Against Traplessness: Disconnection and Entrapment in Multispecies Science Fiction

abstract: Scholars have noted that the celebration of relationality in multispecies and posthumanist scholarship sometimes disregards how more-than-human entanglements entail various kinds of disjuncture. While such critiques tend to figure disconnection as external to relation, this essay suggests that disconnection and connection are constitutive of all relations in equal measure. To help, the author draws on two multispecies science fiction novels— Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Semiosis by Sue Burke—that complicate the stakes of more-than-human relationality not with recourse to its purported absence but rather by foregrounding its productive impossibility. By drawing on a conception of the Anthropocene as a contemporary form of entrapment par excellence, the essay cautions against idealized states of traplessness and posits disconnection as a precondition for the Anthropocene's modulation.