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Paper short abstract

Exploring two works of speculative fiction, 'Wegetacja' and 'Lekki Lekki', this contribution highlights the importance of reimagining plant–human entanglements, where vegetal agency unsettles anthropocentrism and opens difficult but vital paths toward multispecies survival on a damaged planet.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how speculative fiction reimagines plant-human entanglements as difficult, often unsettling pathways for survival on a damaged planet. I focus on two contemporary narratives: 'Wegetacja'(2021) by Polish writer Dominika Słowik and 'Lekki Lekki' (2020) by Franco-Senegalese author Mame Bougouma Diene. Both stories foreground human-plant relationships while avoiding either uncritical celebration of frictionless universal kinship or the revenge-of-nature trope, typical of ecohorror. Instead, they depict complex negotiations in which humans must acknowledge their entanglement with the vegetal world, accepting their noncentrality within ecosystems.

In 'Wegetacja', the protagonist’s evolving intimacy with plants moves from indifference to attunement and response-ability, raising questions about vegetal agency, communication, and subjectivity. The narrative demonstrates how recognizing plants as actants reshapes human consciousness, behavior, and even ethical stance. The Africanfuturist narrative 'Lekki Lekki', blending science fiction with indigenous spirituality, imagines a community compelled to merge with plants to survive a planetary crisis. The text invites readers to envision cohabitation on nonhuman terms, encompassing such timely themes as mourning and memory.

Read together, these narratives illuminate the costs and possibilities of multispecies survival: negotiation, adaptation, and recognition that not all lives can be preserved, yet cooperation across species may offer fragile futures. Drawing on posthumanist and new materialist thought (e.g. Haraway, Morton) alongside critical and literary plant scholarship (e.g. Marder, Sandilands), I argue that these stories function as speculative exercises in response-ability, indispensable amid environmental crisis and biodiversity loss. They exemplify how contemporary SF reconfigures vegetal agency and relationality to imagine alternative forms of multispecies cohabitation.