstract

Science fiction (SF)’s capacity to imagine alternative futures, embodiments and forms of agency is a crucial resource for the ethical project of critical posthumanism. In the twenty-first century, however, science-fictionality has surpassed its traditional generic boundaries to become a tool for comprehending and intervening in our changing reality, made concrete in different media and styles. This has translated into a rise of recombinant genre fiction, whereby themes and scenarios related to technoscience are addressed by genres other than SF. One illustrative instance of this tendency is the burgeoning body of works that integrate the conventions of SF and crime fiction, which have been steadily on the rise for the past five years in anglophone literary markets. Aiming to open up new avenues for the study of this critically unexplored corpus, this article sets out to assemble a critical apparatus for examining the representation of posthumanity in these hybrid texts. Drawing from an approach to crime fiction as a vector for dialectically exploring social and ethical questions, this article will argue that the constituent elements of the genre, namely its close interrelation with technological breakthroughs, its ambivalent engagement with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism and its affinity with interrogations of the exploitative workings of neo-liberalism, make crime fiction a productive locus for challenging dominant conceptions of the posthuman, as well as for articulating alternative visions indexed to critical posthumanist thought.