My paper “A Gentle Extinction: Interspecies Care and Deep Time in Speculative Fiction” is already published in early access on ISLE‘s website!
Speculative fiction has long imagined human extinction as a disastrous collapse. This paper proposes the concept of gentle extinction, an alternative mode of imagining this scenario based on the redrawing of humanity’s boundaries as a species across time and through interspecies care. I illustrate this concept through a close reading of Kawakami Hiromi’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2016). I examine how formal strategies such as the dissolution of singular rupture across deep time, nonhegemonic care practices, and the polyphonic presence of nonhuman narrators create the narrative conditions for imagining human extinction beyond a catastrophic framing.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz 