A Post-Anthropocentric Explication of the Posthuman World-Building in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s the Doors of Eden

ABSTRACT

The present study seeks to analyze Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel The Doors of Eden (2020) to describe how posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism can go hand-in-hand in contemporary speculative fiction. The novel itself is a masterpiece in world-building where the action takes place against the background of an eternally proliferating multiversal reality. Parallel worlds, sentient monsters, posthuman, non-human entities abound in the novel, and this will be seen as complementary and conducive to the posthuman universe-building in the narrative. Through the analysis of the novel The Doors of Eden, I have attempted to show how posthumanism can effectively dismantle and destroy a human-centered worldview by incorporating tropes of monstrosity, alienness, immersive virtual reality, mind-uploading, and integration of mind and machine – all of which eventually come together to define and reinforce the post-anthropomorphic paradigm. For the purpose of the explication, the author has adopted various theoretical insights from the renowned contemporary theoreticians among which Rosi Braidotti’s criticalposthumanism, Barad’s intra-action and agential realism, and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and, Lenton & Latour’s Gaia 2.0 hypothesis will be important.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Indrajit Patra

Indrajit Patra completed his M.A. in 2011 from Burdwan University and Ph.D. in 2019 from NIT, Durgapur, West Bengal, India. He has published several research articles in various national and international, peer-reviewed journals. His primary areas of interest are posthumanism, transhumanism, virtual reality, the relationship between religion and science, psychoanalysis, and epic poetry.