Contents
Imagination, Science and Power 5
I. Invisible Scales: Cells, Microbes and Mycelium 39
2. Human Environmental Aesthetics: The Molecular Sublime and the Molecular Grotesque 41
Imagining Microbes: From the Molecular Sublime to the Molecular Grotesque 54
Molecular Landscapes: New Ways of Reading the Anthropocene 60
Conclusion: The Big Moment of the Very Small 65
3. Still Life and Vital Matter in Gillian Clarke’s Poetry 69
Images of Metamorphosis and Development 80
4. Mycoaesthetics: Weird Fungi and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation 93
Weird Ecology, Weird Fiction 98
Wood Wide Web as Ecological Genome 103
II. Neuro-Medical Imaging and Diagnosis 121
Challenging Medical Knowledge and Classifications 127
Challenging Neurological Reduction 132
Challenging Social and Literary Categories 135
A Person Surrounds This Brain 164
7. The Fiction of the Empty Pandemic City: Race and Diaspora in Ling Ma’s Severance 183
8. Dead Gods and Geontopower: An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth 203
9. Depopulating the Novel: Post-Catastrophe Fiction, Scale, and the Population Unconscious 229
The Population Unconscious 229
Population between Science and Speculation in Science Fiction 238
Survival at Scale in Post-Catastrophe Science Fiction 242
Utopian and Realist Fictions 245
Conclusion: Downscaling Survival 249
10. The Everyday Pluriverse: Ecosystem Modelling in Reservoir 13 261
Introduction: The Rural Mesocosm 261
Noticing Nonhuman Narratives 268
Visualising Coexistence, Part I 274
Modelling Interspecies Assemblages 280
Visualising Coexistence, Part II 287
Conclusion: Scale and Stoicism in the Everyday Anthropocene 291
11. The Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of Climate Change Comics 299
Making the Global Threat Personal 300
Biography and Autobiography 308
Scientific Distance Versus Intimate Experience 312
12. Displacing the Human: Representing Ecological Crisis on Stage 323
‘It’s Actually Not About Us’: The Paradox of Human-Centric Ecological Drama 326
Shifting the Boundaries: The Spatial, the Temporal, and the Sensory 332
‘Fragments, Shards, Whispers’: Imagining the Impossible Other 342
Intermingling Life Forms and Scales 355
Forms of Displacement by Immersion 363