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Michael Bérubé is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University and a former president of the Modern Language Association. He is the author of twelve books, including Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child and What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education.Named a Locus recommended reading in non-fiction for 2025.
Locus
A thought-provoking examination of sci-fi novels and films that invite audiences to contemplate humanity’s 'sorry fate from the vantage point of something other than human.' . . . Bérubé brings welcome humor to the proceedings . . . Sci-fi fanatics will appreciate Bérubé’s offbeat takes.
Publishers Weekly
A vivacious and unrelenting confrontation with the consolations and desolations of contemporary science fiction from one of literary culture’s most insightful and wide-ranging polymaths, Michael Bérubé’s <i>The Ex-Human </i>is by turns brilliant, hilarious, despairing, and refusing despair. An absolute must-read.
- Gerry Canavan, author of <i>Octavia E. Butler</i>,
Are human beings worth saving? Viewing that question through the lens of science fiction, <i>The Ex-Human</i> is one of those rare and wonderful books that will engage aficionados and general readers together. Bérubé writes with conviction, clarity, and warmth—this is literary and cinematic analysis of the highest order, presented in a personal voice that always keeps you in the story.
- Leonard Cassuto, author of <i>Academic Writing as if Readers Matter</i>,
In <i>The Ex-Human</i>, Michael Bérubé compellingly engages on both the personal and academic level with the question of our dystopian contemporary, and what the reading of science fiction can bring to this debate.
- Roger Luckhurst, author of <i>Gothic: An Illustrated History</i>,
[Bérubé's] analyses are intensive yet fluid, variegated with a range of cultural, political, and personal references. Spirited and speculative, <i>The Ex-Human</i> showcases science fiction for its formidable and prescient nature.
- Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews
Michael Bérubé is one of our best social and cultural critics . . . Bérubé’s discussions of all these texts are subtle and insightful. . . . Above all, though, the book is concerned with how science fiction allows us to entertain non-human perspectives upon human life and existence, and specifically to imagine the end of humanity — or rather (and better) its transformation in radical ways that exceed our capacity for imaginative projection and continued empathy.
- Steven Shaviro, The Pinocchio Theory
Recommended.
Choice Reviews
It is a worthy read for anyone seeking to put into words their dissatisfaction with what the human is, and possibilities for what it might (cease to) be.
Supernatural Studies
Michael Bérubé explores the surprising insights of classic and contemporary works of SF that depict civilizational collapse and contemplate the fate of Homo sapiens. In a lively, conversational style, he considers novels by writers including Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Liu Cixin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, as well as films that feature hostile artificial intelligence, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and the Terminator and Matrix franchises. Bérubé argues that these works portray a future in which we have become able to see ourselves from the vantage point of something other than the human. Though framed by the possibility of human extinction, they are driven by a vision of the “ex-human”—a desire to imagine that another species is possible. For all science fiction readers worried about the fate of humanity, The Ex-Human is an entertaining yet sobering account of how key novels and films envision the world without us.
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Learning to Die
1. The Augmentation of the Complexity and Intensity of the Field of Intelligent Life: The Potential Ex- Human of The Left Hand of Darkness
2. Desperate Measures: Justifiable Despair in The Three- Body Problem and Oryx and Crake
3. Inherit the Wasteland: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Cede the Planet to the Smart Machines
4. Better Children: Octavia Butler and Genetic Destiny
Epilogue: Just Kill Me Now
Notes
Index