This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer's fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer's work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer's work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer's fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer's work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer's work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

This book features influential scholarly research and technical contributions, professional trajectories, disciplinary shifts, personal insights, and a combination of these from a group of remarkable women within mechanical engineering. Combined, these chapters tell an important story about the dynamic field of mechanical engineering in the areas of energy and the environment, as seen from the perspective of some of its most extraordinary women scientists and engineers. The volume shares with the Women in Engineering and Science Series the primary aim of documenting and raising awareness of the valuable, multi-faceted contributions of women engineers and scientists, past and present, to these areas. Women in mechanical engineering and energy and the environment are historically relevant and continue to lead these fields as passionate risk takers, entrepreneurs, innovators, educators, and researchers. Chapter authors are members of the National Academies, winners of major awards and recognition that include Presidential Medals, as well as SWE, SAE, ASME, ASEE and IEEE Award winners and Fellows. 

Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction examines the ways contemporary American fiction develops digital cultures through the creative transposition of digital rhetorics and technological practices, incorporating devices such as the hyperlink, network, and recursive processing into print or in translating a classic print narrative into a digital hypertext fiction. These literary experiments with early digital cultures from the 1990s comparatively retrace and speculate on the digital's transformative influence on prior understandings of the human, of social lives, and of individuals' relations to material lifeworlds, exploring the consequences of the apparent plasticity of the boundaries of the human, particularly for women, subaltern subjects, and others already considered liminally human. As these texts query the digital technics entering into textual practices, subjectivity, spatial practices and social networks, lived space, nation, and economic circulation, they reconceive their own literary print narrative methods and material modes of circulation in order to elaborate on unnoticed potentialities and limits of digital technics, providing a crucial means to reorient digital cultures of the present.

Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction examines the ways contemporary American fiction develops digital cultures through the creative transposition of digital rhetorics and technological practices, incorporating devices such as the hyperlink, network, and recursive processing into print or in translating a classic print narrative into a digital hypertext fiction. These literary experiments with early digital cultures from the 1990s comparatively retrace and speculate on the digital's transformative influence on prior understandings of the human, of social lives, and of individuals' relations to material lifeworlds, exploring the consequences of the apparent plasticity of the boundaries of the human, particularly for women, subaltern subjects, and others already considered liminally human. As these texts query the digital technics entering into textual practices, subjectivity, spatial practices and social networks, lived space, nation, and economic circulation, they reconceive their own literary print narrative methods and material modes of circulation in order to elaborate on unnoticed potentialities and limits of digital technics, providing a crucial means to reorient digital cultures of the present.