“Heute noch werden wir aus dem Halbschlaf erwachen“: Writing the posthumanist condition in contemporary German language science fiction

Humanity is in crisis: a crisis pertaining both to actual human beings and to the intellectual conceptualisations of human subjectivity, and induced by climate change, technoscientific developments, and current social movements. These changes introduce the demise of humanity as a horizon of possibility, but also urge us to expand the idea of who we are as human beings, both in order to survive and to become anew. The theoretical framework of posthumanism, along with the genre of Science Fiction (SF), have been at the forefront of exploring new, future-oriented ways of being and becoming human. SF not only extrapolates from what is given, it also provides a space for creative thinking and for imagining the new and the unanticipated. My paper seeks to harness these potentials of posthumanist theory and the SF genre by systematically investigating the different ways German language SF texts by Emma Braslavsky (Die Nacht war bleich, die Lichter blinkten, 2019), Raphaela Edelbauer (Dave, 2021) and Leif Randt (Planet Magnon, 2015) respond to the human subjectivity crisis. Drawing on the frameworks of Critical Posthumanist Theory and Critical Theory, I will explore the alternatives for conceptualising the human after the Anthropocene offered in these texts. While paying special attention to the aesthetic strategies developed in these novels, I will also examine how their visions of the future connect to the (German) present and past.