ABSTRACT
It opens with the ‘invasion narrative’ where literary and cultural texts depict the violation of bodies, homes, nations and the human race. The human is transformed into a host for the Other (alien, monster, pathogen), and the planet itself begins to accommodate life forms not ‘natural’ to it. It argues that discourses of invasion and biosecurity in late twentieth-century texts embody a cultural anxiety about the sovereignty of human bodies, homes, community and the species itself. This anxiety is fuelled by a process of species democratization resulting from both globalization and planetarization. The chapter also examines texts on the theme of cloning and xenotransplantation, arguing that identity questions regarding the borders of the human become complicated in novels such as Never Let Me Go that explore the role of the new biology, and new life forms, in future human societies.
