Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

How do the limits of reproductive optimisation reshape kinship and inheritable futures? Reading S. B. Divya's Meru (2023) as a speculative intervention, this paper argues that engineered ectogenesis redistributes vulnerability rather than simply securing resilience.

Paper long abstract

Today, the creation of a ‘better’ future is increasingly framed as an optimisation problem. Across domains ranging from climate governance to reproductive technologies, the mere existence of a problem appears to invite its optimisation. Building on McKelvey and Neves’ (2021) account of optimisation as an ‘operating system for the present’, this paper examines how optimisation logics reshape the conditions of inheritance of future worlds.

I turn to S. B. Divya’s Indian science fiction novel Meru (2023), which imagines a far-future posthuman society that seeks to minimise environmental harm after ecological collapse by optimising reproduction itself. The novel’s ‘alloy’ beings rely on engineered ectogenesis and designed rebirth to reduce biological vulnerability and ecological impact, destabilising linear models of gestation, descent and generational succession.

Instead of reading these reproductive innovations simply as imaginative extrapolations, I treat them as interventions into current debates about reproductive technologies, planetary stewardship and posthuman futurity. Specifically, drawing on STS scholarship on optimisation alongside feminist and posthumanist work on reproduction and vulnerability, I argue that the alloys’ reproductive system redistributes rather than eliminates vulnerability. In seeking to secure more resilient futures through technological reproduction, vulnerability is displaced from gestating bodies to engineered offspring.

This optimisation of reproduction counteracts the alloys’ professed posthuman ethics of relationality. Instead, optimisation becomes a technocratic claim to reproductive competence that legitimises new forms of authority over planetary guardianship. Thus, Meru reveals how projects aimed at engineering sustainable futures may, even if inadvertently, reorganise kinship, inheritance and the governance of life at planetary scales.