River Styx 109: Posthuman

DEAR READER,

In his treatise on the interconnectedness of all things, The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton writes, “Being a person means never being sure you’re one.” What makes us human—what makes us human now, on a planet that feels increasingly hostile to life—is the central question of River Styx 109: Posthuman. 

Writing, like music, art, and architecture, is a sacred record of our legacy, our evolution, our triumphs and perils; it provides proof of our existence as an intelligent species. If we are truly in the early stages of a sixth extinction—as many thinkers in technology, the sciences, and even the humanities suggest—a review of the literature of the past decade shows that, although we are doing little to avert catastrophe, we are acutely aware of its inevitability. We are writing our own denouement. 

I imagine some posthuman expedition of the distant future unearthing the frozen remains of our civilization and deciphering our texts. How will they interpret what they discover and what will they think of us? What significance will they find in our use of the self-descriptive humanity? And what will they make of the term posthuman, which seems to have entered our lexicon around 1910, and has only increased in literary utility ever since? Will we be seen as a species defined by prescience, pessimism, suicidal ideation? 

These future explorers will find another word: hope. As we assembled this edition of River Styx, we sought honest depictions of our momentous present and an array of possible futures. Not all of those futures are doomed. We looked for writing that nurtures our humanity in a post-anthropocentric world. Though we are surrounded by—entangled with—climate change, AI, pandemics, genocide, cultural erasure, and the threat of total war, we are searching for a reason to hope. Some of us are trusting in the intrepid leaps in space exploration, medical research, nanotechnology, quantum computing, food production, genome mapping, carbon capture. There is not only despair.

In Bradley Bazzle’s carefully rendered story “The Sleepers,” Anna, a graduate student and part-time teacher, navigates a complex attraction to Bryan, a mysterious former student who claims to have survived a near-fatal accident that left him with plastic implants in his body. Lindsey Webb’s “The Green Lion Devours the Sun” is a lyrical rumination about the color green and its associations with death and hope. Sara Deniz Akant sees existential dread in reheated leftovers in her poem, “Sandwiches, Sandwiches.” Nandini Bhattacharya’s “The Department of Racism Without Racists” depicts university faculty members in a surreal battle royale of political correctness. The narrator of Kelly Magee’s darkly comic “The Next Ark” live-tweets the end of the world. 

Elsewhere in the issue you’ll find robots, repurposed waste, an automated, mechanized city, urban decay, disappearance, coal ash disposal, Nick Land, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the tragic consequences of sharing someone’s private images without their consent.

Truth and hope do not always mix well. In these pages you will find truth and hope, sometimes at odds, sometimes in harmony, but their alchemical combining and recombining amounts to one of the most fascinating and timely issues we’ve ever published. 

BRYAN CASTILLE
MANAGING EDITOR