Inhuman Battlegrounds: Mapping the Posthuman War Gothic in Ken Liu’s In the Loop

The Gothic has had a history of being intertwined with war narratives, providing a language to express the physical and mental horrors of military conflict. The Gothic’s link with war has been present since its beginning and has carried forward to the contemporary era in fiction and non-fiction. Ken Liu’s “In the Loop” explores this Gothic tryst with war in the context of drone operations in modern-day military conflicts. The use of posthuman technologies like drones has far-reaching implications for the future of warfare and human identity in military conflicts. The human identity is altered by its entanglement with these posthuman systems within the assemblage of war, which Liu conveys through his characters and their gradual transformation. This study attempts to put forward a framework to better understand the role of the Gothic in effectively articulating the horrors of posthuman warfare, demonstrated through an analysis of Ken Liu’s short story.