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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2025
Fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense – to regain the knowledge – that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life.
Ursula K. Le Guin (2007: 87), The Critics, the Monsters, and the FantasistsHow monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings … that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world … For we talk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out … then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.
David Abram (2011) Becoming AnimalIn late 2019, four years after the Global Climate Strike, a novel zoonotic coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China. The precise source of SARS- CoV- 2 may never be known but, like climate change, it is entangled with particular, if mundane, human interactions with the environment, non- human animals and food. The virus has reminded us that in more- than- human worlds, nourishment and killing are deeply entangled and control is never total. In a little over a year, COVID- 19 has claimed the lives of over 2 million people across the globe, and there is no clear end in sight despite new vaccines. Under existential threats from the microscopic to the planetary, the promise of our species’ exceptionalism struggles to convince and comfort. The call to re- imagine humanity's place in a more- than- human world, and to recuperate or create right relations in a wide range of more- than- human worlds, now rings insistently in many ears.
But what might it mean to speculate more- than- human worlds under these circumstances? When so many researchers and practitioners try to imagine our way into hopeful new worlds, will we pretend innocence and purity? Will we recognise those, both human and non- human, who already live in, and die for, such worlds?
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