Criaturas del mañana: posantropocentrismo, contrafuturismo y fragmentación en Los multipatópodos, de Yosa Vidal

Abstract

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate how some 21st century speculative fiction encapsulates a transversal ethical reprobation of the environmental abuses inherent in the Capitalocene model of production. It also proposes to categorise these texts as counterfuturistic, a newly coined label that can be used to define speculative fiction texts with a clear concern for the catastrophic future towards which the planet is heading if this model is perpetuated. To this end, I analyse the work Los multipatópodos (2017) by Chilean author Yosa Vidal, which, based on the bestiary genre —highly used in Latin America—summarizes all these issues while challenging traditional narrativity and rhetorical strategies. In the first part, I briefly contextualize post-anthropocentrism as a response to the Capitalocene; explain the value of speculative fiction as an expressive vehicle for addressing the questions raised by postanthropocentrism; and propose the notion of counterfuturism and its differences in regards to other terms that are also critical of the future of the planet, such as “climate fiction” or “dystopia”. In the second, Vidal's text is analyzed in detail, with special attention to its postanthropocentric fashion and its high degree of fragmentation. In the conclusions, the implications of the use of the bestiary subgenre are covered, possible avenues for future research are theorised and a possible interpretation of the hybridity that characterises Latin American speculative fiction texts is proposed.