Abstract
Derek J. Thiess studies connections among material history, place, and human embodiment in Slonczewski’s microbe novels. The children of Children Star that become the micros of Brain Plague represent the physical consequences of pure social construction. These novels provide a cautionary demonstration that the revision of history necessarily involves the destruction of competing histories, not only by revision, but also by ecocide, the destruction of a historical place and of the humans who embody their own lived histories. Slonczewski’s work explores the social construction of race and gender but still allows for a critical intervention that is sensitive to the embodied, physical limits and consequences of relativist and constructivist approaches in our critical considerations.
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Thiess, D.J. (2020). Bodies That Remember: History and Age in The Children Star and Brain Plague. In: Clarke, B. (eds) Posthuman Biopolitics. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36486-1_5
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