THE POETICS OF CYBORG CHARACTERS IN THE NOVELS OF ANNALEE NEWITZ
Abstract
This article investigates the poetics of cyborg characterization in Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) and The Future of Another Timeline (2019), arguing that Newitz mobilizes four interlocking narrative modes—monologue, dialogue, landscape, and portrait—to construct cyborg subjectivities that unsettle human/machine, nature/technology, and gender binaries. Through close readings, the study shows how interior monologues (especially Paladin’s focalized consciousness) endow non-human entities with phenomenological depth and ethical agency, while dialogic exchanges stage the negotiation of consent, pronouns, and personhood under regimes of property and code. Landscapes—ranging from Arctic liminal zones and off-grid infrastructures to geological time-machines embedded in Petra—operate as techno-natural chronotopes that externalize political economies of indenture, care, and resistance. Portraiture of bodies (armored carapaces, licensed faces, implanted brains) functions as a semiotics of embodiment that exposes biocapitalist design logics and tests the reader’s reliance on visual legibility for recognizing personhood. Placing Newitz in conversation with Shelley, Dick, Piercy, Wells, and Haraway, the article contends that Newitz reorients the cyborg from a figure of alterity to a coalitionary agent whose voice, environment, and corporeality are co-authored by social systems and acts of refusal. The contribution is twofold: a method for stylistic analysis of cyborg poetics across four modes, and a theorization of “techno-subjectivity” that links narrative form to material politics of autonomy, gender, and labor.
Keywords
cyborg; posthumanism; feminist SF; monologue; dialogue; landscape; portrait; techno-subjectivity; biocapitalism.
References
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