3. Sensorial Estrangement: Smelling Otherwise Worlds

The Smell of Xenogenesis

Writing in the wake of centuries of atmospheric violence and olfactory “othering” directed against black women,8 Octavia Butler imagines how smell might be deployed to make otherwise worlds. Instead of ascribing racialized body odors as a tool of segregation or discipline, she explores smell’s capacity for forging queer biochemical connections across divisions of race and species. In works such as Clay’s Ark (1984), “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987), the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–89)9 and Fledgling (2005), she depicts processes of intimacy, reproduction, sociality, and healing mediated by smell. Extrapolating from scientific research and popular beliefs about pheromones,10 Butler imagines how the visceral and nonvolitional qualities of olfaction might function to expand kinship networks and build alternate futures. In Butler’s worlds, smell refuses liberal conceptions of autonomy, demanding instead that characters navigate the challenges of reproduction and community building under conditions of chemical compulsion.

Xenogenesis imagines humanity’s future as inextricably entangled with the reproductive processes of the Oankali, an alien civilization that survives by selectively interbreeding with species from different planets. The Oankali arrive just after humans (or at least the humans in control of wealthy, nuclear-capable nations) have nearly destroyed the planet through nuclear war. They rescue the remnants of humanity and—beginning with the protagonist, Lilith—carefully select and groom them to resettle Earth as members of interspecies families. While this ensures a future for the humans who have been saved, Butler’s representation of interspecies kinship under conditions of captivity is deeply ambivalent. As critics have noted, the novel’s posthuman future is interwoven with an exploration of the ongoing racialized and gendered histories of slavery, settler colonialism, eugenics, and biocapitalism.11

Scent plays a pivotal role in Butler’s world-building. It binds together Oankali kinship networks, suffuses the architecture of Oankali ships and terraformed areas on Earth, and serves as a means of direct chemical communication for Oankali: “Their kinship group areas were clearly scent-marked. Each time they opened a wall, they enhanced the local scent markers—or they identified themselves as visitors, members of a different kinship group. . . . Lilith could not read scent signs.”12 Whereas the cultural imperative of deodorization has eroded many humans’ capacity to discern scents, the Oankali are able to both “read” scent and produce “scent signs.”

In addition to marking kinship areas, scent plays a quiet yet powerful role in forging interspecies bonds. The comforting scent of the Oankali (particularly that of their third-gender genetic engineers, the ooloi) counteracts their visual appearance, which humans find alien and terrifying. It enables some humans to enter into—and even enjoy—interspecies reproductive arrangements imposed by the Oankali, who have sterilized all the humans they rescued so that they will only be able to reproduce through xenogenetic intimacies. When a woman whose human partner has been killed is comforted by her Oankali kin, “the first signals [she] received were olfactory. The male and female smelled good, smelled like family, all brought together by the same ooloi. When they took her hands, they felt right. There was a real chemical affinity.” Through olfactory and tactile mediation, “Strangers of a different species had been accepted as family” (196).

In the sequels to Dawn, we learn that Lilith’s hybrid human-Oankali progeny have inherited the Oankali’s sensory virtuosity. With “senses . . . more dispersed over his body” (254) than those of humans, and with the capacity to sense molecules and DNA, Lilith’s son Akin is able to access reciprocity not only as a philosophy but as a material, sensory experience: “he came to know that he was also part of the people who touched him—that within them, he could find fragments of himself. He was himself, and he was those others” (255). Akin uses his superhuman sense of smell to identify edible plants and gather information “like a bloodhound” (338) as he wanders on Earth, but he is also vulnerable to olfactory influence when he meets a young ooloi whose “scent overwhelmed his senses” (464). The third novel in the trilogy, Imago, begins with a detailed account of the sensory changes that occur when Lilith’s child Jodahs metamorphoses into an ooloi: “I sat down on the floor and let myself work out the complex combinations of scents” (525). As the novel progresses, Jodahs and its ooloi sibling Aaor repeatedly rely on the olfactory influence of their pheromones to pacify hostile humans: “My scent was at work on her. She would probably have difficulty resisting it because she was not consciously aware of it” (632).

Narrated in the first person, Imago offers unfiltered access to Jodahs’s posthuman sensorium. Jodahs’s response to the scent of its ooloi parent Nikanj, for example, extends across five paragraphs:

It had an incredibly complex scent because it was ooloi. It had collected within itself not only the reproductive material of other members of the family but cells of other plant and animal species that it had dealt with recently. . . .

Its most noticeable underscent was Kaal, the kin group it was born into. I had never met its parents, but I knew the Kaal scent from other members of the Kaal kin group. . . .

The main scent was Lo, of course. It had mated with Oankali of the Lo kin group, and on mating, it had altered its own scent as an ooloi must. The word ‘ooloi’ could not be translated directly into English because its meaning was as complex as Nikanj’s scent. “Treasured stranger.” “Bridge.” “Life trader.” “Weaver.” “Magnet.” (526, emphasis added)

Nikanj’s scent includes traces of all the DNA it has collected from family, and in the course of its genetic study of Earth’s plants and animals. It also includes multilayered kinship markers that announce its relations within Oankali and human society. The claim that the meaning of “ooloi” is as untranslatable as scent draws a suggestive analogy between aliens who can sense and manipulate DNA and olfaction, and the suggested (but inadequate) translations that follow—treasured stranger, bridge, life trader, weaver, magnet—all evoke qualities of scent as a volatile medium of bodily and trans-corporeal intimacies.

Although Akin, Jodahs, and Aaor deploy scent in the interest of establishing the possibility of an independent and reproductively viable human settlement on Mars, the Oankali’s preternatural capacities both to sense and to manipulate others’ sensory responses raise irresolvable questions about consent and coercion under postapocalyptic and posthuman conditions that resonate with histories of circum-Atlantic slavery and antiblackness—especially the constrained choices faced by black women whose exploited reproductive capacities have been essential to racial capitalist worldmaking. Commenting on a passage in which an ooloi “looped a sensory arm around [Lilith’s] neck forming an oddly comfortable noose,” Justin Mann suggests that Butler’s figuration of the instrument of sensory evolution as a noose “encompasses the pleasure and pain, history and futurity, and abjection and subjection that constructs late twentieth-century black life.”13 This ambivalence toward interspecies futures forged through olfactory attraction marks a refusal to idealize smell as a utopian solution to the uneven crises of the Anthropocene. Instead, Butler suggests that it is vital to learn how to discern, historicize, navigate, and actively shape the biochemical webs of relation in which our world is already enmeshed.

Funk and Anthropoid-Centrism in Fledgling

Butler’s final novel, Fledgling, revisits many of the themes she explored in Xenogenesis: human coevolution with a species that may have come to Earth from outer space, the role of chemosensory pleasure in extending kinship networks, the counterintuitive use of viruses in genetic engineering, and interspecies reproduction as a survival strategy. Like each novel in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Fledgling opens with a scene of rebirth under conditions of sensory defamiliarization: its protagonist, Shori, awakens in a dark cave, forced to rely on senses like touch, hearing, taste, and smell. Eventually, Shori learns that she has lost her memory after surviving an attack that killed the rest of her family. She also learns that she is Ina—a matriarchal, vampire-like species that survives through symbiotic relationships with blood-providing humans. Shori and her family are targeted for extermination by other, conservative Ina because she is the product of genetic engineering—a human-Ina hybrid whose genetic inheritance from black humans enables her to survive in sunlight. Shori’s hyperosmic abilities enable her to both survive and expose a plot against her family. Following her nose, she tracks the scent trails left by her kin and their attackers, identifies appealing human “symbionts,” and singles out potential mates among the Ina.

Butler’s vampires are distinguished by their biochemical and olfactory relations. Like the Oankali, the Ina are both hyperosmic and capable of influencing others with their scents; unlike the Oankali, they are also powerfully affected by olfactory signals. Perhaps because it is inextricable from flavor, smell exerts a profound erotic influence on Ina, soliciting them to choose particular Ina mates and human symbionts. When Ina take blood from humans, the humans are both physically pleasured and chemically transformed by the exchange: they take on their Ina partner’s scent, and in the process they become subservient to that Ina’s wishes. Butler also speculates on how taking smell seriously as a source of knowledge might influence legal proceedings: in Ina trials, the accused and accuser “give the Council the opportunity to make use of their formidable senses. They watched, listened, and breathed the air as we spoke. Together, they had thousands of years of experience reading body language.”14 Legal testimony similarly requires sharing air with others through the embodied and viscerally compelling sense of smell: “I saw, I heard, I breathed their scent” (251).

While the reader might expect some of her lost memories to be triggered by familiar scents, such a moment of olfactory recognition never comes: instead, scent guides Shori toward her biological relatives and new kin relations. She learns that she is strongly attracted to some humans’ and Inas’ personal scents, and that following her olfactory inclinations leads to strong relationships that appear to be mutually fulfilling. The queer, polyamorous, and interspecies kinship networks of Ina and their symbionts are mediated—and erotically motivated—by scent. To Shori, promising symbionts smell “interesting,” “distracting,” “healthy,” “open, wanting, alone” (15, 311, 98). Scent also conditions relations with other Ina: whereas she enjoys the “dark, smoky” scent of her intended Ina mate, her father (whom she doesn’t recognize) has a scent that “made me feel safe, although I couldn’t say why”; an elder from another Ina family “smelled good somehow, not in the slightest edible, not even sexually interesting, but good, comfortable to be with” (223, 67, 158). Throughout the novel, scent moves Shori toward a diverse, open-ended, and erotically compatible network of intraspecies and cross-species kinships.

Like the Xenogenesis trilogy, Fledgling highlights problems of consent posed by the viscerality and immediacy of olfactory relations. When Shori learns that the animal she killed and ate in the cave was a man, she reflects: “his scent should have told me what he was. How was it that he had smelled only like food to me and not like a person at all?” (34). For the Ina, the sensory appeal of scent—inextricably entangled with gustatory and sexual appetites—makes it difficult to distinguish between persons and nonpersons. When she meets Wright, who becomes her first symbiont since her awakening in the cave, Shori explains why she wanted to get into his car: “I realized he smelled . . . really interesting. Also, I didn’t want to stop talking to him” (15). These lines encapsulate the contradiction between Shori’s appetitive and interpersonal relation to her symbionts: should she use her mouth to consume them or converse with them? As Wright struggles to subdue Shori so that he can bring her to the police or the hospital, his scent overwhelms her: “I didn’t have the words to say how good he smelled. . . . I bit him—just a quick bite and release” (16). While Butler reverses the race, gender, and apparent age of the assailant and victim, this scene invokes the motif—featured in novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Patrick Susskind’s Perfume (1985)15—in which an irresistibly seductive fragrance is cited as an excuse for sexual assault. Shori believes that she can bite Wright without doing him any permanent harm. Wright continues to struggle, but once the chemicals in her saliva enter his bloodstream, he comes to desire being bitten by her. This leads to an unsettling sexual relationship that raises difficult questions about consent: can Shori—who is fifty-three years old, has the body of a ten-year-old human child, and has not yet reached sexual maturity as an Ina—consent to a relationship with an adult human whose smell she finds compelling? And what should we make of Wright’s furious resistance to Shori’s assault, followed by his chemically coerced “consent”? As Shanté Smalls puts it, “How can we . . . see this allegorization of rape as anything but rape?”16 Unlike some other Ina, Shori and her Ina allies endeavor to treat their symbionts like equal partners (with some notable exceptions, including when first biting them)—but kindness does not compensate for the immense power differential between Ina and their symbionts (the term “symbiont” usually refers to “the smaller member of a symbiotic pair.”)17

While Smalls points out troubling resonances between Fledgling’s sexually predatory child (or child-like) protagonist and the exploitation, sexual objectification, “adulting” and demonization of black children, other critics argue that Butler’s novel navigates conditions of ethics and embodiment that exceed the presumptions of liberal humanism. Elizabeth Lundberg reads the novel as a staging of queer relationality, arguing that it “draws on BDSM-informed ideas of consent and relational, embodied subjectivity to highlight how the liberal humanist subject has been destabilized.”18 L. H. Stallings reads Fledgling as a paradigmatic instance of “funk”—a black feminist mode of embodied intelligence that reorders the liberal sensorium “by privileging smell and internal kinetic energy in black communities.” Stallings argues that Shori’s erotic experience of scent enables an unruly approach to polyamory led by embodied desire, rather than by liberal notions of ethical, contractual “love”: “Butler’s focus on funk’s privileging of olfaction provides an out from the Western romance narrative that suggests one love to complete or fulfill the self as modern and civilized.” For Stallings, smell discloses otherwise worlds and sexual relationalities that exceed patriarchal and capitalist conceptions of humanism. “Olfaction,” she writes, “is not a Platonic sense. To walk with it and to make it a part of one’s culture evokes a new understanding of life and humanity.”19

Despite Butler’s nuanced engagement with smell as a subject of speculative worldmaking, Fledgling ultimately presents an ambivalent account of olfactory relationality. If smell and chemical compulsion shape a world that refuses liberal models of agency, Shori’s unprecedented status in that world (as an Ina-human hybrid produced through genetic experimentation) reintroduces the notion of individual agency. After being guided primarily by visceral olfactory desires in the novel’s early chapters, Shori is persuaded that it would beneficial to follow Ina practice of seeking out additional symbionts—a lawyer and a young man with experience in “business administration” (158)—who would be well positioned to help her manage the wealth and rental properties20 she has inherited. While hyperosmia makes other Ina susceptible to sensory overload, Shori displays an unusual capacity to distance herself from olfactory sensations—and to manipulate, taxonomize, and resist them. In one scene, when a barrage of scents threatens to overwhelm her as she rushes through the woods, she slows down to analyze them: “All I cared about were the scents drifting in the air and what they could tell me. I stopped every now and then to take a few deep breaths, turning into the wind, sorting through the various scents. . . . Standing still, eyes closed, breathing deeply, I could sort through far more scents—plant, animal, human, mineral—than I wanted to bother with” (103). Instead of experiencing scents (as many humans do) as fleeting, volatile, and difficult to pin down, Shori is able to produce a mental “scent picture” (64)—a metaphor that suggests she is uniquely able to relate to scent as a “Platonic sense,” with the distance and detachment typically associated with visual spectatorship. When one of her symbionts is murdered, Shori gathers olfactory information from the corpse, “selecting out scents that were not her own, separating them into odors and groups of odors that I recognized” (257, emphasis added). Shori also learns to distance herself from olfactory compulsions: nearly overcome by the scent of her intended mate, she resists the urge to bite him; viscerally repulsed by “olfactory keep-out signs” left on symbionts whose Ina have been murdered, she bites the women anyways in order to save their lives (116). Shori even inquires about the possibility that female Ina might deliberately influence people with scent: “can you control the way it affects people or who it affects?” This question is left unanswered; instead, Shori’s interlocutor simply points out that Shori’s scent is already quite powerful for a child: “I don’t want to imagine what you’ll be like by the time you come of age” (222). Shori’s olfactory agency—including her resistance to olfactory compulsion—is exceptional even among the Ina.

As a work of sensorial estrangement, Fledgling is shaped by the tension between Shori’s olfactory libido—which establishes intimate relationships through visceral, biochemical responses—and her capacity to resist, categorize, and instrumentalize smells. Shori’s contradictory capacity to both feel the force of olfactory “funk” and maintain some distance from chemical compulsion enables her not only to survive but to protect her kin. As Melody Jue explains, this capacity to resist olfactory reactions distinguishes Shori from the novel’s antagonists: the group of reactionary Ina who assault Shori and her family are deeply offended by her because, as a racialized human-Ina hybrid, she “smells ‘wrong’” to them.21 The novel’s central conflict pits Shori’s expansive and diverse olfactory desires against the olfactory prejudices of Ina who are viscerally repulsed by her scent.

Noting that bodily smells are “the collective exudation of our symbiotic microbial communities,” Jue argues that “Butler did not quite push past an anthropocentric view as much as she could have” (18). In addition to microbial symbionts, Shori screens out a host of other more-than-human scents that do not appear related to her immediate concern of protecting her kin: “eyes closed, breathing deeply, I could sort through far more scents—plant, animal, human, mineral—than I wanted to bother with” (103). Elsewhere, as she runs through the woods, Shori reflects on the scent of horses: “My scent apparently disturbed them. Yet their scent had become one of the many that meant ‘home’ to me” (111). Unlike the reciprocal olfactory desires that structure most human–Ina relationships, Shori’s olfactory exchange with nearby horses is asymmetrical: her scent disturbs them, while their scent (which may include pheromones that communicate their fear) comforts her. Despite the fact that most Ina live with their symbionts in rural settlements secluded from sensorially overwhelming cities, Fledgling—like Xenogenesis—turns out to be surprisingly anthropocentric (or anthropoid-centric) in its representation of scent as a medium of interspecies intimacy. Salt Fish Girl, by the Asian Canadian novelist Larissa Lai, offers a more extensive engagement with the ecological implications of scent—specifically, its unpredictable entanglements with GMO produce and DNA derived from fish.

“We Can Still Catch the Scent of the Latent Commons”

Lai articulates a theory of sensorial worldmaking in “The Sixth Sensory Organ” (1996), an evocative essay that blends sensorial speculation with queer-of-color memoir. She writes that, through centering her own experience and remaining receptive to change, “it becomes possible to imagine and create new worlds by beginning with the assumption of their existence and then leaving them open to modification. The ability to do both of these things requires the use of every sense available from the most verifiable to the most intuitive.”22 Critics have argued that Lai’s novels challenge Suvin’s definition of science fiction as a genre that centers “a white male understanding of progress and modernity,” aligning her work instead with a lineage of migrant “speculative fiction” that estranges conventional understandings of science itself in order to “foster alternative forms of connectivity that exceed and defy the privatizing logics of nation, corporation, and nuclear family.”23 In addition to acknowledging Octavia Butler’s influence as a model for “dream[ing] us into the future in relationship across racial difference,”24 Lai has explicitly differentiated her work from male science fiction writers who depict smell in dystopian terms, such as Spider Robinson (author of Telempath, a novel in which people’s heightened sense of smell often leads to suicide) and Cormac McCarthy (author of The Road, in which the air is a source of planetary and respiratory devastation and which, as Lai notes, problematically dispenses with women “before the action begins”).25

Salt Fish Girl (2002) builds a world suffused with the pungent odours of diasporic foods that are often stigmatized or outright prohibited for transgressing sensory norms. Elsewhere, Lai notes that Canadian expectations for Asian migrants to assimilate demand the suppression of such sensory attachments (which detrimentally affects traditional foodways that support cultural identity and mental, physical, and social health):

I will eat whatever’s laid before me, regardless of where it came from. Roast pork, salt fish, fried tofu, sweet gai lan and then snake soup, eel hot pot, stir-fried dog. . . . Wait! We don’t eat those things any more. They’ve been conveniently forgotten in our eastward journey to the West. You must forget the parts of yourself that prove the bigots right after all, regardless of the cost.26

Lai singles out the queer, racialized sensory excess associated with the odors of durian and salt fish. These intense odors communicate with her characters on both cultural and genetic levels, materializing possibilities for more-than-human kinship and queer-of-color reproduction that exceed the erotic constraints of the heteronormative family.

Salt Fish Girl consists of two interwoven narratives: one set in South China in the late 1800s and early 1900s and the other set in and around a walled city on the west coast of North America in the years 2044–2062. The first thread features an incarnation of Nu Wa, the half-serpent, half-human deity who created humans in her own image. Reincarnated as a young woman in the nineteenth century, Nu Wa falls in love with the daughter of a salt fish merchant, runs away with her, eventually drowns, and is transmuted into a durian seed. The dystopian future storyline focuses on Miranda Ching, a young woman whose body emits the sulphurous odor of durian and who ends up working at the laboratory of Dr. Flowers, a corrupt gene scientist who engineers clone workers for corporations by blending genes sourced from fish and racialized populations. The two plots intersect when Miranda falls for a former clone worker named Evie Xin who smells of salt fish because, in order to bypass legal regulations on human cloning, she was genetically engineered to be “point zero three per cent Cyprinus carpio–freshwater carp.”27 Miranda turns out to be another incarnation of Nu Wa, connected to the goddess through the material agency of a mutated durian tree. Together, Miranda and Evie join a community of fugitive clones who work to undermine the corporate order founded on the work of legally nonhuman clones, and who thrive on queer, posthuman practices of biological and social reproduction.

The novel’s world is structured by an array of sensorially differentiated (and differentiating) atmospheres. The walled corporate-owned city of Serendipity, where Miranda grows up, is “an assimilationist space of olfactory neutrality”28 that privileges visual engagement with gleaming storefronts and GMO foods that were “always vibrant bright and regular in shape and color” (30–31). Miranda’s father works remotely through the visual and haptic mediation of a virtual-reality “business suit” that turns his work as a tax collector into an adventurous video game. By contrast, in the “Unregulated Zone” outside Serendipity’s gates, “the air grew thick with the smell of old petrol, sulphur, urine and rotten food. . . . It was too dirty and too foul smelling” (37). Even in the Unregulated Zone, atmospheres are engineered in an effort to align sensory and biopolitical hierarchies: Dr. Flowers’s clinic “smelled too conspicuously of bleach” used in an effort to create a sanitary atmosphere (99); riot police later use a cloud of “supertoxic chemical irritant” to disperse a crowd of activists outside the clinic. In the nineteenth century, when Nu Wa is taken to the “Island of Mist and Forgetfulness” (which shares its acronym with the International Monetary Fund),29 forgetfulness is actively induced not only through promises of profit and uplift, but also by atmospheric mist. The novel is suffused with both slow and spectacular forms of atmospheric violence, as when factory workers are poisoned by chemical inhalations and prison guards turn off the heat to punish unruly inmates. In Salt Fish Girl, racial capitalism relies on both genetic and atmospheric engineering brought to bear on (ultimately uncontainable) projects of biopolitical control. The novel’s Pacific Economic Union—the territory governed by a union of six corporations—forms the acronym “PEU,” suggesting that its regimes of spatial control and biological rationalization are premised on a culturally constructed response to stigmatized tastes and smells: “pee-yew!”30

These sensory and atmospheric practices of racial capitalist worldmaking are unsettled by the novel’s speculative engagement with the suppressed sense of smell. As critics have shown, Lai’s deployment of culturally stigmatized scents critiques and refuses liberalism’s injunctions to forget about bodily and historical truths. These truths include: (1) the psychological and social costs of cultural assimilation, which demands the suppression of smells associated with diasporic community; (2) the repressed queer and interspecies intimacies evoked by the erotic charge of durian and salt fish scents, which are presented as active agents in all of the novel’s erotic scenes; and (3) the resurgence of suppressed histories of colonial violence associated with strange scents and with the novel’s mysterious “dreaming disease,” which I will return to shortly. Messy and unpredictable olfactory encounters unsettle the sensory and racial logics of the novel’s corporate geographies and genetic engineering projects. Through sensorial estrangement, the novel attunes us to the “diffuse connections” catalysed by smell.31 These olfactory connections refuse to be bound to the composed, individual body: they solicit unruly relations across spatial, generational, racial, and species divides.

Salt Fish Girl draws attention to two pungent objects—durian and salt fish—that often feature in “atmo-Orientalist” discourses directed against smells perceived as “Asiatic.”32 Early on, Miranda describes the scene of her conception, which occurred when her father brought her mother an illicit durian: its odor—“intriguing, yes, and familiar too, and also illicit”—both inspires and suffuses her parents’ intercourse: “as they tumbled to the floor, it tumbled between them . . . its pepper-pissy juices mixing with their somewhat more subtly scented ones and the blood of the injuries it inflicted with its green teeth.”33 Shortly after this scene—in which the durian is an active participant in the exchange of scents and fluids—Miranda’s mother becomes pregnant, despite being “a good eight years past menopause” (15). Miranda’s account of her childhood begins with several pages of olfactory description conveying not only the odor of durian but the subtle ways in which Miranda’s scent permeated her family home:

The unpleasant cat pee odour oozed from my pores and flowed into every room. It swirled around the coffee table, glided smoothly over the couch and poured over the rug [. . .]. It crept under bedroom doors into the private rooms of each family member [. . .]. It rushed up their nostrils and in through ears. It poured down their throats when they opened their mouths to speak.34

The verbs in this extended catalogue underscore the unruly material agency of scent as it transgresses the architectural and corporeal boundaries of the heteronormative household. The “all-permeating” (16) trans-corporeal mobility described here conveys how, for a time, the durian’s odor tends to linger and even emanate from the bodies of its eaters.35

The themes of sensory excess and visceral response are common in writings about durian. While some early Western accounts of the fruit were positive, colonial relations soon led Europeans to “regard [durian consumption] with great puzzlement that further reinscribed the difference and maintained the racial hierarchy between colonizer and colonized.”36 In Salt Fish Girl, this colonial and racializing response of olfactory disgust is evident in early responses to Miranda’s smell. A range of characters—including Miranda herself—initially denigrate her “cat pee odour” as a marker of class, femininity, sexuality, animality, impropriety, and racialized contagion.37

Lai’s erotic treatment of durian also resonates with the writings of durian enthusiasts, which detail how the fruit challenges erotic and economic autonomy: as food studies scholars Gaik Cheng Khoo and Jean Duruz write, “Once captivated by the sweet aroma of durian, we durian lovers are no longer agents in control of our desires, freedom, or as it turns out, our pockets! Michael Pollan raises the possibility of plants acting as agents by utilizing scent in their quest to attract animals and humans as seed dispersers in order to fulfill their evolutionary destiny.”38 “Durian lovers” (a term not limited to the human species) are entrained by the fruit’s smell into participating in a process of interspecies reproduction. While Lai’s novel invokes popular associations between durians and sexual potency, it delinks these ideas from patriarchal (and anthropocentric) framings that associate durian with male fertility and single it out as the “king of fruits.”39 In presenting durian sensations as an occasion for extending kinship networks, Salt Fish Girl also resonates with accounts of durian feasting as a communal and celebratory experience that renews relations through what anthropologist Lisa Law terms calls “the production of an alternative sensorium.”40 The kin-making work of scent is on full display in the brief period when Miranda’s family is first overwhelmed by her scent: it enables her parents to fall in love for the first time and suspends her family in a “new-found state of bliss”; this bliss extends to the more-than-human world, reframing what others would perceive as overgrown and unsightly landscaping as a delightful “riotous exuberance of life” (18).

The novel’s other salient odoriferous object—salt fish—is evocative of life’s oceanic origins and humans’ shared genetic inheritance with fish. Miranda reveals that she inherited a strange anatomical feature—fistulas behind her ears41—from her mother, and that they seemed to serve “the function of memory, recalling a time when we were more closely related to fish, a time when the body glistened with scales and turned in the dark, muscled easily through water. This is why, when pressed, the liquid they release smells of the sea” (107–8). These fistulas open onto intergenerational and interspecies temporalities, many of which are tied to historical traumas. This intergenerational, maternal, and interspecies inheritance enacts relations of sensory reciprocity: Miranda doesn’t just smell it in the scent of salt fish but also emits a series of scents (sea-brine and durian) for others to smell. While these scent emissions are involuntary—unlike those of Butler’s ooloi—they also exert powerful influences when inhaled. In addition to these resonances across deep time, the smell of salt fish also evokes memories of childhood and “complicated” feelings associated with weaning, Miranda notes that Evie “stank of that putrid, but nonetheless enticing smell that all good South Chinese children are weaned on, its flavour being the first to replace that of mother’s milk” (48). Here, Lai offers a sophisticated account of olfactory recognition: instead of comfort or nostalgia, the childhood resonances of this scent elicit feelings associated with nourishment, loss, and a substitution that “defamiliarizes the naturalized role of women as reproductive beings.”42 Lai underscores that neither salt fish nor durian are naturally occurring scents in the novel’s setting: both Evie’s fishy scent and the durian trees capable of growing in British Columbia’s cold climate are outcomes of genetic engineering.

Encounters with these smells are a distinctive formal component of the novel, which is structured around powerful yet elusive moments of olfactory anagnorisis. Lai explains that she was interested in how scents “tap into a visceral, bodily sense of memory, that kind of immediate connection one gets to a moment in the past when one is confronted by scent.”43 Scent—even when its provenance is uncertain and mixed—induces an embodied sensation, a desire that sets Nu Wa in motion: “The scent of the fish, or perhaps her scent, or, more likely still, some heady combination of the two wafted under my nose and caused a warmth to spread in the pit of my belly. I followed her” (51). For Miranda, scent enacts a sensation of recognition without a discrete object (and perhaps without a discrete subject, either), stretching the boundaries of self and knowledge:

I caught a whiff of a familiar fragrance, briny and sweet [. . .] Afterwards I wasn’t sure what had happened. I had recognized something, but had no idea what. It felt as though something inside me was stretching, had always stretched to that moment of recognition, in the past, a stretching without knowing, a longing without certainty of the object[. . .] This knowing without consciousness of what it was I must remember ate at me. (105–6)

I caught a whiff of something subtler, and infinitely sweeter [and] I myself was shocked by this odd glimpse of clarity, this moment of knowing. (150)

The knowledge communicated in these moments is at once compelling and elusive. What does olfactory recognition communicate, and what does it withhold? Scent maintains a measure of opacity, refusing to render knowledge as transparent or complete. Thus, when Miranda first recognizes Evie’s salt fish scent, Evie refuses her claim: “You’re full of shit. How can you know anything?” Evie’s challenge takes the form of a question about knowledge production, drawing attention to smell not only as a fundamentally affective and relational mode of encounter but also as a sensory method for unlearning bounded, commonsense conceptions of identity, community, and temporality.

In the novel, Miranda is just one of many people showing symptoms of the “dreaming disease”—an emergent condition whose symptoms include “foul odours of various sorts that follow the person without actually emanating from the body, psoriasis, sleep apnea, terrible dreams usually with historical content, and a compulsive drive to commit suicide by drowning” (100). Dr. Flowers—the geneticist sought out by Miranda’s father to treat her durian odor—treats numerous patients afflicted with the dreaming disease. When she begins working for him, Miranda sees patients who include “a man who smelled of milk and could remember all the famines that had ever been caused by war” and “a girl who smelled of stainless steel and could recite the lives of everyone who had ever died of tuberculosis” (101–2). Another victim, “a girl who smelled of cooking oil[,] remembered all the wars ever fought” (85). These odoriferous dreams resonate with recent research on the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, and frame smell as a capacity that can materialize and make perceptible suppressed and ongoing histories of colonial and capitalist violence.44 Although biomedical discourses characterize these dreamers’ unruly smells as “foul odors,” the scents of milk and cooking oil invoke scenarios of nourishment that might mitigate some of the suffering caused by war and famine—thus, the scents could emerge as a kind of counterhistorical wish fulfilment. The odor of stainless steel similarly suggests that access to modern infrastructures might help mitigate tuberculosis, but it simultaneously reminds us that industrial materials like stainless steel are themselves the source of toxic smells and other harmful externalities that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations.

Olfactory recognition extends to these instances of historical violence, whose ongoing connections to the novel’s present have been obscured by colonial agnosia. As Bahng writes, “The dreaming sickness becomes Lai’s vehicle for positioning the intertwined histories of war, labor, and the environment as the precondition for the age of genetic modification.”45 As a condition that materializes intergenerational, transnational, and interspecies olfactory relations, the dreaming disease situates Lai’s novel within BIPOC futurism’s broad “program for recovering the histories of counter-futures” (to invoke Kodwo Eshun’s definition of Afrofuturism).46 Smell’s distinctive, “polysynchronous” capacity to evoke past experiences in visceral, embodied, yet elusive terms is essential to the braided form of Lai’s novel, whose “nonlinear temporality . . . shows human history to be cyclical, recursive, reincarnate, and transpositional.”47

In addition to erotic and intergenerational historical relations, olfactory recognition draws Miranda toward a future oriented by generative multispecies intimacies. As Bahng explains, Salt Fish Girl critically engages with finance capitalism’s efforts to imagine and extract profit from “genomic futures.” Bahng traces how the Human Genome Project (1990–2003) shifted its focus “from the study of mutation [in the context of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] to the more profitable science of DNA recombination and genetic engineering.”48 This financialized approach to genetic research—designed in pursuit of profit and a securitized, calculable future—is evident in efforts to develop genetically modified foods (referenced by the enormous fruits eaten by the novel’s elites), or the recent “cultivation of a smell-less durian, its characteristic stink bred out through the crossing of different varieties of the durian tree.”49 It also drives recent research by Unilever and University of York scientists who identified the genetic pathway for “the bacterial production of thioalcohols, an important component of the characteristic body odor smell,” which could pave the way for the genetic deodorization of human bodies (despite the fact that smelling other people’s body odor can reduce social anxiety).50 In addition to offering a critical account of market-driven genetic research, Salt Fish Girl explores the potentialities inherent in unpredictable, unruly processes of genetic mutation that exceed the normative, profit-driven constraints of capitalist science. Building on evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s argument that “incorporative symbiosis (long-term relationships between different species) . . . is the primary mechanism that generates new organs, tissues, and even species,” Michelle Huang reads the novel as a narrative of “symbiogenesis” in which serendipitous reproductive relations among humans, fish, and durians enact the emergence of a queer, more-than-human future.51

Lai’s olfactory plot is entangled with the figure of the Asian clone worker, which brings together the themes of “racialized histories of genomics, the financialization of science, and transpacific labor.”52 In the later chapters of Salt Fish Girl, Evie introduces Miranda to a fugitive group of Asian clones, the Sonias. These rebel clones—produced through a xenogenetic process to serve as superexploited not-quite-human workers in a shoe factory—are thriving in the unregulated, mutated commons walled out by corporate enclosures like Serendipity. They reproduce their community not only through xenogenesis (involving an extraordinarily fertile durian tree) but through intergenerational networks of care, storytelling, and political activism. Their worldmaking extends to industrial sabotage: in an effort to inspire further acts of resistance and refusal, they surreptitiously distribute subversive messages (including some clones’ individual life stories, artworks, poems, and polemics) molded into the soles produced at the shoe factory.

While hiding out with the Sonias, Miranda recognizes her origins and engages in a sensuous encounter that—like all of the novel’s scenes of carnal pleasure—is animated by olfactory recognition. Her partner in this encounter is the mutated durian tree grown from a seed that the earlier incarnation of Nu Wa intermingled with in the early 1900s:

But the thing that most shocked and astonished and at the same time oddly comforted me was the odour that poured from the fruits, wafted off the leaves and seeped from the bark. It was the same heavenly cat-piss-and-pepper odour that had been the bane of my childhood existence, the odour that still trailed me around like a stray dog.

I felt the tree pulling at me, as though I were a small moon caught in the gravitational field of a heavy planet. (221)

When Evie picks a durian from the tree and offers it to Miranda, Miranda tastes it: “an overwhelming sense of wonder compelled me. I scooped the creamy yellow flesh into my mouth, felt its taste and odour merge with my own” (224). This encounter is both radically xenogenetic and auto-erotic: since this durian is likely related to the one that fertilized Miranda’s mother, her ingestion of its “creamy yellow flesh” is not only somewhat cannibalistic but also potentially incestuous. Like the clone community of Sonias, the intergenerational kinship between Miranda and previous/future incarnations of Nu Wa “call[s] into question the force of individualism.”53 We later learn that Miranda/Nu Wa is pregnant, presumably as a result of this fertile durian fed to her by a community of queer, fishy clones.

By estranging readers from deodorizing conceptions of smell (which either minimize it or reduce it to commodified and hedonic encounters with a narrow olfactory range), Salt Fish Girl holds space for other modes of olfactory engagement and relation. If these sensuous encounters elicit the olfactory recognition of suppressed historical continuities, they also draw Miranda into an alternate future defined by genetic and relational serendipity. Unlike the corporate, enclosed settlement of “Serendipity” where Miranda spends her childhood, Anna Tsing emphasizes serendipity as a vital quality of more-than-human worldmaking: “one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human.”54 As an atmospherically distributed medium available across many species divides, scent plays a powerful role in catalyzing these serendipitous intimacies and collaborations between human and nonhuman agents. As the biologist Lyall Watson writes, “Before sight and sound hijacked our attention, we shared with all life a sort of common sense, a chemical sense that depended on direct contact with matter in the water or the air.”55 If we share with nonhuman life not only a vast extent of genetic code but the capacity to know the world through chemosensation, then smell may offer an alternate “common sense” (or sensus communis) for making multispecies relations in a postnatural, genetically transformed molecular commons.56 Despite the ecological devastation wrought by racial and colonial capitalism, Tsing writes, “We can still catch the scent of the latent commons” (282).

Salt Fish Girl concludes with a series of breathless revelations about a genetic and biochemical commons—a new, mutated, and racialized “wild” that refuses to be captured for labor and heteropatriarchal reproduction. “I thought, we are the new children of the earth, of the earth’s revenge,” Miranda/Nu Wa muses, shortly before entering a hot spring to give birth to a child fertilized by the pungent durian she consumed (259). This hot spring, filled with salt and minerals, presumably shares a “rotten-egg smell” with the sulphurous river from which Nu Wa—and humankind—emerged in the novel’s opening paragraphs (2). In the final paragraph, both Miranda/Nu Wa and Evie find their legs fused together into long, serpentine tails, their skin turned scaly. By bringing Miranda and Evie together, attracting Miranda to the Nu Wa–infused durian, and then attracting them to the fresh mountain air and the salt-scented hot springs, scent has been an indispensable catalyst for this scene of queer, diasporic, multispecies futurity.

However, Lai also confronts her characters with smells that at first seem relatively unburdened by history. After liberating themselves from Dr. Flowers, Miranda and Evie drive into mountains filled with “trees green and living, exhaling their contemplative cedar scent and casting blue-green light over the crumbling road in a lacy pattern. . . . The mist and cedar air rushed through the [car’s] broken window” (265). Among these trees is another corporate genetics facility, where they walk into a puzzling building:

And then the curious round cabin appeared. A ring of thick cedar logs for its sides and a roof that spiraled up and ended with a skylight at the top. “They commissioned a Native architect, Agnes Bishop, to design it,” said Evie. “As though purchasing her labour would somehow connect their project with the land.”

[. . .] The cabin revealed its shape—a spiral, like a snail shell, or the body curled fetal, door where the head goes, toilet at the centre, where the tail could curve in. And the skylight directly above. Was I meant to make something of this, was the cabin design a riddle? (268)

Although Lai notes earlier that the Diverse Genome Project—purchased by the corporation that employed Dr. Flowers around the time Evie was born—“focused on the peoples of the so-called Third World, Aboriginal peoples, and peoples in danger of extinction” (160), the novel does not otherwise reference Indigenous people until this scene, just a few paragraphs before it ends. In two distinct scenes, the scent of cedar—a sacred tree and vital companion species for the Stó:lō,57 Squamish, Musqueam, and other Indigenous nations in the Pacific Northwest—remains opaque to Miranda and Evie. Whereas durian, salt fish, and the scents associated with the dreaming disease have concrete historical referents, cedar (whose deep associations with collective continuance I discussed in chapter 1) strikes Miranda only as “contemplative,” “fresh,” and “green” (155, 265). For Miranda, the “curious round cabin” made of cedar and designed by a “Native” woman poses a “riddle,” but she quickly comes up with an answer based on the toilet in the center of the building: “This is a story about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places. I leaned into the wall of the coiled cabin, snail, the body curled in upon itself, spine coiled, a snake lying in wait” (268).

These scenes—in which a novel preoccupied with scent as a diasporic medium of collective memory lingers with a scent tied to Indigenous collective memory—raise difficult questions about tensions between diasporic and Indigenous modes of sensorial worldmaking. Does dismissing the building’s spiral design and cedar construction as merely an act of corporate appropriation participate in the erasure of Indigenous epistemologies? Does interpreting the construction biomorphically as a coiled snake project the Chinese myth of Nu Wa onto Indigenous land and architecture? Does framing the building as an allegory about “stink” dispel the lingering fragrance of cedar and the histories and relations held by that scent? The ambivalent names Lai chooses for her characters (Miranda echoes Shakespeare’s Tempest, and “Evie Xin” translates as “New Eve”—an echo of the longstanding settler myth of the “American Adam”)58 suggest that their migrant, posthuman status remains entangled with settler colonial geographies. While Lai explores how scent can evoke intergenerational connections with past violence and complicity—for example, one dreaming disease patient “could recall and recount every death, every rape, every wound, every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ancestral lineage” (85)—even this expansive framing does not account for the position of diasporic settlers who benefit from settler colonialism even when their ancestors did not directly commit such violence, and even when their ancestors suffered historical violence in other places.

In dwelling on Miranda/Nu Wa’s lack of historical or personal connections with the scent of cedar, my intention is not to find fault with Salt Fish Girl’s focus on diasporic memory. Instead, I wish to draw out the questions provoked by the “contemplative cedar scent” and “curious round cabin” that Miranda/Nu Wa and Evie pass through on their way to a site of queer, interspecies worldmaking. Can diasporic worldmaking—the new possibilities for conviviality and relation made possible by transplanted, mutated forms of life—coexist with Indigenous cosmologies? How can we draw on—and redistribute—the worldmaking capacities of smell while also supporting efforts to decolonize smellscapes? As Lai writes in a 2013 essay on Asian diasporic and Indigenous relationality, it is imperative to “begin to imagine how we might live, work, and make culture in relation to one another, and to the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds differently from the ways in which . . . state politics and global capital have allowed thus far.”59

Love Is in the Air

Commissioned for the Tate Modern’s spacious Turbine Gallery, Anicka Yi’s In Love with the World (2021) extends Butler and Lai’s speculative experiments with multispecies olfactory intimacies into a multisensory staging of human-AI symbiogenesis. Yi’s installation features an intricate and constantly evolving series of interactions among biomorphic airborne machines, visitors, and gallery staff. Their forms reminiscent of jellyfish and amoebas, the machines (called “aerobes”) float in the vast overhead space, displaying a range of shifting moods and behaviors. At times, an aerobe might display curiosity or sociability, drawing close to humans or other aerobes; others might shy away, remain still, or quietly investigate a space recently vacated by another aerobe. At unpredictable times, aerobes descend to a maintenance area, where they are attended to by gallery staff. These behaviors are governed by complex algorithms that, as Yi emphasizes, enable the aerobes to behave, interact, and evolve in unforeseeable ways. The gallery’s atmosphere—shared by aerobes and humans—also transforms over the course of the exhibition, presenting a series of scents that correspond to changes in the aerobes’ behavior patterns. The constant dance of interactions mediated by a scented atmosphere evokes the imagined scenario that oriented Yi and her collaborators when planning the exhibition: “[We] imagined machines that could breathe, smell, and have an organic response to their environment. We thought of machines living ‘in the wild,’ engaging with plants and animals, independent from humans.”60

In Love with the World brings together, on a monumental scale, two themes explored in Yi’s earlier works. Several of her installations—most notably You Can Call Me F (The Kitchen, 2015) and Life Is Cheap (Guggenheim Museum, 2017)—incorporate scents associated with women in Yi’s network, and with Asian diasporic women and spaces. In Life Is Cheap, a diorama that blends a circuit board with a living ant colony that communicates via scent challenges “techno-Orientalist” stereotypes that associate Asiatic racialization with technological abstraction.61 In two works exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Yi stages intimate encounters between organic materials and machines: Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita) features soil infused with a bacterial colony and machine sensors that registered the odorous gases emitted by those microbes; Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble) presents animatronic moths that inhabit—and could potentially feed on—cocoon-like forms composed of dried kelp. Yi’s deployments of scent as a medium offer a rejoinder to patriarchal and racist discourses that associate unruly odors with femininity and racial otherness.62 Her experiments with biologized machines similarly unsettle ideological tendencies that associate machines either with masculine rationality or with abstract, disembodied calculation.

Visitors to the Turbine Hall enter the aerobes’ space, whose scale and verticality unsettled human norms of movement and perception. Noah Feehan, who collaborated with Yi on the exhibition’s technical design, explains that the scale, alterity, and opacity of the aerobes could evoke visceral responses in human visitors: “Images and video cannot elicit the autonomic response you feel near them in person—a flood of cortisol and oxytocin, the uncanny blend of fight-or-flight mixing with the intense protectiveness of one’s kin” (78). Like Butler’s Oankali, Yi’s aerobes present an occasion for relationality that has no precedent. They unsettle not only bodily biochemistries but conventional ideas about the scope of kinship. Both their sentience and their sensorium are unaccountable: “you find yourself wondering what they want, and there is no straightforward answer. The aerobes sense the building itself, the state and position of every other aerobe—and of you, for that matter” (78). Unlike the vast majority of computers and AI technologies—which have been oriented by human aims (specifically, by militarized, visual processes of “target discernment”), the aerobes exhibit a form of machinic intelligence that refuses anthropomorphism while remaining deeply interested in learning about humans in the gallery.

Yi frames In Love with the World as an intervention in AI discourses that emphasizes the ethical and relational implications of embodied intelligence. In place of the “purely cognitive focus” that characterizes much of the research and public understanding of AI, Yi centers the “sensory ecology of intelligence” (103)—intelligence as an evolving mode of understanding grounded in embodied and affectively charged encounters with the world. This intervention builds on recent shifts in AI research: as the feminist science studies scholar Elizabeth Wilson explains, researchers since the mid-1990s have “contend[ed] that sensory, perceptual, and corporeal data form the frame within which cognitive faculties emerge. The skills and competencies that develop in an artificial entity as it engages directly with the world generate a distributed intelligence that is robust and responsive and has the capacity for growth.”63 Yi’s interest in unpredictable, co-evolving relations among humans and aerobes foregrounds the affective affordances of artificial embodied intelligence, acknowledging that machines “can as readily be a means for affective expansion and amplification as for affective attenuation” (30).

Yi’s approach to sensorially engaged AI inverts conventional efforts to bring AI to bear on the embodied senses. The startup Aryballe, for example, “uses artificial intelligence and digital olfaction technology to mimic the human sense of smell, help[ing] their business customers turn odor data into actionable information.”64 For businesses like Aryballe, the goal is not to explore smell’s capacity for making relations but to gather and leverage olfactory data; possible applications include engineering more effective “‘new car’ smells,” “[reducing] R & D time for new foods and beverages,” or “[detecting] food spoilage in consumer appliances.”65 In their critique of machine learning applications in olfactory research, cognitive scientists Ann-Sophie Barwich and Elisabeth Lloyd discuss a “shockingly uninformed” statement by a member of the Google AI team working on understanding how chemical structure relates to olfactory sensation: “Based on analogous advances in deep learning for sight and sound, it should be possible to directly predict the end sensory result of an input molecule, even without knowing the intricate details of all the systems involved.”66 As Barwich and Lloyd explain, this claim erroneously analogizes olfaction with vision and audition; it thus downplays the biological complexity of the olfactory system, which involves “high stimulus–response variation based on a genetically highly heterogeneous sensory system, resulting in divergent perceptual responses to physico-chemical information.”67 Instead of reducing olfaction to the extraction and analysis of chemical data, In Love with the World is deeply invested in the unruly affects and relations disclosed by smell.

Yi and her collaborators were influenced by “In Praise of Wetware,” a contribution to an MIT forum on Ethics, Computing, and AI by the art historian Caroline Jones. Jones contrasts the centralized, computational model of intelligence that orients most AI research with an emergent understanding of intelligence as something distributed throughout our bodies and environments. “Unlike the machines we build,” writes Jones,

humans are full of wet, chemical signals. We are pulsing with fluids and symbionts, leaky with secretions, riddled with ancient evolutionary paths working in concert with fancy new myelinated nerves and an awesome neo-cortex. Our architectures, workspaces, and medical technologies have never truly accommodated our damp, squishy, feely parts. Let’s face it, computational models of cognition have never been fully adequate to the wetware within, or the biological environment without.68

What might machines be like if they could engage with the world through messy, embodied processes like metabolic exchange, chemosensation, and microbial symbiosis? What if machine intelligence were located not just in central processing units but dispersed across surfaces teeming with chemicals, microbiota, and sensory stimuli—similar to how we have “ectopic” olfactory receptors “distributed in many different tissues throughout the human body” including the skin, blood, and vital organs?69 What if machines, like humans and a range of nonhumans, were designed to enact sensation, intelligence, memory, and affect in distributed modes—through continuous and shifting interfaces with material environments? Jones’s reflections informed Yi’s effort to realize a “wet,” biomorphic artificial intelligence that has an open-ended capacity for symbiogenetic evolution through messy and continuously shifting sensory engagements with the world.

In addition to exploring a distributed and embodied model of intelligence, Yi also rejects the tendency to imagine AIs in anthropocentric terms, either as replacements for human workers or as machines for “human augmentation.”70 From the Turing test (which assessed machinic intelligence based on the criterion of indistinguishability from human performance) to the framing of Artificial General Intelligence as an AI that exhibits human-level intelligence, research on artificial intelligence has centered the human as metric and implicit beneficiary. This anthropocentric framing also shapes research on “Emotional AI,” which focuses on surveilling or replacing human affective labor. Yi’s aerobes, by contrast, were inspired by nonhuman forms of embodiment, communication, and thought. When designing the program that generated their behaviors, Yi and her software engineer “spent months and months trying to be very fastidious to avoid anything that seemed too human-centric, too anthropomorphic” (50). Instead, they found inspiration in the behaviors of the moon jellyfish, as well as leaf venal systems, hyphae growth in mycelial networks, and stigmergy (the indirect coordination of actions through the environment) “as observed in ants and bees” (79). The two types of aerobes that floated about in the Turbine Hall included tentacled “xenojellies,” which resemble enormous jellyfish, and more blob-like “planulae,” which were “coated in a fine substance meant to invoke cilia” (47). Tentacles and cilia are apparatuses of distributed intelligence that contain sensory neurons tuned to tactile, chemosensory, and thermal stimuli. Yi’s aerobes evoke Donna Haraway’s evocation of “tentacular thinking” as a mode of theorizing and worldmaking (“tentacular worlding”) attuned to the ongoing “graspings, frayings, and weavings” of sympoeitic assemblages.71 The coloration of the xenojellies’ tentacles was evocative of the “veiled lady mushroom”—a reference not only to the “funky umami smell of mushrooms” but also to the underground mycelial networks they create (47). As Yi explains, the planulae “are drawn to areas where the xenojellies have spent some time, and they work on connecting these areas through a vein-like, hyphae pattern” (113). Hyphae are strands of the mycorrhizal network—the “wood wide web” featured in the research of ecologist Suzanne Simard72—that enables trees to communicate and share resources with each other through fungal networks. In addition to these mycorrhizal networks, fungi also communicate by means of volatile organic compounds with “complex scent profiles,” which “may play crucial roles in the formation and regulation of symbiotic associations and in the distribution of saprophytic, mycorrhizal, and pathogenic organisms in the ecosystem.”73 Yi’s suggestion that her planulae trace hyphae in the air evokes the idea of an aerial mycelium—an atmospheric network for chemosensory communication and mutual, interspecies care. Through an act of “conceptual displacement” that defamiliarizes our ideas about the affordances of air,74 this evocation of aquatic and subterranean forms reframes the atmosphere—typically envisioned as empty—as a thick and saturable milieu.

Yi conceives of air as “a sculpture that we inhabit”—an immersive medium of “biological and material entanglement, where invisible molecular information is metabolized between living organisms and their environment” (73). Instead of performing “intelligence” as a disembodied, rational, or anthropocentric project, Yi’s aerobes stage atmospheric modes of sensing such as thermoception and olfaction that are typically sidelined by ocularcentrism. Equipped with thermal sensors, the “xenojellies are interested in the heat signatures of visitors in the Turbine Hall, and will often gather and interact in the air above large warm-bodied groups (human or otherwise)” (113). Thermoception—a sensory register that, in infrastructurally privileged spaces, is often deliberately avoided or dampened by HVAC technologies (especially in climate-controlled art galleries)—senses the complex interactions between ambient temperatures, humidity, shade, clothing, metabolism, and individual preferences. Although it is somewhat contingent upon culture, infrastructure, and habitus, thermal sensation has both immediate and cumulative effects on people’s physical, cognitive, and emotional states.75 When deliberately sought out, the warmth of other bodies is often associated with pleasure, comfort, affection, and sociability—a sensory component, perhaps, of the “love” referenced in the title of Yi’s installation.

Like warmth, scent draws attention to the air as a shared medium. Breath sustains all living creatures in the Turbine Hall; among both living creatures and artificial aerobes, air mediates the transmission of affect. As we have seen throughout this book, scent can evoke visceral affective responses, register toxic atmospheres, trigger dormant memories, or elicit new relationships. By pumping a series of scents into the gallery, Yi creates the impression that the aerobes can sense both human visitors and their shared air through the sense of smell. The exhibition’s carefully designed scents are intended to

connect the aerobes to the deep-time history of the Bankside site and all other organisms that share this habitat. We wanted to teach the aerobes about earthly life and the possibilities and risks that are embedded in air, without saddling them with our own biases of “good” and “bad.” Since visitors to the Turbine Hall will also react to the ambient smells, the scentscapes create multiple layers of symbioses between the aerobes, the scent molecules, and the warm-bodied visitors. (111)

These scentscapes, designed in consultation with cognitive psychologist and environmental odor expert Pamela Dalton, stage both the long environmental history of the surrounding area and the abrupt changes introduced by the Bankside Power Station, a massive “cathedral of power”76 that generated electricity from 1891 until it was decommissioned in 1981, and was subsequently converted into the Tate Modern. In Love with the World invites human visitors to participate alongside aerobes in a collective, sensory encounter with atmospheric transformations brought about by natural and anthropogenic forces across deep time.

Each of the exhibition’s epochal and historical scentscapes references a set of olfactory notes, which Yi associates with “corresponding effects on aerobes’ moods and behaviours” (Table 1). These scentscapes incorporate distinctive smells associated with each period: the marine and algal scents of the Precambrian era, when the land was bare of animal and plant life; the odors of rotting meat and dinosaur flatulence (whose methane gases have been linked to the period’s increased global temperatures) during the Jurassic; the combined smells of decay (associated with contagious miasmas) and spices believed to ward off plague during the Black Death; the smells of horse sweat and imported trees and teas during nineteenth-century outbreaks of cholera. The “Cholera” scentscape—in which black tea evokes the international and imperial trade routes that facilitated the transmission of epidemic disease—would have been especially resonant in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What might these shifting scentscapes “teach” aerobes and human visitors about the long environmental history of the region? The exhibition provokes comparisons between the atmospheres of earlier epochs and the “fuel oil, smoke, ozone, burning coal, pipe tobacco” that compose the modern, “Machine Age” scentscape. The “uncomfortable, stressed,” and asocial behaviors that this industrial atmosphere appears to elicit in the aerobes—and potentially in human visitors, too—contrast with the more exploratory, sociable behaviors (“High interest in the environment and each other”; “interest in sharing atmospheric information”) associated with earlier periods. These noxious and distressing industrial odors reference the ninety-year period during which the Bankside Power Station generated electricity by burning coal and oil. One of Yi’s goals for the exhibition was to provoke questions and conversation about atmospheric disparities: “who gets to breathe good clean air and who does not, and how social inequities impact this.” These concerns about “atmospheric justice” were heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic, which constrained many people’s access to the exhibition and (for those who chose to remain masked) its scentscapes when it opened in October 2021 (55–56). Witnessing the aerobes’ dynamic responses to different historical atmospheres would have attuned visitors to the differentiated and socially conditioned air as a medium of affect and sociability. How might different social and technological arrangements produce different atmospheres, and how might those atmospheres transform the conditions of human and more-than-human relation?

The exhibition also provokes questions about the aerobes’ own energy consumption and emissions. After all, even as they sense and respond to historical atmospheres, the aerobes themselves are among the most technologically advanced products of the fossil-fueled Machine Age. The noxious odors of the Anthropocene include emissions generated by aerobes themselves, as well as the gallery lighting and climate control that sustain the exhibition’s baseline conditions. Although a “Climate Impact Report” (152–54) details various measures taken to reduce and offset the project’s carbon emissions, the aerobes also appear to sense and respond to the exhibition’s own emissions. This draws attention to the precarity of atmospheric perception as a means of accessing intimacy with others: if smell and other modes of atmospheric sensing could potentially make the aerobes curious about humans—and about other aerobes—the smells emitted by the Machine Age also stress them out and lead them to seek isolation. This is all the more ironic because, for both aerobes and humans, those industrial effluvia are of our own (unevenly distributed) making. They are social byproducts that erode sociality.

While Yi’s aerobes were not actually capable of smelling, her biomorphic machines and scentscapes stage the possibility of a more-than-human world held together by reciprocal olfactory relations. For example, the installation inspired the writer Elvia Wilk to write “The Fog” (2021) a short story in which moth-like biobots were designed to serve humans as hyperosmic disease sniffers. The moths’ algorithmically programmed “capacity to learn as they moved through the world” leads to a serendipitous symbiogenetic development: they begin responding to the smells of humans by “emit[ting] their own powerful and otherworldly smells.”77 Perceiving these spontaneous emissions as a threat, their designers decommission the moths and put them on public display in a museum-like “Archive.” The story focuses on the narrator, a gallery attendant who begins developing their own responses to the moths’ odors: namely, a hypersensitivity to smell, a sense of kinship with the moths (they lose their job after acting to protect a moth from a visitor enraged by its smell), and a fog-like “experience of shrinking, and then of becoming part of something I’d thought I was external to . . . a feeling of being mixed up, then dissolved.”78 Wilk’s story extrapolates from Yi’s installation a first-person account of olfactory response not as an individual feeling but as an “otherworldly” series of biological, sensorial, and ethical transformations.

In literary narratives and speculative artworks, scent can be a powerful medium for exploring more-than-human kinships across precarious and unevenly distributed atmospheres. In their works of sensorial estrangement, Butler, Lai, and Yi imagine worlds premised on a radically different sensorium. Instead of channeling research on pheromones into fragrance commodities and discourses that reinscribe heteropatriarchal relations, their works experiment with scent as a biochemical incitement toward transformative intimacies with aliens, vampires, mutated fruits, clones, and biomorphic robots. In addition to attuning us to the affective, erotic, and ethical complexities of olfactory relations, as well as to their polychronic capacity to interlink past and future atmospheres, these works demonstrate how speculative fiction can contribute to expansive approaches to understanding—and understanding with—the senses.

Notes

1. 1. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 46.

2. 2. For werewolves, see Anne Rice, The Wolf Gift (Anchor, 2013); for astronauts, Yuri Herrera, “The Cosmonaut,” in Ten Planets: Stories, trans. Lisa Dillman, 15–23 (Graywolf, 2019); for trolls, Border (Gräns) dir. Ali Abbasi (METAfilm, 2018); for fungi, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (Del Rey, 2020); for hyperosmia, Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead, 2019); for data workers, Deji Bryce Olokotun, “We Are the Olfanauts,” Electric Lit 152 (April 15, 2015), https://electricliterature.com/we-are-the-olfanauts-deji-bryce-olukotun/, accessed December 9, 2024; for “alphas” and “omegas,” Omegaverse or A/B/O slash fiction. Vampires, aliens, clones, hybrids, and biobots will be discussed in this chapter.

3. 3. Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition,” in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale University Press, 1979), 7, emphasis in original.

4. 4. See, e.g., Musser, Between Shadows and Noise; Stallings, Funk the Erotic; Robinson, Hungry Listening; Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes; Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown, Race and the Senses: The Felt Politics of Racial Embodiment (Routledge, 2020); and Senses With/out Subjects, eds. Erica Fretwell and Hsuan Hsu, special issue of American Literature 95, no. 3 (September 2023).

5. 5. Melody Jue, for example, draws on Suvin as inspiration for theorizing water as a medium of “sensory estrangement” in Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), 6.

6. 6. Frances Tran, Sensational Futures: On Asian Racialization and Speculative Aesthetics (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

7. 7. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Cornell University Press, 2014).

8. 8. See Louks, “The Smell of Misogynoir,” 94–131.

9. 9. The trilogy—consisting of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—was republished under the title Lilith’s Brood in 2000.

10. 10. Martha McClintock popularized ideas about human pheromones when she published a 1971 study suggesting that they mediated the coordination of menstrual periods among women who lived together; this led to fragrance marketing—for example, scents like Marilyn Miglin’s Pheromone (1978) and Jovan’s Andron (“The Pheromone-Based Cologne for Men,” 1981)—that framed pheromones as powerful, nearly irresistible heterosexual attractants. M. K. McClintock, “Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression,” Nature 229 (1971): 244–45.

11. 11. See, e.g., Justin Mann, “Pessimistic Futurism: Survival and Reproduction in Octavia Butler’s Dawn,” Feminist Theory 19, no. 1 (2018): 61–76; Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation (Duke University Press, 2019): 73–116; Priscilla Wald, “Cognitive Estrangement, Science Fiction, and Medical Ethics” The Lancet 371:9628 (June 7, 2008): 1908–9.

12. 12. Octavia Butler, Dawn, in Lilith’s Brood (Aspect, 2000), 67. Subsequent references to the trilogy are to this edition and will appear in the text.

13. 13. Mann, “Pessimistic Futurism,” 62. Although Butler famously insisted that “The only places where I am writing about slavery are where I actually say so,” my approach follows critics like Mann who situate her work within the ongoing afterlife of slavery—in a racial capitalist world structured by slavery and antiblackness (Stephen Potts and Octavia Butler, “‘We Keep Playing the Same Record’: A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler,” Science Fiction Studies 23, no. 3 [1996] 332).

14. 14. Butler, Fledgling (Seven Stories Press, 2005), 249. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

15. 15. See Louks, “The Smell of Misogynoir,” 132–55.

16. 16. Shanté Smalls, “Transaesthetics, Transing, and the Legacies of a Black Girl-Child Figure,” Syndicate (March 20, 2017), https://syndicate.network/symposia/literature/funk-the-erotic/.

17. 17. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “symbiont.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/symbiont. Accessed December 11, 2024.

18. 18. Elizabeth Lundberg, “‘Let Me Bite You Again’: Vampiric Agency in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling,” GLQ 21, no. 4 (2015): 566.

19. 19. Stallings, Funk the Erotic, 14, 133.

20. 20. Benefiting from rental properties and other real estate holdings held over the course of centuries while living on farms, orchards, ranches, and other secluded complexes, the Ina are thoroughly enmeshed with U.S. settler colonialism. Like Butler’s Earthseed and Xenogenesis trilogies, Fledgling presents readers with the difficulty of imagining worlds in which survival does not rely on settler infrastructures.

21. 21. Melody Jue, “Scenting Community: Microbial Symbionts in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling,” Journal of Science Fiction 4, no. 1 (July 2020): 18.

22. 22. Larissa Lai, “The Sixth Sensory Organ,” in Bringing It Home: Women Talk about Feminism in Their Lives, ed. Brenda Lea Brown (Arsenal, 1996), 214.

23. 23. Paul Lai, “Stinky Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa Lai’s ‘Salt Fish Girl,’” MELUS 33, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 175; Bahng, Migrant Futures, 20.

24. 24. Tenea Johnson, “3 Minutes with Larissa, Author of When Fox Is a Thousand” (August 12, 2020), https://www.teneadjohnson.com/3-minutes-with-larissa/. Accessed December 15, 2024.

25. 25. Paul Semel, “Exclusive Interview: ‘The Tiger Flu’ Author Larissa Lai,” paulsemel.com (October 22, 2018), https://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-tiger-flu-author-larissa-lai/.

26. 26. Lai, “Sixth Sensory,” 202.

27. 27. Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen, 2002), 158. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

28. 28. Stephanie Oliver, “Diffuse Connections: Making Sense of Smell in Canadian Diasporic Women’s Writing,” PhD Dissertation (University of Western Ontario 2014), 260.

29. 29. Bahng, Migrant Futures, 162.

30. 30. Oliver, “Diffuse Connections,” 262.

31. 31. Oliver, “Diffuse Connections.”

32. 32. Hsu, The Smell of Risk, 113–51.

33. 33. Hsu, The Smell of Risk, 15.

34. 34. Hsu, The Smell of Risk, 17.

35. 35. On trans-corporeality, see Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (University of Indiana Press, 2020), 2.

36. 36. Gaik Cheng Khoo and Jean Duruz, “A Whiff of Southeast Asia: Tasting Durian and Kopi,” in Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats, eds. Gwyn McClelland and Hannah Gould (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023), 91.

37. 37. For extensive discussions of olfactory racism in the novel, see Oliver, “Diffuse Connections,” and Paul Lai, “Stinky Bodies.”

38. 38. Khoo and Duruz, “A Whiff of Southeast Asia,” 90–91.

39. 39. See Khoo and Duruz, “A Whiff of Southeast Asia,” 95.

40. 40. Lisa Law, “Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong”; on durian and the role of durian feasts in renewing kin relations, see Jennifer Wong, “A Bay Area Love Letter to Durian,” KQED (March 7, 2023), https://www.kqed.org/arts/13925835/durian-bay-area-love-letter-singaporean-culture. Accessed December 14, 2024.

41. 41. The novel expands on Lai’s earlier speculations on fistulas in her 1996 essay, “Sixth Sensory.”

42. 42. Oliver, “Diffuse Connections,” 292.

43. 43. Larissa Lai, “Future Asians: Migrant Speculations, Repressed History, and Cyborg Hope,” West Coast Line 38, no. 2 (2004): 173.

44. 44. Bahng, Migrant Futures, 160–61.

45. 45. Bahng, Migrant Futures, 153.

46. 46. Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 288.

47. 47. Tullett, Smell and the Past, 88. Michelle Huang, “Creative Evolution: Narrative Symbiogenesis in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 2 (2016): 122.

48. 48. Bahng, Migrant Futures, 154, 159.

49. 49. Paul Lai, “Stinky Bodies,” 178.

50. 50. Society for General Microbiology, “Bacterial Genetic Pathway Involved in Body Odor Production Discovered,” ScienceDaily (March 30, 2015), www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150330213947.htm. Accessed December 11, 2024. Ben Quinn, “Exposure to Other People’s Sweat Could Help Reduce Social Anxiety, Study Finds,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/26/exposure-other-peoples-sweat-help-reduce-social-anxiety-study. Accessed December 11, 2024.

51. 51. Huang, “Creative Evolution,” 121.

52. 52. Bahng, Migrant Futures, 149.

53. 53. Bahng, Migrant Futures, 165.

54. 54. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 152, emphasis in original.

55. 55. Qtd in Paul Lai, “Stinky Bodies,” 183.

56. 56. Tullett employs the term “molecular commons” to underscore that “We are embedded in a vast web of chemical communications between species in which smelling and odorants play a prime role” (Smell and the Past, 28).

57. 57. In her monograph on the significance of cedar in Pacific Northwest Indigenous cultures, Hilary Stewart includes this creation story for red cedar told by the Stó:lō elder Bertha Peters: “There was a real good man who was always helping others. Whatever they needed, he had; when they wanted, he gave them food and clothing. When the Great Spirit [Xá:ls] saw this, he said, ‘That man has done his work; when he dies and where he is buried, a cedar tree will grow and be useful to the people—the roots for baskets, the bark for clothing, the wood for shelter” (qtd in Hilary Stewart, Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians [University of Washington Press, 1995], 22). See also Fikile Nxumalo, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2019), 54–70.

58. 58. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1959).

59. 59. Larissa Lai, “How to Do ‘You’: Methods of Asian/Indigenous Relation,” Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Amériques 46 (2013): 12.

60. 60. Anicka Yi et al., Anicka Yi: In Love with the World (Tate Publishing, 2021), 103. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

61. 61. See David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu, eds., Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2015); Long T. Bui, Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton (Temple University Press, 2022)

62. 62. See Rachel Lee, “Metabolic Aesthetics: On the Feminist Scentscapes of Anicka Yi,” Food, Culture, & Society 22 (2019) 692–712.

63. 63. Elizabeth Wilson, Affect and Artificial Intelligence (University of Washington Press, 2010), 4.

64. 64. Bernard Marr, “Artificial Intelligence Is Developing a Sense of Smell,” Forbes (May 10, 2021), https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2021/05/10/artificial-intelligence-is-developing-a-sense-of-smell-what-could-a-digital-nose-mean-in-practice/.

65. 65. Marr, “Artificial Intelligence Is Developing a Sense of Smell.”

66. 66. Cited in Ann-Sophie Barwich and Elisabeth Lloyd, “More than Meets the AI: The Possibilities and Limits of Machine Learning in Olfaction,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 16 (August 31, 2022), https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.981294/full. Barwich and Lloyd’s emphasis.

67. 67. Barwich and Lloyd, “More than Meets the AI.”

68. 68. Caroline Jones, “In Praise of Wetware,” unpublished essay cited with permission.

69. 69. Désirée Massberg and Hanns Hatt, “Human Olfactory Receptors: Novel Cellular Functions Outside of the Nose,” Physiological Reviews 98, no. 39 (July 2018): 1739.

70. 70. See, e.g., Sarah Dégallier-Rochat et al., “Human Augmentation, Not Replacement: A Research Agenda for AI and Robotics in the Industry,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 9 (October 2022), https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2022.997386/full.

71. 71. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33, 42.

72. 72. See Shouhei Tanaka, “Ecological Network Aesthetics and the Wood Wide Web,” ASAP/Journal 7, no. 1 (January 2022) 119–44.

73. 73. Yuan Guo et al., “Sniffing Fungi—Phenotyping of Volatine Chemical Diversity in Trichoderma Species,” New Phytologist 277 (2020): 244.

74. 74. On “conceptual displacement” as “a method of defamiliarization to make our terrestrial orientations visible,” see Jue, Wild Blue Media, 6.

75. 75. On the cultural and social implications of thermal mediation, see Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot & Cold (Duke University Press, 2021).

76. 76. Rowan Moore and Raymund Ryan, Building Tate Modern: Herzog & De Meuron (Tate Gallery, 2000), 182. Completed in 1963, the redeveloped Bankside Power Station was located opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral; its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, incorporated elements from his earlier design of Liverpool Cathedral.

77. 77. Elvia Wilk, “The Fog,” in Yi et al., Anicka Yi, 140, 144.

78. 78. Wilk, “The Fog,” 143.