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Abstract
An ecocritical reading of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s, Cage of Souls, a science fiction novel about a dying world, reveals a humanity trapped in its own consciousness. Using the Material Ecocritical (Iovino and Oppermann) and biosemiotics (Wheeler) lenses, this paper explores the dichotomies the human consciousness used to establish a solid identity in an evolving world, and it traces the autopoietic (Bergthaller), and thus evolutionary roots of these dichotomies. In Cage of Souls, these dichotomies are shown to be the causes of human extinction, as they cause humanity to remove itself from the life-giving network of the world. In a twist on the typical “dying earth” genre (“Adrian Tchaikovsky…” 0:58), however, they also reveal a critique of the universes’ role in human extinction, questioning the balance of culpability between humanity and the universe that birthed it. Viewed from the end of both humanity’s and the Earth’s lifespan, Cage of Souls uses the science fiction genre to question the suitability of humanity for life on Earth, and the culpability for demise of both, presenting a shift in perspective of the human separation from the planet from a blame-based discourse of lost utopia to one of future potential accessible only through transformation of humanity itself.