Abstract
This chapter analyzes Peter Watts’s problematizing of the human and the sentient in the Rifters trilogy (1999–2004). Watts’s not merely postcolonial but, indeed, posthuman world challenges human dominance, as prehistoric and technologically based lifeforms compete with humans, blurring the lines between the biological and the technological, the physical and the virtual, the literal and the figurative. Divisions are artificially imposed, and Watts ruptures the biocentric fallacy that life will be forever confined to elements arising from organic chemistry: life, the text stresses, is nothing more than an expression of code.
In memoriam: John Brian Bowes (1929–2017). Taken by the scourge of Alzheimer’s. A man worth remembering.
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Eldridge, B. (2019). A Maelstrom of Replication: Peter Watts’s Glitching Textual Source Codes. In: Ransom, A., Grace, D. (eds) Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15685-5_13
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