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Fires and floods rage across the world, destroying entire communities, in the process. They leave behind ashy remnants and miry residues, as reminders of their power and destruction. One day, these remnants and residues might be all that is left of our civilisation, as we know it, since the climate crisis puts our future – the future of every species on earth – in danger. These desolate landscapes are the worlds that contemporary speculative fiction imagines; these are the worlds where disaster has struck, and people do what they have to do to survive – or so they say. As a result of their climate changed worlds, speculative fictions texts, such as D’Lacey’s Meat, hold an interest in the production and consumption of flesh (a large contributor to the current climate crisis). Meat explores how a climate changed world, without animals, facilitates a renegotiation of the different kinds of flesh that are considered edible. For the ideologically conditioned townspeople of Meat’s Abyrne, it is no longer herds of cows that they raise for consumption; instead, their herds are comprised of humans. Moving from slaughterhouse to home, human flesh fills the stomachs of Abyrne’s residents. This choice is, perhaps, surprising, since it seems so far removed from our current societies; yet, Meat suggests that flesh is always sustenance, and we are only one power- hungry meat baron away from having human flesh on our plates. The farming of human flesh, in Meat, encourages ethical questions about not only what it means to eat flesh but also what it means to be flesh. Acknowledging humans as being flesh allows humans to move into what Matthew Calarco calls a “zone of indistinction” with animals. In this zone, humans acknowledge a shared fleshiness and recognise that they are like animals. Can seeing humans as flesh – in every disturbing form – encourage a better way of treating humans and animals alike, as equal, more-than-fleshy beings, in our current world? To answer such a question, I will show that we must turn to speculative fiction texts, like Meat. I will explore how Abryne’s leaders manufacture distinctions between the edible and the inedible, alongside analyses of the strange ideological conditioning moments of flesh consumption in Meat, in order engage with Calarco’s indistinction approach. I conclude that, while the climate crisis offers us an insight into what it means to eat flesh and Calarco’s indistinction approach offers us an insight into what it means to be flesh, crucially, speculative fiction offers us an insight into what it means to both be and eat flesh, in a world where everything is on the menu. Samantha Hind(School of English, University of Sheffield) Comments are closed.
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