Karl Steel reviewed The Revolt Against Humanity by Adam Kirsch
The "we" trap
Not an easy book to write. Kirsch boils down certain strains of misanthropist ecocriticism and posthumanism (like the anti natalism of Benatar or the frankly goofy gothic pessimism of Patricia MacCormack) and especially the range of often bonkers transhumanism into something digestible on a medium-length flight. He falls, though, into the trap of so much ecopessimist writers (eg Roy Scranton): the "we" trap (we who? who's the we he's writing about here? who's responsible). A very small set of humans are responsible for global warming (here in NYC, it's the people with cars and the folks who take a lot of flights -- responsibility varies neighborhood by neighborhood).
We don't, however, get much of a survey for ecoterrorism, no acknowledgement of the existence of, say, certain book about blowing up pipelines. So I'd say the moral vacuity of the "we" trap leads Kirsch into a certain set of merely pessimistic …
Not an easy book to write. Kirsch boils down certain strains of misanthropist ecocriticism and posthumanism (like the anti natalism of Benatar or the frankly goofy gothic pessimism of Patricia MacCormack) and especially the range of often bonkers transhumanism into something digestible on a medium-length flight. He falls, though, into the trap of so much ecopessimist writers (eg Roy Scranton): the "we" trap (we who? who's the we he's writing about here? who's responsible). A very small set of humans are responsible for global warming (here in NYC, it's the people with cars and the folks who take a lot of flights -- responsibility varies neighborhood by neighborhood).
We don't, however, get much of a survey for ecoterrorism, no acknowledgement of the existence of, say, certain book about blowing up pipelines. So I'd say the moral vacuity of the "we" trap leads Kirsch into a certain set of merely pessimistic readings, where he's more inclined to read Morton than he is, say, anyone writing outside the Anglosphere. There's absolutely NO sense that anyone in the Global South -- the primary victims of global warming -- have anything to say about ecological disaster; no sense of the necessity of Revolution, whatever that might look like.
So that's a fatal flaw.
His survey of transhumanism, though, is useful.
My sense, however, is that Kirsch is familiar only with a narrow range of mostly "literary" science fiction -- or that he's not given the space to refer to much unfamiliar fiction in this book's 96 pages. So we get Welles (Time Machine), a little Swift, a little McEwen, but no, say, Olaf Stapleton, no sense of how writers have imagined that the end of the human species doesn't mean that intelligent life won't evolve from raw minerals yet again.
