Breathing with Seagrass

Abstract

This essay introduces recent speculative novels written by Finnish authors and discusses the vegetal agency that permeates them. In Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun (2013; translated 2016) and Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters (2020; translated 2022), plant life entices, intoxicates, and transforms human bodies and minds. Sinisalo experiments with ideas about the coevolution of plants and humans, and Itäranta explores the significance of plants in the contexts of space colonies and ecosabotage. The essay suggests that the novels gesture toward an emerging Planthroposcene . Anthropologist Natasha Myers has proposed “Planthroposcene” as a modification to Anthropocene, the era of global human impact on the Earth. As an “aspirational episteme,” the Planthroposcene considers plants as allies and teachers, and invites researchers and artists to develop ways of “conspiring” with them. While the Planthroposcene invites humans to align themselves with plant life in mutually beneficial relationships, contemporary Finnish speculative fiction suggests that such relationships are not fluid extensions of knowledge, but can also be strange, disturbing, and even destructive. Drawing on the theoretical view that speculative fiction can challenge readers’ habitual patterns of engaging with their lived environments, and thus give rise to unexpected experiences and non-anthropocentric viewpoints, the essay develops the notion of embodied estrangement . Discussing ambivalent plant–human relations demonstrates how the notion of embodied estrangement can contribute to science fiction studies as well as to more-than-human methodologies in literary studies.