Toward an Ethics of Affinity: Posthumanism and the Question of the Animal in Two SF Narratives of Catastrophe

This article reads two narratives of catastrophe, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” (1983) and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” (2015), in an attempt to explore how their concern with disaster destabilizes the binary human/nonhuman. Conjuring up visions transformation extinction before after stories interrogate humanist accounts subjectivity through focus on language consciousness, prompting us rethink ontological divide between human animal. interrogation is carried out not only at level thematics, but also a formal level, techniques defamiliarization extrapolation as well choice narrative voice focalization. Thus, engage some key issues addressed by discourses originating from fields animal studies critical posthumanism, which are currently gaining momentum philosophy literary criticism context Posthuman turn. As will be contended, send powerful message about boundary self other, highlighting necessity shift toward posthumanist ethics affinity.