“They are here. They are everywhere. They are us.” – Posthuman Encounters in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018)
In Little Eyes (2018), the latest technological hype comes in the shape of cute, pet-like robots with cameras for eyes. These so-called kentukis are remotely inhabited and controlled by their human users via an online connection which is established at random. As the novel’s blurb - “They are here. They are everywhere. They are us.” - suggests, a kentuki is at once a familiar and unfamiliar creature and users’ experiences range from comforting to unsettling. The novel revolves around the theme of stranger danger and reports several uncanny encounters between humans and not-quite-humans in places around the world. The representation of these posthuman interactions in the novel remains ambiguous: Even though the potential to challenge or even transgress the human/non-human binary is addressed, the novel follows a classic dystopian narrative, which posits that it is not the technology itself which is inherently good or bad, it is us humans.
Authors
- Heike Mißler
Institutions
- Saarland University (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Journal of Posthumanism
- Published
- 2024-09-10
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v4i2.3347
- Primary Topic
- Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00