Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century by Kate Marshall (review)

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• Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century by Kate Marshall
• Adrienne Ghaly

MARSHALL, KATE. Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. 232 pp. $26.00 paper; $99.00 cloth.

Realism's enduring cultural presence in contemporary American literature is not the result of variations on the bourgeois subject, free indirect discourse's dialectic of intimacy and alienation, the structure of a political unconscious, or its treatment of sociomaterial environments. Instead, argues Kate Marshall in this vibrant work of novel theory and the nonhuman, this persistence derives from realism's tendency to decenter human experiences, often in highly 'weird' ways. On one level, this book might be understood as a lively response to new materialism, theories of the nonhuman, and the Anthropocene; on another, as an engaging and welcome addition to current critical re-engagements with realism. Over the better part of two decades scholars from Fredric Jameson to Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, from Debjani Ganguly to Ramón Saldívar, have interrogated realism's flourishing in contemporary Anglophone literature, often identifying its permeability and propensity for fusion with its putative others, from the romance to the complex generic hybridities of 'speculative' and 'planetary' fiction. [End Page 331]

Marshall's opening chapters seek to track "a longing for the nonhuman" (3) in twenty-first-century fiction and theory by establishing an alternate genealogy found in the modes with which American fiction since the later decades of the nineteenth century sought to imagine nonhuman perspectives. The new weird thinkers—novelists and theorists of new materialism, proponents of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism—share a commitment to "modalities of indifference, the cosmic, and external or object agencies" (31). From Poe to pulp to new materialisms, through American naturalism, para-modernist texts, and post-extinction narratives: in Marshall's vision all are "novels that want to be written by aliens" (13). This animating idea encompasses "shifts of perspective and unlikely experiments with sentience" (3), "build[ing] worlds that feel weird" (4), and "construct[ing] a nonhuman point of view" (9) without consigning such weirdness to the domains of genre fiction. Marshall does not dissolve the category of genre, but argues instead that in the novels under examination "genre becomes mood," a "reflexive knowing" and "feeling…the limitations of the human vantage" (5). This genre shift, Marshall contends, "is doing the work of theory in the novel" (5).

This perspective means that Novels by Aliens participates in broader efforts to expand the governing parameters of realism's critical conversations, at least in the Anglo- and Francophone spheres. The study's focus on contemporary American realism's radically exterior points of view, however, opens up new and exciting territory. Marshall develops many wide-ranging arguments and interventions over the book's six chapters. These aggregate into two central interlocking claims. First, that to understand the highly weird realism of much recent fiction, including that by authors such as Cormac McCarthy, China Miéville, Marilynne Robinson, and Teju Cole, demands an appreciation of the fact that nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction was always much weirder than has been imagined or admitted. Here, pulp, horror, s-f, and strands of the American Gothic are realism's uncanny siblings rather than their others. H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and speculative authors are placed by Marshall in intimate conversation with realist texts by Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. E. B. DuBois, and Willa Cather. Second, Marshall contends that contemporary realist innovations emerge from a radical expansion of established forms of realist exteriority, encompassing descriptions of landscapes and materialities, omniscient narrators, forms of consciousness, and multi-scale perceptions that are pushed into "alien," (15) even cosmic, perspectives. The terms of her investigation, Marshall argues, require a new terminology. For example, reading realism's "consciousness…alongside and against… other forms of attempting to think outside the human" transforms consciousness into a broader and more encompassing notion of "sentience" (82). Landscapes are consistently read as disconcertingly agentic, fundamentally indifferent to human actors, and sometimes the nonhuman narrators of stories, all of which reveal the impoverishment of the very term landscape.

The book identifies the three...