Fragmented Humanity and Posthuman Futures in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls

Posthumanism challenges the dehumanization of the human subject and recreates the
connection between humans, technology, environment, and nonhuman beings. Cage of
Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky uses the future Earth as a planet in which humanity has
died, mutated, and split into a multiplicity of posthuman forms. The novel shatters
anthropocentric structures, prefigures biological change, ecological degradation, and
biological separation. The novel provides a strong form of posthuman subjectivity
through its representation of fragmented human beings, new species, and mixed
intelligences. This paper will discuss the novel in terms of posthumanism, which
includes species transformation, an ecological entanglement, embodied cognition and
the demise of human exceptionalism. The paper has examined the experiences of Stefan
Advani and the interactions with evolved and degenerated forms of life and contends
that the novel redefines humanity as fluid, unstable and comprised along with
nonhuman agencies. After all, Cage of Souls is not just a form of posthumanism as a
theoretical construct but as a condition of living in a dying world, where only those that
are capable of adjusting to something even greater than human limits will be able to
survive