R. John Williams reviews Novels by Aliens

Kate Marshall. Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. 232 pp.

Review by R. John Williams

9 January 2025

In the twenty-first century, the voice of the novel (and the literary theory surrounding it) has become alien and weird. Or at least, it’s trying to. Such is the thesis of Kate Marshall’s concise and illuminating survey of the “nonhuman” turn in novels and literary criticism over the past few decades. As Marshall notes, the contemporary genre-bending efforts to locate and inhabit “alien” perspectives are, not surprisingly, motivated by concern over the climate and the fate of humanity on our planet. Given this concern, and insofar as the old belletristic critique of science fiction (that it’s good at worlds, but less so psychological interiorities) now feels hasty and wrongheaded, Marshall’s text is interested in exploring the ways the genre’s tools have been deployed across a much larger corpus.

In a nutshell, the book argues, persuasively I think, that the generic and thematic concerns of what has come to be known as Cli-Fi (or climate fiction) are in fact embedded in a much wider range of novelistic discourse than has been previously acknowledged. Rather than merely arguing that we all ought to be reading science fiction, then (although of course, she is interested in that as well), Marshall proposes, as she puts it, “to make a stronger case for the literature of the twenty-first century whose response to systemic [climate] change may not be overt but may be subtly and insistently present,” and that critics ought to “look not only for the primary genres of climate fiction but also for their hybrid traces in novels not otherwise considered within that frame” (p. 9). The desire to “taxonomize” works into generic modes like Cli-Fi, she argues, “risks overlooking by oversimplification the rich engagements with the emerging conceptual landscape of ecological thought that fiction not overtly addressing itself to the topic contains” (p. 101).

It is a compelling thesis, and is bolstered by trenchant readings of not only several contemporary novels (for example Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), to name a few) but also unexpectedly relevant late nineteenth-century fiction by realist and naturalist authors like Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. The latter two especially, Marshall argues, are “a much overlooked resource of literary weirdness,” and offer a fascinating prefiguration of the generically complex mode that she refers to as cosmic realism evidenced in these more contemporary works (p. 31). The goal throughout, as she puts it, is to find “novels that want to be written by aliens”—to locate, that is, “moments of strange sentience” that emerge by way of complicating the parameters of narrative subjectivity (pp. 13, 37). The readings are attentive and fascinating (and bibliographically rich) and I suspect that the book will be widely read in classes on the growing body of novels addressing ecologies and climate change.

One does wonder at times, however, if the turn toward the “anthrodecentric” in these contemporary novels and literary theories (all of which share an interest in destabilizing and decentering human perspectives, and in blurring and hybridizing the line between nature and society), is not in danger, as some eco-Marxist critics might argue, of conjuring up ontologies that obscure the very real effects of human agency on the climate—the worry being, as Clive Hamilton puts it, that we risk “repudiating our uniqueness as world-makers just at the time our world-transforming power reaches its zenith.”[i] Even so, Marshall’s text offers a fascinating examination of how the novel continues to think through these many possible worlds.

[i] Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Malden, Mass., 2017), p. 89.