Standards of Justice for Human Being and Doing in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and C. S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore

• Main Author: Claire P. Curtis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2017-09-01
• Series: Open Library of Humanities
• Online Access: https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4447/

The creation of superior societies and communities in which bodies live better and thrive depends on richly detailed accounts of imagined societies including flexible theories of justice that can be used to evaluate them. Both Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) and C. S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore (1998) attempt to rethink what bodies can do and be, by exploring ways of living together among those with different, and differently compatible, bodies. The novels are set in future spacefaring societies away from the Earth, which nevertheless struggle with the fact of Earth’s existence. Each novel describes radical cognitive and bodily change: chosen alteration in 2312 and environmental transformation in This Alien Shore. In each novel, the body, and what bodies can do and be, is a central issue. But how might we evaluate the societies these novels describe to gauge their contributions to articulating desires for a better way of being? In this article I employ Martha Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ (encompassing life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses, emotions, reason, affiliation, play, other species, control over environment) to think about justice in the articulation of evaluative standards. In so doing the analysis I develop addresses some key questions raised by these novels, including: Whose body will matter? Will there be bodily norms? How will communities confront different bodily abilities? How can we enhance our own thinking about how to live in and among bodies? How does (and should) the idea of the body politic change when our expectations about bodies changes?