Distributed for University of Wales Press
Speculative Flesh Ecologies
Flesh, Indistinction and Speculative Fiction
An original contribution to the fields of contemporary science fiction studies, animal studies, and plant studies.
Speculative Flesh Ecologies introduces the original rubric of “speculative flesh ecologies,” or fictional environments in which different kinds of flesh—human, animal, plant, thing, and cultured—interact in order to challenge human-nonhuman distinctions. The book explores the role of flesh in contemporary speculative fiction, showing its value as an approach for understanding and imagining the meanings and ethical possibilities of becoming, and being, flesh.
288 pages | 5.43 x 8.5 | © 2026
New Dimensions in Science Fiction
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Table of Contents
Abstract
Acknowledgements
Declaration
Introduction
Some Strange Planetary Oven
An Edible Creature
Speculative Flesh Ecologies
Fleshing out the Field: Speculative/Flesh/Ecologies
Fictional Slipperiness
A Life with Cibi
“We Wouldn’t Ever Eat Anybody, Would We?”: Human/Animal Flesh and Indistinction in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2008)
Welcome to the Open Slaughterhouse
Indistinction
Red and Salty Meat Inside
The Dog Could Catch Something to Eat
I Am Meat
We’ve Made Meat for Everyone!
To Survive Without Causing Harm to Any Other Living Thing
We Have Seen the Land Where Pain is Not Even a Memory
“I Gave Them Fruit”: Plant Flesh and Grafts in Sue Burke’s Semiosis (2018) and M. R. Carey’s The Book of Koli (2020)
Our Green Planet
Grafts
A Niche in this Ecology for Ourselves
Before the Roots Went in Too Deep
I Gave Them Fruit
Our Green Planet
“The Pigs Ate Everything”: Thing Flesh and Vital Materialism in Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs (2019) and Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011)
Plastic Islands
Vibrant Matter
Becoming Part of the Island
She Felt Like She was Eating the World
The Pigs Ate Everything
Five Pigs Roamed Freely
“Actual Real Proper Meat”: Cultured Flesh and Simulacra in Mat Blackwell’s Beef (2016) and Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s ‘A Series of Steaks’ (2017)
The Future of Meat is Here
Simulacra, Simulation, and Hyperreality
Proper Meat
Fake Beef
Corpse Meat
Purebred Hereford
IT’S ALIVE
A Happy Cow
Corpse-Eating Guilt
Conclusion
Resurrected Meatballs
The Future of Speculative Flesh Ecologies
Bibliography