Speculative Umwelten

This paper examines how Emily St. John Mandel’s novels—Station Eleven (2014) and Sea of Tranquility (2022)—reconfigure human subjectivity through the lens of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory. While Station Eleven depicts a world where nature reclaims urban spaces, dissolving anthropocentric semiotic systems, Sea of Tranquility explores technologically mediated Umwelten in moon colonies, where artificial environments falter. Drawing on biosemiotics (Kalevi Kull, Wendy Wheeler) and Umwelt transitions (Morten Tønnessen), I argue that Mandel’s works stage speculative futures where human identity is contingent on adaptive semiotic engagement with nonhuman agencies, whether organic (reclaimed forests, viral ecologies) or technological (time anomalies, dome-lit biospheres). By analyzing Mandel’s material landscapes from the Travelling Symphony’s Shakespearean performances to Olive’s holographic book tours, this paper demonstrates how sf narratives operationalize Uexküllian phenomenology to critique anthropocentrism. Where Station Eleven reveals the unmaking of human Umwelten through ecological resurgence, Sea of Tranquility interrogates the remaking of subjectivity in synthetic environments. Both novels, we contend, employ post-apocalyptic settings to expose the fragility of human semiotic dominance, offering a distinct contribution to sf’s engagement with posthuman ecologies and phenomenological worldbuilding.