Amborgs and Kinship in Garry Kilworth’s Animal Fantasy Fiction

The aim of this paper is to analyze Garry Kilworth’s animal fantasy fiction in the context of Joan Gordon’s figure of the amborg in order to demonstrate how Kilworth’s re-imagining of interspecies boundaries undermines the Anthropocene’s meta-narrative of human dominance. The three works chosen for analysis—the stand-alone novel Midnight’s Sun (1990), the Welkin Weasels series (1997-2003), and the short story “The Fabulous Beast” (2012)—differ considerably in their depiction of the animal Other yet are linked by a shared message of interspecies kinship, which corresponds to the calls for interconnectedness expressed by many leading researchers of the Anthropocene. Overall, this paper argues that Kilworth’s animal fantasy, and much of contemporary speculative fiction in general, invites its readers to deconstruct the Anthropocene by realigning their optics and seeing the Self in the animal Other, the animal Other in the Self.