Stages of Transmutation : Routledge : 9780415788229 : 0415788226 : 16 Nov 2018 : "Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism develops the concept of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction novels by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, and Kim Stanley Robinson, in which the human species suddenly transforms in response to new or changing environments. Narrating dramatic ecological events of human-to-nonhuman encounter, invasion, and transmutation, these novels allow the reader to understand the planet as anunstable stage for evolution and the human body as a home for bacteria and viruses. Idema argues that by drawing tension from biological theories of interaction and emergence (e.g. symbiogenesis, epigenetics), these works unsettle conventional relations among characters, technologies, story-worlds, and emplotment, refiguring the psycho-social work of the novel as always already biophysical. Problematizing a