This book is a posthumanist reading of a large number of novels for all the ways in which they call into question the nature of the human. It examines Deep Time fiction, the climate bildungsroman, subsurface fiction and the fiction of Artificial Beings, identifying several variants of posthumanism, including the geological, ecological, conciliatory and supervening. Such critical posthumanisms are concerned with ecological states of being, alternative worlds, ontologies or social orders, environmental justice, and the creation of artificial life forms.

The novels decenter and deconstruct anthropocentrism by mapping connections and resonances, dependencies and mutualities between the human and the other-than and more-than-human. They point equally to the effects of anthropocentric ways of thinking and being on the environment, the planet, and the nonhuman.