Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation

By David Higgins

Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels and film. John Wyndham’s triffids, Algernon Blackwood’s willows and Han Kang’s sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations and inhabit our metaphors – but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. Plants in Science Fiction is the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction, and its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics and cultural life at large – questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders and boundaries; erecting and dismantling new visions of utopian and dystopian futures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786835611

Book preview

New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Plants in Science Fiction

New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Series Editors

Professor Pawel Frelik

University of Warsaw

Professor Patrick B. Sharp

California State University, Los Angeles

Editorial Board

Grace Dillon

Portland State University

Tanya Krzywinska

Falmouth University

Isiah Lavender III

University of Georgia

Roger Luckhurst

Birkbeck University of London

John Rieder

University of Hawai‘i

Plants in Science Fiction

Speculative Vegetation

Edited by

Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins and Jerry Määttä

© The Contributors, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-559-8

eISBN 978-1-78683-561-1

The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Olaf Holland / Alamy Stock Photo

Series Editors’ Preface

Science fiction (SF) is a global storytelling form of techno-scientific modernity which conveys distinct experiences with science, technology and society to a wide range of readers across centuries, continents and cultures. The New Dimensions in Science Fiction series aims to capture the dynamic, worldwide and media-spanning dimensions of SF storytelling and criticism by providing a venue for scholars from multiple disciplines to explore their ideas on the relations of science and society as expressed in SF.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Contributor Biographies

Introduction

Katherine E. Bishop

Part 1: Abjection

1Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale

Jessica George

2‘Bloody unnatural brutes’: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids

Jerry Määttä

3Botanical Tentacles and the Chthulucene

Shelley Saguaro

Part 2: Affinity

4Between the Living and the Dead: Vegetal Afterlives in Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads

Brittany Roberts

5Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction

T. S. Miller

6Alternative Reproduction: Plant-time and Human/Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han

Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

Part 3: Accord

7Sunlight as a Photosynthetic Information Technology: Becoming Plant in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume

Yogi Hale Hendlin

8The Question of the Vegetal, the Animal, the Archive in Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz

Graham J. Murphy

9Queer Ingestions: Weird and Sporous Bodies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction

Alison Sperling

10 The Botanical Ekphrastic and Ecological Relocation

Katherine E. Bishop

Selected Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgements

There are a host of people and entities, yes, even including plants if you’re holding a book with paper pages, to thank for helping to bring this book to, ahem, fruition. The errors, of course, are our own.

First and foremost, many thanks to Paweł Frelik, one of the editors of the series of which this is part, whose encouragement helped nudge this book into being. Our gratitude also goes out to his co-editor, Patrick Sharp, who is ever a font of useful knowledge, as well as to our peer reviewers and editors at the University of Wales Press, especially Sarah Lewis, who is indefatigable, kind, and has great taste in books. Second, thanks to the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), where our editorial triumvirate came into being and which has been warmly receptive to plant-centric papers over the years. Particular thanks to Andy Sawyer, Glyn Morgan, and the other Liverpudlians for hosting us in Liverpool, England, home of the John Wyndham Archive, where Jerry Määttä’s own contribution was born and bred. To the contributors of this volume, we salute you; we appreciate your joining us on this (when we started it) unique venture. Thanks, too, to J. J. Jacobson, who generously opened the Eaton Collection at University of California, Riverside to us for our research and assisted in its early stages. The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) also deserves a round of applause for its support of plant panels; so, too, do the participants and participating audience members of the Plants in Science Fiction roundtable composed of Alison Sperling, Brittany Roberts, Steven Shaviro and Graham Murphy that Katherine Bishop led in 2018.

So many others helped to make this volume possible. The list begins (but certainly does not end) with Scott Newton, Keren Omry, John Rieder, Sherryl Vint, Steven Shaviro and Brian Attebery, who provided invaluable feedback throughout the process. To our families who understand (and enable) our long hours spent on this project and incessant chatter about it, thank you; special thanks, too, for inspiring curiosity in us about the world, not least the green around us, to our parents.

We thank No Exit Press, Bantam Press, and Tom Robbins himself for permission to generously quote Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume.

Lastly, but not least, we are grateful to our institutions for providing necessary research and travel funding, which allowed this collection to come together. Thanks to Miyazaki International College, Uppsala University and Inver Hills College for their myriad means of support.

Contributor Biographies

Katherine E. Bishop received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She is an Associate Professor of Literature in the School of International Liberal Arts at Miyazaki International College (Miyazaki, Japan). Her recent publications have appeared in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and American Studies Journal. Her recent research has centred on the transgressive possibilities of plants, from anti-imperialism to aesthetics as well as epistolary literature.

Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she offers courses on contemporary ecofiction and the early modern history of environmental ethics. Her article ‘Remaking Eighteenth-Century Ecologies: Arboreal Mobility’ appears in the Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment (2017). With Laura Auricchio and Giulia Pacini she co-edited Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660–1830 (2012), which includes her essay ‘The Vocal Stump: the Politics of Tree-Felling in Swift’s On cutting down the old thorn at Market Hill’. She is currently completing a book project, ‘Talking Trees: Silviphilia and Silviculture 1650–1800’.

Jessica George received her Ph.D. from Cardiff University in 2014. Her doctoral research focused on evolutionary theory in the fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft, and she has published on this subject as well as on literary adaptations of myth and contemporary horror TV. She has interests in the Gothic, literature and science in the long nineteenth century, adaptations and transformative works, and contemporary Welsh writing in English. As JL George, she writes weird and speculative fiction and is a Literature Wales bursary recipient for 2019.

Yogi Hale Hendlin is an environmental philosopher working at the intersection of political theory, biosemiotics and public health. Hendlin is an Assistant Professor in the Erasmus School of Philosophy and core faculty of the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, as well as a Research Associate in the Environmental Health Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. As a plant philosopher, Hendlin has received an Austrian National Science Foundation (FWF) grant, and specialises in interspecies communication, using plants’ communicative capacities as a basis for ecological justice. Hendlin is an Associate Editor for the journal of Biosemiotics, co-organised the 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering at UC Berkeley, and is co-editor of the forthcoming book Food as Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective.

David Higgins, Ph.D. is the Speculative Fiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches English at Inver Hills College in Minnesota, and his research examines imperial fantasies in post-war American culture. David’s article ‘Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction’ won the 2012 SFRA Pioneer Award for excellence in scholarship. He has published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa and Extrapolation, and his work has appeared in edited volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction.

Jerry Määttä, Ph.D. is Associate Professor (Docent) at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden. His research interests include sociology of literature, ecocriticism, and Swedish and Anglophone science fiction. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the launch and reception of modern science fiction in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s, and since then he has primarily published on Anglophone post-apocalyptic narratives and literary prizes and awards. He is on the advisory board for Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.

Timothy S. Miller received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame, and he has taught both medieval English literature and contemporary science fiction at Sarah Lawrence College and Mercy College. He has published extensively on medieval literature as well as the relationship between genre science fiction and mainstream literary fiction, and his current work in progress explores representations of plants and plant being in later medieval literature and culture.

Graham J. Murphy is a Professor with the School of English and Liberal Studies (Faculty of Business) at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). He has co-edited Cyberpunk and Visual Culture and Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, co-authored Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion, and appears in such venues as The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: Bridging the Solitudes, More Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, Dis-orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, and a host of other publications. His most recent projects are the co-edited collection The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (early 2020) and a handful of other articles in various stages of development. He is an Assistant Editor for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and sits on the Editorial Board of both Science Fiction Studies and Extrapolation.

Brittany Roberts is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Languages at University of California, Riverside, where she researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian and Anglophone speculative fiction, especially the genres of horror, science fiction, and weird fiction. She is currently writing her dissertation, which undertakes a comparative analysis of post-war Russian and Anglophone horror literature and cinema focusing on depictions of humans, animals, the environment, and the ecological and metaphysical dynamics that link them. Brittany has published an article in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and has written book chapters for the forthcoming collections Ecohorror and The Spaces and Places of Horror. She is especially interested in how horror disrupts the human–nonhuman binary and in how speculative fiction reconsiders, challenges and reconceives our relations with other species.

Shelley Saguaro is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Gloucestershire. She is the author of Garden Plots: The Politics and Poetics of Gardens (2006) and has contributed several articles to Green Letters. These include ‘Something that would stand for the conception: The Inseminating World in the Last Writings of Virginia Woolf’ (2013) and ‘The Republic of Arborea: Trees and the Perfect Society’ (2013) in the Utopias and the Environment Special Issue. Among other publications focusing on trees and plants are ‘Telling Trees, Eucalyptus, Anon and the Growth of Co-evolutionary Histories’, in Mosaic (2009) and ‘Tolkien and Trees’ (with D. C. Thacker) in J. R. R. Tolkien (2013). Her current research focuses on ‘the botanical tentacular’ in science fiction and in ‘abcanny’ fiction.

Introduction

Katherine E. Bishop

We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone¹

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Plants play key roles in human stories and cultures, from the dryads of Greek mythology, the Tree of Mercy sprung from the biblical Adam’s corpse, Green Man iconography and Odin’s Yggdrasil to fantastic stories of lamb plants and laughing human-faced Jinmenju. Floriography, or sending messages through flowers, has long buzzed through love letters from the Song of Solomon to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), eighteenth-century Turkish courts and nineteenth-century British drawing rooms. Then there were the numerous stories of monster plants and other botanical wonders that followed in the wake of Charles Darwin’s work on plants in the 1870s, still influencing horror fiction to this day. On a tamer note, tulips famously captured the attention (and wallets) of those who could afford them in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, and orchids and ferns particularly satisfied species-hunting Victorians just as air plants have become a byword for a certain breed of millennials. Plants are everywhere, if one just thinks to look.

Given their pervasiveness in our histories and imaginaries, it should be little surprise that plants run rife in science fiction (sf) novels, films, TV series, video games and graphic fictions.² Who doesn’t know Audrey II’s cry of ‘Feed me, Seymour’ from the 1986 remake of Little Shop of Horrors, Farscape’s photogasmic-prone Delvians (1999–2003) or at least Groot, from Guardians of the Galaxy and beyond (1960–)? Others might think of the Plants from the PopCap Games hit, Plants vs. Zombies (2009), the home tree in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) or the many alien plants, ecosystems and pod people collected in the stories in Improbable Botany (2018), edited by Gary Dalkin. John Wyndham’s flesh-eating monster plants in his post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids, the sentient flora in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962), the gene-hacked crops of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), the invasive trees and mechaflowers of Warren Ellis’s graphic novel Trees (2014) and the galactic greenhouses of the film Silent Running (1972) represent just a few more that often spring to mind when the subject arises.³ Then there are the hordes of plant–human hybrids populating popular culture, the intriguing combination of self and so-far-from-self inspiring a vast range of possibilities. Numbering among such chimeras are the woman who turned to broccoli in the television series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004), the durian fruit-borne children of Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2008), Octavia Butler’s Oankali’s seeding of the universe in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy (1987–9), DC Comic’s Poison Ivy (1966–) and the photosynthesising post-apocalyptic humans of Tam Linsey’s Botanicaust (2012). Moving away from the anthropomorphic side of the spectrum to the technocentric, there are the neural network-adaptable trees from Avatar (2009) which allow jacked-in users to communicate with the world and with the dead, as well as the empathic forest planet in Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’ (1971). As the title (borrowed from Andrew Marvell) suggests, the story pits nature against an Ozymandian humankind and finds us, for the most part, lacking, quite contrary to how most humans would see the opposition.

This profusion of plants in popular culture, especially in sf, suggests at least an uneasy acknowledgement that plants have capabilities that we humans neither share nor yet fully comprehend. We tend to think of plants as landscapes and love objects and metaphors and ornaments and lunch – when we think of them at all. When we try to think of plants on their own terms, in terms not dominated by human experience, we encounter a domain that is strange, difficult to describe, alien. The botanist Francis Hallé argues that, ‘plants represent absolute otherness to us’, an otherness plant-philosopher Michael Marder locates in ‘the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity’.⁴ We see them only enough to unsee them and then focus on the humans and non-human animals acting upon, around and through them in a phenomenon the biologists James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler famously named ‘plant blindness’.⁵ Too often, plants are there to be looked upon and ignored, used with little effect or affect. Consumed.

Indeed, the first step to seeing vegetal life is perhaps to interrogate how we look at it. In his 2015 poem ‘The Problem of Describing Trees’, Robert Hass writes that ‘There are limits to saying, / In language, what the tree did.’⁶ We can only see – and thus describe – arboreal subjects in human terms. But acknowledging the nature of these limits can ‘disenchant us’, allowing us to see how human perception inevitably colours our view: we tend to make trees ‘dance’ and ‘whisper’ and ‘shiver’ in our imaginaries, as Hass puts it, when they do nothing of the sort. Hass’s poem shows the folly of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, how anthropocentrically inscribing ourselves upon the world, including the vegetation surrounding us, can constrain our ability to see beyond ourselves.

One of the greatest boons of sf is the way it allows us to confront that which is alien to us – worlds, thoughts, experiences, desires and lives that are not our own. It helps provide, if not a map for Le Guin’s forests mentioned in the introductory quotation, then, perhaps, a cartographic guide, a way of imagining the unknown. The defamiliarisation often considered to be inherent in sf – which Darko Suvin calls the genre’s capacity for cognitive estrangement – crucially produces an ‘imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’.⁷ And what alive is more alien to humans than plants? Plants are intriguing life forms that surround us, sustain us and even feed off of us, yet inhabit such different ways of being.

While serious scientific work and speculations alike on plants’ capabilities have increased greatly since the advances by Gustav Fechner, Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose in the nineteenth century, the past decade or so has seen exponential growth in both areas. Specialised studies such as Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life (2006), by František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso and Dieter Volkmann, and Anthony Trewavas’s Plant Behavior and Intelligence (2014), which have come at the topic from more rarefied angles, have been complemented by works aimed at broader audiences, such as Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola’s Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (2015), Daniel Chamovitz’s What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (2013) and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World (2016). Demonstrating the way an increasingly deep interest in plants has continued to build, a few forays into plant studies have even become best-sellers. Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001), for one, was adapted into a documentary by The Public Broadcasting Service in 2009, airing to a wide audience.

Critical plant studies have begun to reach far outside the fields of biology and into areas including philosophy, art and literature. Plant philosophers such as Michael Marder and Matthew Hall have revolutionised the way in which plants are treated in the humanities: Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), Grafts: Writings on Plants (2016) and Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016, with Luce Irigaray), as well as Hall’s Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (2011), have attracted significant attention in interdisciplinary studies. Likewise, Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetal Life (2015) explores connections between biopolitics, knowledge and power, providing a history of plants (or the absence thereof) in canonical philosophical thinking.

The distinctions between the familiar and the unfamiliar, or between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, abstracted, exaggerated or subtly held aslant as they may be, have real-world implications, including the ways that power is distributed from the micro- to the macro- or global scale. Closely considering the distribution of power across species, environmentally forward schools of thought argue, can, in turn, encourage sustainable relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world, including plants. As Anna Tsing shows in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), the way we think about vegetation is not simply central to the way we think about ourselves or even humanity; the way we think about vegetation may also be key to our continued existence. More and more, this is being recognised across disciplines, from art, as in Botanical Speculations: Plants in Contemporary Art (2018), edited by Giovanni Aloi, to wider media, as in Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (2013), edited by Randy Laist, Elizabeth Chang’s Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century (2019) and Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s edited collection Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (2016).⁸

A natural offshoot, then, of the rise of both science and fiction related to vegetal potentialities, the collected essays in Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation further narrow our purview, allowing us to speculate further on what – or who – plant life may be, while exploring how we understand ourselves in relation to the mute(?) sentient(?) world of flora. Both collectively and individually, these original essays argue that plant life in sf transforms our attitudes towards morality, politics, economics and cultural life at large, questioning and shifting many traditional parameters. They ask how plant-based characters or foci shift our understandings of institutions, nations, borders and boundaries, erecting – and dismantling – new visions of utopian and dystopian futures. Covering works dealing with various types of plants in sf (i.e. monstrous, partuitive, seductive, posthuman), ranging temporally from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, and geographically from the United States to Europe, Russia and Korea, the authors featured here explore the place where humans and plants meet, contemplating and challenging the widely held assumption that plants constitute the ultimate form of non-human life. A common thread throughout most of the essays is moving past this reflexive sense of difference to explore commonalities, hybridities and mutual forms of growth. Reflecting these shared concerns, then, this volume is divided into three sections that traverse the route from alienation to understanding: Abjection; Affinity; and Accord.

In the first section, Abjection, Jessica George, Jerry Määttä and Shelley Saguaro approach the traditionally held divide between plants and humans, broaching historical considerations of monstrous plant life as threats to commonly held conceptions of human superiority and anxieties about disturbing the ‘natural order’, be it taxonomic or social. In ‘Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale’, Jessica George argues that, in their focus upon evolutionary degeneration, non-human life and human insignificance, authors such as Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood returned repeatedly to a concern with the nature and status of ‘the human’, finally using vegetation to question human pre-eminence. Connecting abjections of nature and subaltern states, Jerry Määttä in ‘Bloody unnatural brutes: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids’ focuses on the symbolic possibilities of Wyndham’s triffids, and their relation to the novel’s contemporary colonial context, showing parallels between the treatment of plants and humans within the exploitative economic systems of colonialism. The triffids’ horror comes less from their absolute strangeness, Määttä finds, and more from horrors closer to home. Next, Shelley Saguaro, in ‘Tentacular Botanicals and the Chthulucene’, abuts The Day of the Triffids with two other seminal tales of botanical monstrosities, H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and John Boyd’s The Pollinators of Eden (1969), to show how the vegetal reconfigures a classical horror-bound configuration of tentacles into more generative possibilities. All three of these chapters challenge the easy division between human and non-human worlds, questioning the chasm long held between taxonomic categories.

In Affinity, the second section, laughter, sex and parturition entangle physicality and communication, affect and instinct, pushing ever closer towards common ground. Brittany Roberts, T. S. Miller and Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook delve into human–plant similarities, moving from base functions to higher processes: from death to affect, desire and strange births. In ‘Between the Living and the Dead: Vegetal Afterlives in Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads’, Brittany Roberts probes into possible ramifications for human–plant hybridity, and reveals how Iufit and Maslov deconstruct Soviet scientific discourses around human perfection and superiority, particularly the early twentieth-century trope of the ‘New Soviet Man’. Roberts argues that through Necrorealism, Iufit and Maslov find ecological kinship among humans and plants in life through the cycle between life and death, bridging vegetal life and Homo sapiens. In ‘Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction’, T. S. Miller moves to another form of negotiation, that of sexuality, and juxtaposes the alternating denial of and succumbing to desire in Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1791), Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms (1926) and John Boyd’s The Pollinators of Eden (1969). Miller finds that the convergence of human sexuality and plant sexualities holds both promise and threat. Fittingly, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook pushes past the desire on which Miller focuses to its common outcome: fruition. Looking to Robert Holdstock’s novel Lavondyss (1988) as well as works by Han Kang in ‘Alternative Reproduction: Plant-Time and Human/Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han’, Cook considers how these texts embody the radical possibilities of posthuman reproduction, focusing on the ways temporality is embodied in natural and preternatural impregnation and gestation. Thus, in Affinity, the authors examine not just human–plant dynamics but also qualities often thought of as solely human from a vegetal perspective.

In the final section, Accord, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Graham J. Murphy, Alison Sperling and Katherine E. Bishop illuminate deep rhizomatic kinship networks, tracing the hyphen in human–plant relations inset by the previous sections. Yogi Hale Hendlin focuses on scent in ‘Sunlight as a Photosynthetic Information Technology: Becoming Plant in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume’. Dissolving the modernist divorce between emotion and reason, body and mind, the lesson from plants in Jitterbug Perfume (1984) indicates that the fear arising from separation is overcome through connecting with our plurality as photosynthetic beings, much like the rhizomatic and asymmetric growth of plants. Hendlin investigates what it means for humans