Postquantum: A Tale for the Time Being, Atomik Aztex, and Hacking Modern Space-Time

Abstract

AbstractThis study identifies the postquantum novel as an emerging subgenre of speculative ethnic fiction that challenges the prevailing logic of Western space-time in contemporary literature. In contrast with archetypal twentieth-century literary modes such as modernism, postmodernism, and science fiction, postquantum fiction strays from classical and quantum mechanics—and Western science more broadly—as default knowledge systems and instead turns to premodern, indigenous, and non-Western epistemes as equally valid intellectual frameworks for representing reality. Drawing from philosophy of science and postcolonial theory, this study reads Zen Buddhism in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and the Meso-American calendrical sciences in Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005) as alternative logics of space-time and argues that the postquantum novel destabilizes many of the physicalist assumptions undergirding temporality and spatiality in twenty-first-century narrative. Postquantum fiction thus constitutes an original form of epistemological critique that decolonizes Western scientific hegemony in literature via ethnoscientific theory and praxis while also expanding the social justice concerns of ethnofuturism to include traditional and marginalized knowledge.