“I am sitting in a kitchen, talking to a sheep”: Looking Through Postanimal Eyes in Adam Roberts’s Bête (2014)

This chapter close reads a so far under-researched example for a postanimalist narrative in Adam Roberts’s Bête (2014). At the dystopia’s core, the biotechnological enablement of animal figures emerges as a thematic as well as formal prerequisite to its plot and narrative construction. AI-microchips find their ways into sf animals’ brains; and animals and chips co-evolve into independently acting, postanimal creatures. Roberts’s text raises a whole range of questions about the killability of certain species as opposed to others, the discursive processes that contribute to these ambivalences, as well as on the multifaceted violence intrinsic to human-animal relationships. Moreover, it emphasizes that questions about human-animal relationships are not only about unsettling beliefs in a presupposed anthropological difference (a fundamental dividing line between humans and animals). It points readers to the fact that asking about this dividing line is in itself an unproductive and misleading endeavor, for human-animal boundaries not only take highly differentiated shapes but are never to be “known” in their entirety—least of all are they to be put into human words easily.