Anthropocene, Plantationocene, and Capitalocene, and related concepts, such as Gynocene, are designed to identify the figure or process causing current and future (climate) upheaval. Thus they are all, as T. J. Demos has observed, “names of resistance.”1 Donna Haraway’s contribution to this list—Chthulucene—is certainly also a concept that encourages resistance, but it does so in different ways. In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Haraway notes with Anna Tsing that the Anthropocene is importantly different from previous eras by the obliteration of refuges where a multitude of interconnected species can find shelter, recuperate, transform, die, and come to life again. Humanity is ultimately just another creature in this network of interdependent beings. The naming of this period or state as the Chthulucene is an effort to direct attention to the ways in which these always-connected forms of life enable each other and how they are affected by the detrimental effects of the Anthropocene as assemblages and systems rather than as individuals. Chthulucene is thus a concept that fosters what Tsing has termed the “art of noticing,”2 where what is noticed is precisely the reality of the forces that tie them/us together and the existence of these vital interconnections. Moreover, Chthulucene is conceived not simply as a descriptor but as an agentive concept that, in Haraway’s characteristic prose, “entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.”3 In this way, Chthulucene identifies not primarily the reasons why the planet is experiencing a climate crisis but the complex, tentacular nature of the damaged planet all species inhabit. At the same time, the concept actively decenters the human as species and, in so doing, seeks to collapse Anthropocentrism as logic and practice.

For a student of gothic and horror, it is tempting to assume that the concept has been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. There are certainly similarities between the tentacular, underground, and horrific universe that Lovecraft imagined and the understanding of ecological relations that informs Haraway’s Chthulucene. However, as Haraway observes, whereas the chaotic and monstrous are abject in Lovecraft’s misogynist and racist mythos, they are familiar and intimate in Haraway’s description. The bodies of the plants and animals that inhabit this planet are hosts to literally trillions of other microbial beings in an infinitely complex network of connections. The horror of the Chthulucene is thus not, as in Lovecraft, the tentacular nature of life on the planet but the failure by the Anthropos to recognize and embrace the planet’s multispecies nature. Such neglect will eventually also leave humans without refuge—a process already occurring within precarious communities across the planet.

Because the Chthulucene is not coined to identify detrimental processes or human agency, it offers a kind of systemic hope. The slogan of Haraway’s Chthulucene is “make kin not babies.”4 This is a call that encourages two related processes: a considerable reduction of humans on an overpopulated planet and, just as important, a nurturing of the intimate relations that exist between the Anthropos and nonhuman life, and between nonhuman forms to which humanity is marginal. Learning to love across species borders, to value kinship even with the microbes that have coevolved with and now nurture the (human) body, is a step toward hope for a planetary survival that may, or may not, include the human. Thus critics like Eben Kirksey have used the Chthulucene to consider futures where the human has become extinct but where love and desire are still distinct possibilities.5

The chapters of this part all demonstrate a keen awareness of the material processes and the thinking that have brought about the planetary emergency. Thus they do not in any way resist the notions that capitalism is the driving force of effects like global warming and the current depletion of biodiversity, or that humans in the Global North have been the agents of capitalism. At the same time, these chapters are also concerned with connections beyond those that exist between the human, capitalism, and climate change. In explorations of multispecies border crossings, death, and the threat of extinction, they move into, but do not necessarily confirm, the conceptual territory that Haraway has helped outline.

In the first chapter of the part, “The Anthropocene Within: Love and Extinction in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge,” Johan Höglund explores two novels by M. R. Carey that envision a future where a fungal plague has transformed the better part of humanity into braindead and voracious “hungries.” Unlike the standard zombie narrative, these novels do not revolve only around (violent and futile) human resistance to the corporeal invasion and decay that the plague entails. Instead, Höglund argues that these novels consider the positive transformative potential of multispecies becoming. The solution that these novels propose is thus not the fortification of the epistemological and ontological borders that set the human apart from, and above, other forms of life but rather the embrace of a multispecies becoming that enables being beyond the confines of the human.

Laura R. Kremmel’s chapter “Rot and Recycle: Gothic Eco-burial” explores how the notion of the sanitized human corpse emerged in burial rituals in the Global North and how new eco-friendly burial systems as well as gothic are problematizing these rituals and the human exceptionalism out of which they grew. The chapter accounts for the historical emergence and proliferation of the notion that the human corpse is a pollutant rather than an ecosystem undergoing transformation. Firmly rooted in Haraway’s and Tsing’s rethinking of the notion of human death and relations between humans and other forms of life, Kremmel then shows how gothic, from its earliest beginnings to the present, has interrogated this notion via images of lively decay and by recognizing the hybrid, multispecies nature of the human corpse.

In the chapter “Erotics and Annihilation: Caitlín R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the ‘Anthropocene,’” Sara Wasson investigates how Keirnan’s new weird writing complicates not only the notion of the Anthropocene but also Haraway’s alternative concept Chthulucene. The chapter’s comprehensive reading of Kiernan’s work reveals an oeuvre that clearly understands the long history of life on this planet as fundamentally queer, multispecies, and more-than-human but that eschews Haraway’s often exultant hope for a symmetrical and liberating meeting between life-forms. Instead, Wasson identifies in Kiernan’s work a dark and foreboding awareness of the fragility of Homo sapiens as it encounters and merges with other forms of life. The strange and often violent erotics that such meetings entail does not promise to revitalize the human but rather forms part of a planetary renewal to which the Anthropos is utterly marginal.

In the collection’s final chapter, “Monstrocene,” Fred Botting explores the limits of the many attempts to name the dark era that the human being has engineered and is currently living through and trying to understand. Working through and critiquing some of the concepts that have been used to grasp the ongoing damage done to the planet, Botting observes how much of the conceptual territory still serves to resurrect and make comfortable the very notion of the human in ecology. In an attempt to deviate not simply from these concepts but from the very process of meaning making, Botting offers the “undark” as a condition that exists beyond the epistemological limits of humanist evocations of nature and proposes the “monstrocene” not as an alternative concept but as a collective notion capable of disturbing the apparent rationality and objectivity of much of the existing nomenclature. “Monstrocene” thus challenges the reader to precisely read, reread, and rethink (ecological) relationships in an era of climate disruption, this in an effort to avoid solidifying and compartmentalizing these connections. Such an undertaking, Botting suggests with Anna Tsing, may take its cue from the entangled, ongoing, resistant, and restorative image of the mycelium and the potential of the mushroom, not to resist precarity and unpredictability, but to shape lives out of these conditions.