“In the twenty-first century, we live on Mars,” states Kate Marshall at the opening of Novels by Aliens (1). This Martian landscape is not a literal one, but one that we know well; it is our familiar Earth made strange, from the deserts of climate fiction to the de-extinction world of Jurassic Park (1990). Using the image of space exploration, Marshall reminds us of the frontier, a central trope in much of twentieth- and even twenty-first-century fiction, as she herself writes at the frontier of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Engaging with a wide constellation of recent and more established approaches, such as new materialisms, object-oriented ontology (OOO), or narratology, and thinkers from Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1988) to Fredric Jameson (Antinomies of Realism, 2014), Marshall weaves together an impressively concise study, given its complexity.

Novels by Aliens expands on Marshall’s previous work on naturalism and space (2013), the Anthropocene and geological time in fiction (2015), and the “New Weird” and nonhuman perspective (2016).Footnote ¹ In doing so, it “tells the story of how genre became mood in the twenty-first century” (back cover). At the core of Marshall’s argument rest implications for an impressive range of considerations in literary studies. Not the least is its comment on the future of genre, which Marshall ties to the future of the realist novel and of realism in general, a future which she diagnoses as tending towards genre hybridity and multiplicity of points of view. In chapter 3, for example, Marshall positions herself in relation to contemporary debates around realism. Following Marilynne Robinson, she terms “cosmic realism” these moments “of vibrating matter or the eliminative materialist fantasies of obliterated consciousness through often failed but extravagant attempts at transferring their point of view into a radical externality” (4). In doing so, Novels by Aliens aims to fill the gap that exists in the vocabulary of literary theory when it comes to describing narrative voices that take their root “outside.” For Marshall, these are the “aliens” of contemporary fiction: a rock, a bird’s-eye view, a voice from outer space – narrative points of view that are as radically nonhuman as writing allows and that reshape our understanding of omniscient voice, exteriority, and nonhuman agency.

Moving within a wide breadth of texts from the first two decades of the twenty-first century – from Marilynne Robinson to Colson Whitehead and Matt Ruff – Marshall creates a rich genealogical tapestry of contemporary “New Weird” fiction’s antecedents: the Old Weird, American naturalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and pseudoscience fiction. In chapter 1, “The Old Weird,” Marshall sets the stage for the rest of the study and explores “techniques [that] surround the narrative foci, points of view, and near-sentient landscapes of a range of recent novels: characters, persons even, who are something close to, but other than, human” (47). Chapter 2, “Cowboys and Aliens,” investigates further as it aims to understand how contemporary fiction has operated a move toward antihumanist and anthropecentric perspective through narrative voices that take hold in the landscape. Chapter 4, “The Novel in Geological Time,” incorporates the concept of the Anthropocene and links back to the hybrid form of cowboys and aliens as its antecedent. All three chapters are distinct while also engaging back with each other in a way that opens up Marshall’s argument. Indeed, through Marshall’s “weirding” of the novels as a technique for reading contemporary fiction, Novels by Aliens sits within a tradition, one that is “thinking-with genre” (5). This could be illuminated further in conjunction with the work of scholars such as Sara Ahmed, who, in reading works beyond their immediate genre categorizations, has aimed to create a “willfulness archive,” a body of texts that speak to each other in their (feminist) refusals, wiliness, and irreverence.Footnote ²

Perhaps Novels by Aliens’ most compelling passage for critics and literary scholars resides in its engagement with what it means to read “properly.” Far from offering a reductive plea for relevance and the “uses of literature,” Marshall expands on what scholars and writers of fiction already know: that the power of fiction rests in its ability to open possibilities, to imagine “possible worlds.” These could be alternatives to the currently accepted visions of the future, alternatives to this “Mars” we live on, produced by hegemonic scientific discourse. Much like Ahmed’s building of a willfulness archive, the critic (and reader) should not simply identify the texts that speak directly to the theme at hand, for example collating a list of climate disaster fiction, but should help excavate less obvious moments in a wide range of novels, moments that help us imagine different worlds.

Chapter 5, “Pseudoscience Fiction,” ties in the imaginative possibilities of fiction and an exploration of the dialectical relationship between fact and fiction. What Marshall terms “pseudoscience fictions” take root in the nineteenth-century popularization of pseudoscientific ideas. Perhaps my biggest, and possibly only, question mark in reading Novels by Aliens is that it too readily ties the continuation of aesthetic forms to the return of a time period, in this case the nineteenth century: “rising income gaps, preventable diseases, prison populations, and smaller unions, but also … an uptick in global piracy as another sign of the nineteenth century’s revival in the present” (125). Marshall seems aware of this danger, stating that “[t]here is, of course, much more to be said about the economic and political ramifications of framing the present global situation as another century’s revenge or undead form” (125). However, the precautions end there, and it would have been useful to further explore this idea which gives much credence to progress as a coherent and linear process, itself rooted in colonial and Eurocentric understandings of history, space, and exteriority as it relates to ontological humanity and alterity, something that Marshall aims to question in this study.

Overall, Novels by Aliens is a necessary addition to contemporary literary theory. Engaging solidly with cutting-edge theory while tying it back to its historical roots, Marshall achieves an impressive feat with a study that is both precise and complex.