Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Donna Haraway
Published by Free Association Books, London, 1996, 290 pages, 15 × 23 cm, English
Price: €24 (Temporarily out of stock)

Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as “creatures” which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg—a hybrid of organism and machine—represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. First published in 1991.

#1996 #donnaharaway
Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene
McKenzie Wark
Published by Verso Books, London, 2016, 304 pages, 14 × 20.8 cm, English
Price: €13 (Out of stock)

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.

Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.

The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought.

#donnaharaway #kimstanleyrobinson #mckenziewark #sciencefiction