Revisiting a State of Nature An Anthropological Encounter with Multispecies Science Fiction

Drawing on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of “zone of indiscernibility,” this article forges a
link between science fiction and multispecies anthropology through a close reading of Adrian
Tchaikovsky’s (2015) recent science fiction novel Children of Time. In so doing, it argues that
Tchaikovsky’s novel allows us to challenge received notions of the human and nature in
Western political theory while working to imagine a culture and politics adequate to a
technologically forged multispecies society. At the same time, it suggests that Tchaikovsky asks
us to imagine a zone of indiscernibility in tangible terms as a space multispecies alliance.