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Power Dynamics in Speculative Forms

Eating Insects with Alien Friends: Entanglement Ethics and Anthropocentric Exclusions in Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014)

Phoebe CHETWYND

Résumés

Stephen Loo et Undine Sellbach (« Eating ») soulignent l’exclusion des insectes de nombreux courants d’éthique animale malgré l’importance de ces créatures pour les écosystèmes. De manière controversée, ils affirment que l'entomophagie pourrait attirer l'attention sur la vie des insectes et même produire de nouvelles formes de communautés inter-espèces. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) de Becky Chambers offre une occasion spéculative d'explorer ces propositions, car des humains et des extraterrestres s’y nourrissent d'insectes alors qu’ils voyagent à travers la galaxie à bord du vaisseau spatial Wayfarer. Mobilisant la philosophie d’Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, cet article soutient que la communauté inter-espèces du Wayfarer remet en question l'anthropocentrisme et célèbre l’altérité. Il s’appuie également sur le travail d’Eva Haifa Giraud pour mettre en lumière l’exclusion normative des insectes de cette communauté. Les insectes sont essentiels au régime alimentaire de la communauté du Wayfarer mais le roman perpétue leur marginalisation et leur instrumentalisation. Ainsi, cet article nuance les travaux largement positifs sur le roman et réfléchit également à la manière dont la littérature spéculative peut réimaginer les relations entre humains et non-humains, mais aussi (re)produire des normes anthropocentriques.

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1As anthropogenic ecological crises intensify, the inextricable interdependence of human and nonhuman lives has been brought to the fore (Puig de la Bellacasa 1). In response, a form of relational ethics has flourished which foregrounds narratives of entanglement (Haifa Giraud 1). Such narratives look to undermine anthropocentrism by recognising that ecosystems are constituted by the practices of humans and nonhumans alike. In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in the Capitalist Ruins (2015), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing encapsulates this position, writing that “the modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and not human” (20). Donna Haraway underlines the ethical thrust of such positions when she argues that “species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth and that game must be one of response and respect” (Species 19).

2Narratives of entanglement do not, however, imagine a world in which there is no conflict but rather recognise that, in Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s words, “[w]e cannot possibly care for everything, not everything can count in a world, not everything is relevant in a world in the same way that there is no life without death” (78). In What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism and an Ethics of Exclusion (2019), Eva Haifa Giraud agrees that exclusion “plays a necessary and constitutive role in the fabric of the world” (172). However, she expresses concerns that exclusion is also “often bound up with particular sociotechnical infrastructures and political decisions” (172). Rather than simply acknowledging exclusion, she argues that more attention must be paid to which relations are excluded from entangled ethics at risk of (re)producing anthropocentric norms (175).

  • 1 Animal ethics frameworks can be loosely sorted into two broad categories. The first, characterised (...)

3Insects are particularly susceptible to such normative exclusion because, as Eric C. Brown observes, “the insect has become a kind of Other, not only for human beings but for animals and animal studies as well, best left underfoot or in footnotes” (ix). Stephen Loo and Undine Sellbach concur that insects are “strikingly absent from most academic and popular discussions about the formation of community relations” (“Eating” 12). Indeed, insects pose profound challenges to many dominant ethical frameworks in animal studies.1 They may resist incorporation into ethical structures premised on proximity to humans because, as Loo and Sellbach argue, they are “tiny, multitudinous and almost machine-like, seemingly with limited recognizable emotion or self-consciousness” (“Picture Book” 47). Even ethical frameworks that emphasise difference may struggle to account for insects; as Danielle Sands points out, humans often feel disgust or even fear in the face of insect life, impeding their recognition as kin (155).

4However, insect life is both essential to survival for human and nonhuman animals alike and increasingly precarious due to ecological crisis (Swan 1-2). The continuing normative exclusion of insects from ethical consideration is therefore untenable. In their article “Eating (with) Insects: Insect Gastronomies and Upside-Down Ethics” (2013), Loo and Sellbach argue that entomophagy could be “ethically productive” (26). This is provocative because meat-eating is often seen as the ultimate display of Western anthropocentrism (Fiddes 70; Potts 18-19; Willard 107). For the authors, however, the arguments given in vegan and vegetarian animal ethics against the consumption of nonhuman animals do not apply to insects because “they are not our kin and most Western palates do not like the taste of their flesh and blood” (12). Instead, the authors suggest that if insects are often ignored then “eating insects reminds us of their ecological significance” (22). Referring to Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects? (1885), they argue that “[b]y bringing insects to the table as food, Holt smuggles them into the polis, treating them as co-citizens of sorts, with interests, instincts and agencies that we must somehow settle with our own” (15). Paradoxically, then, insect death could bring renewed attention—and even renewed awareness of responsibility—to insect life.

  • 2 See, for instance: Peter Admirand, “Compassionate, Gentler Sci-Fi: Extraterrestrial, Interspecies D (...)

5This article pursues these discussions of entanglement, exclusion, and entomophagy through an analysis of Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014, hereafter referred to as Long Way). The novel is the first instalment in her four-part Wayfarers series, which takes place in a distant future in which humans have been forced to abandon Earth after ecological collapse and have subsequently encountered extraterrestrial species (known collectively as sapients). In Long Way, the Wayfarer spaceship crosses the galaxy to build tunnels to facilitate trade and travel, home to a crew of both humans and other sapients. Much of the secondary literature on Long Way praises the depiction of this multispecies community, particularly for the ways in which difference is embraced.2 Nayana George argues that the shared meal is “an integral aspect” of these interspecies interactions (631). However, the nonhuman animal characteristics of the aliens remain under-studied in the scholarship, and the consumption of insects has yet to be discussed. Through an analysis of insects as creatures and as food in Long Way, this article will bring a new, more nuanced perspective to the secondary literature, arguing that insects remain absent from the speculative multispecies communities. In so doing, this article contributes to understanding both the transformative potential of speculative fiction for human-nonhuman relations and to the genre’s limitations. Further, it advances current discussions in animal studies about entanglement ethics and exclusions, focussing particularly on the normative exclusion of insects from ethical frameworks.

6I introduce Long Way through Cecilia Mancuso’s work on “multiplicative speculative fiction” and Lowenhaupt Tsing’s notion of “pericapitalism,” arguing that the Wayfarer crew carves out a space for ethical experimentation in a future still dominated by exploitation of human and nonhuman lives. The second and third sections both refer to the notion of “commensality”—or eating together—to explore how these interspecies ethics manifest around the shared table. The former looks at commensality as a technique to (re)produce communal ties across difference, in which entomophagy proves a particularly adaptable practice. The latter considers commensality as a disciplinary technique in which insect eating becomes a condition for acceptance into the Wayfarer community. Finally, I consider how some nonhuman animals—particularly insects—continue to be excluded from the shared table. Indeed, the binary between human and nonhuman is simply expanded to one between sapient and nonsapient; in this context, entomophagy restricts insect life, reinforcing the marginality of insects in ethics and perpetuating the instrumentalization of some nonhuman creatures.

Life amongst the ruins: Exploitation, experimentation, and entomophagy

7Since the 1980s and the emergent hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, Fredric Jameson argues, “traditional Utopian production seems to have come to a halt” (216). Mancuso agrees, pointing to the twenty-first-century predilection for “hopeless dystopia,” a genre they term “predictive speculation” (469). Predictive speculative fiction—such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)—“purposefully limits the typical ability of speculation to produce visions of radically different futures” (473). Against this trend, the 2010s saw the emergence of “hopepunk,” a form of speculative fiction that foregrounds “affects like hope and its proposed mechanisms for surviving and resisting the logics of capitalism” (460). Long Way has been characterised as hopepunk by Peter Admirand (128), Jari Käkelä (23), and Beatriz Hermida Ramos (29). However, as Onur Karaköse points out, Chambers rejected the term (33) which, she contends, “quickly morphed into an ambivalent pop culture label” (35). Instead, Mancuso proposes the umbrella term “multiplicative speculative fiction” for work that “seeks to imagine as wide and numerous a range of futures as possible, and more generally expand the horizons of what it is possible to imagine” (469). This section opens by introducing the work of Lowenhaupt Tsing to tease out the multiple futures depicted in Long Way before looking at the ways in which insects are eaten in these different futures.

8Predictive speculation, Mancuso argues, “seeks to identify and offer a concrete roadmap to the single ‘best’ future, where ‘best’ means optimized for a particular outcome or set of factors” (469). Lowenhaupt Tsing is herself suspicious of teleological ideologies of growth, preferring instead to frame ecology as “a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life” (4). Viewing ecologies in this way produces a picture of capitalism not as a “total institution” but as “livelihood patches,” in which some patches “are simultaneously inside and outside of capitalism” (133-134). The liminality of these spaces—termed “pericapitalist”—means that they are neither utopian nor inherently ethical but rather may allow for experimentation with alternative ways of living (65). This precarious, non-teleological search for life in the ruins of capitalism intersects productively with the multiplicity that Mancuso advocates, in which “the work of multiplicative speculation” is to “create hope, question our norms, and inspire alternatives” (480). In what follows, I draw on these intersecting theories to produce a picture of the multiple futures in Long Way, accounting for both the hegemonic society of the Galactic Commons (GC) and the heterogeneous resistance in its margins.

9Lowenhaupt Tsing writes that “imagining the human since the rise of capitalism entangles us with […] the spread of techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other beings into resources” (19). Such techniques of alienation can be read in the functioning of the GC, the institution that organises trade, travel, and justice across the galaxy. For instance, Ashby Santoso—the captain of the Wayfarer—reflects on the Harmagian colonisation of the Akaraks, “their planet was left barren, their water sources polluted, their forests stripped” (Chambers 159). The Akarak ecosystem is alienated, treated as resources, and exhausted. This colonisation predates the GC, but the institution continues to expand to include new planets, motivated by the need for new resources. Rosemary—the administrator who joins the Wayfarer at the beginning of the novel—believes that the inclusion of the Quelin in the GC was “an arrangement of convenience” due to their planet’s significant natural resources (284). Similarly, Dr Chef—the doctor and chef on board the Wayfarer—states that the GC is only in negotiations with the Toremi because their adhesion to the institution would open access to their fuel sources (86). Lowenhaupt Tsing argues that as capitalism uses up resources in one area, it abandons this area for a new one so that “simplification for alienation produces ruins, spaces of abandonment for asset production” (6). Because the GC is not constrained by planetary existence, the production of these ruins takes on a galactic scale: once the resources of one planet are depleted, there is always another planet on the horizon whose resources can be exploited.

10However, there are also communities on the margins that resist this alienation. The Wayfarer participates in the expansionist activities of the GC by building tunnels to facilitate trade and travel. Indeed, the novel opens as the crew accepts a mission to create a new tunnel to simplify travel to Hedra Ka, home to the Toremi. During the long journeys across the galaxy to undertake such missions, however, Ramos highlights how “emotions and affective care and support become forms of concrete action to directly challenge capitalist, racist and cisheteronormative systems” (39). Tim Ingold characterises wayfaring as an “improvisatory movement […] that is open-ended and knows no final destination” (S122). Even the name of the ship connotes liminality, a non-teleological movement between economic forms and spaces. Laurie Ringer draws on Lowenhaupt Tsing to argue that Dr Chef forges life amongst the ruins after he is forced to leave his home planet in the wake of a deadly civil war amongst his species, the Grum (139). Yet, I argue that the whole community of the Wayfarer can be framed as an experiment with life amongst the ruins of capitalism. Not unlike Dr Chef, all the human characters are in space because Earth has become uninhabitable and so their ancestors sought extra-terrestrial havens. Further, the ruins are not only constituted by the past but are also produced through the ongoing capitalist and expansionist practices of the GC. The Wayfarer can thus be read as a pericapitalist space, never able to entirely escape capitalism but whose marginality nonetheless may allow new relations to emerge.

11Loo and Sellbach argue that through “the discovery of unanticipated tastes shared, and the imaginative and instinctual realignments this enables” entomophagy is “important for the emergence of an ecologically oriented community” (“Eating” 26). Red coast bugs are eaten across the GC and “you could find plenty of Aeluons and extrasolar Humans who had become wealthy from their trade” (Chambers 38). This suggests the kind of alienation described by Lowenhaupt Tsing through which “people and things become mobile assets” (5). The red coast bugs have been objectified, exchanged across the galaxy in pursuit of the accumulation of wealth. Further, Rosemary remembers hopper burgers from her youth on Mars—a street food treat she has never tried (Chambers 128). Mars was originally settled by the wealthiest humans who fled Earth during anthropogenic ecological collapse and so the place itself evokes Global North capitalism. The name hopper burger also recalls Burger King’s Whopper Burger, further binding the product to anthropocentric capitalism on Earth. Not all forms of entomophagy, then, seem to produce new communal relations as insects are alienated and used as resources across the GC.

12However, insects are also eaten in marginal pericapitalist spaces like the Wayfarer. Dr Chef, for instance, breeds red coast bugs on board and often serves the insects up for dinner. Moreover, the crew stops at Port Coriol, another liminal space: the colony has an “independent anything-goes attitude” and its markets are “anything but corporate” (Chambers 96). Rosemary and the Wayfarer’s technician Kizzy and the pilot Sissix take the opportunity to buy hopper burgers; Rosemary imagines “how her mother would react to her chowing down a bug sandwich wrapped in greasy paper while sharing a table with modders and smugglers and arm-hacking patch thieves” (128-129). The “greasy paper” evokes the kinds of informal packaging associated with street food rather than the standardized cardboard packaging of fast-food restaurants. Street food has long existed on the margins of financial and hygiene regulations and so has been characterised as an “informal economy” (Ribeiro de Santana and Amparo-Santos 469). This liminality is reaffirmed through the eating companions Rosemary imagines, who all operate on the margins of formal economies: smugglers, modders (who experiment with technology on the fringes of legality) and technology thieves. If insects are eaten in pericapitalist spaces, this at least suggests the possibility for new communities to emerge through entomophagy.

13Loo and Sellbach argue that bringing insects to the plate requires undoing the ways in which these creatures have been deemed inedible in the West (“Eating” 13). One possible approach is to emphasise the rational advantages of insects as a source of protein, excluded from Western plates due to the normative social constitution of edibility (14). The consumption of insects in the pericapitalist spaces of Long Way denaturalises this exclusion of entomophagy in Western cultures. Rosemary grew up in a wealthy family on Mars, the only community mentioned that still eats mammals (Chambers 38). Indeed, the humans who escaped to Mars used their sparse resources to transport the cows instead of to help other, less privileged humans (38). Rosemary therefore “felt guilty” when she admitted to the rest of the crew that she has never eaten red coast bugs, because it signals her “privileged ancestry” and because “insects were cheap, rich in protein and easy to cultivate in cramped rooms, which made them an ideal food for spacers” (38). Rosemary’s Martian dietary practices are quite similar to normative Western ones so placing Rosemary in a context in which her own dietary practices are strange serves equally to estrange Western ones. Moreover, Rosemary describes red coast bugs as “a bit like crab, only denser” (43). She thus gives readers a familiar standpoint from which to grasp the foodstuff and questions the cultural constitution of edibility in which crabs are considered edible and not insects.

14However, Loo and Sellbach claim that such rational arguments may have “limited success” in convincing Western consumers to try insects (“Eating” 14). Instead, “a manifesto capable of persuading our stomachs” is needed (14). Where the insects in the capitalist spaces of the GC are hardly described, many of the characters take evident delight in the various insects consumed in pericapitalist spaces. When Kizzy suggests hopper burgers to Rosemary and Sissix on Port Coriol she says “[o]oh! What about hoppers? […] I could seriously go for a hopper. Mmm, spicy peppers and crunchy onions and a big toasty bun…” and she “looked at Rosemary with eager eyes” (Chambers 128). Most of the components are familiar burger ingredients in the West, rendering the unfamiliar component—the grasshopper—less strange. The hopper burgers are thus framed as delicious not only to Rosemary, who has never eaten them, but also potentially to readers too.

15Reading Long Way through the work of Mancuso and Lowenhaupt Tsing allows for the multiplicity of futures depicted to emerge. The GC is constituted through alienation and expansion; unshackled from planetary constraints, the ruins of capitalism take on a galactic scale. Insects in these contexts seem subject to the alienation and objectification that characterise capitalist human-nonhuman relations. However, pericapitalist spaces—such as the Wayfarer—exist on the margins of the GC, never able to entirely escape capitalism but not entirely captured by it either. Eating insects in these spaces undoes the exclusion of insects from Western parameters of edibility both through rational arguments and through the pleasure they incite in the characters. The next three sections will explore entomophagy in the pericapitalist spaces of the Wayfarer, paying particular attention to the interspecies relations in which the practice is embedded.

Multispecies tables: Commensality, community, and difference

16References to eating together—or commensality—often appear in writing on relational ethics. Jacques Derrida famously argued that “eating well” means that “one never eats entirely on one’s own” (282). Haraway, too, writes that “human and nonhuman animals are companion species, messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or not” (Species 301). Such images emphasise the interspecies entanglements underlying all meals and endow the meal with experimental potential for new forms of interspecies relations. Multiple species dine together at the Wayfarer’s table, a useful speculative opportunity to evaluate the metaphor of the shared table in relational ethics. Whereas the next section will explore multispecies tables as sites of discipline, this section focusses on the ways in which the Wayfarer’s dining table accommodates difference and the role of entomophagy in this process. It opens by characterising the extra-terrestrial characters as both aliens and animals, establishing the Wayfarer community as an experimentation with the negotiation of species difference. It continues to explore how this negotiation of difference manifests around the meals shared on board and the particular role of entomophagy in this process.

17Against the anthropocentric tendency to reduce aliens to their alienness, Sherryl Vint emphasises that “any alien animals or aliens who have animal-like qualities are both aliens and animals” (16). She writes further that “some sf also specifically figures its aliens as animal-like and thus invites more direct comparison with how human society relates to its animal others” (136). In Long Way, Chambers invites just such comparison: Rosemary reads a report in which it is noted that Aandrisks are like “the native reptilian species of Earth” while the Quelin are compared to “crustaceans” found on an Aandrisk planet (Chambers 141). Matthew Calarco notes that anthropocentric rights-based animal ethics frameworks tend to privilege nonhuman animals that are similar to humans (26-27). In her choice of reptilian and crustacean bodies for the Aandrisks and the Quelin respectively, Chambers seems to call into question the kinds of anthropocentric hierarchisation of nonhuman animals described by Calarco. Moreover, humans themselves are also compared to “hairless primates that plague the sewer systems of Quelin cities,” thereby challenging the anthropocentric difference between human and nonhuman animals (141). Interspecies relations are not without discrimination: the same report mentions “racial slurs in colloquial use” that compare sapient animals to non-sapient ones (140-141). In contrast, the Wayfarer experiments with an acceptance of difference that refuses such intolerance. Corbin, the ship’s scientist, uses a “racist” insult in an argument with Sissix, calling her a “lizard”, to which Ashby responds: “Losing your temper is one thing, but you are part of a multispecies crew, and you need to be mindful of that” (10). Reading the aliens in Long Way as both aliens and animals suggests that the multispecies crew requires an ongoing process of negotiation of difference that calls into question anthropocentric ethics frameworks premised on similarity to humans.

  • 3 Ohan’s pronouns change from they/them to he/him after he is cured of the Whisperer virus.

18Notably, the crew in Long Way eats dinner together every night despite their physiological and cultural differences, which is representative of commensality, as referring to the social relations of eating in a group and is common to all human societies in one form or another (Grignon 24-25; Fischler 529). Despite the long history of the concept in the social sciences, David Goldstein notes that it is only recently that literary critics have begun to explore the representation of commensality in literature (42). He argues that fiction can complement the work of social scientists, not least by producing “a more capacious interpretation of the term” that “opens the question of relationship not just to other humans, but to the entire ecological system of which humans and our food are both a part” (53). The importance of the shared meal in Long Way can be seen through the evolution of the character of Ohan, the Wayfarer’s navigator. Ohan is a Sianat Pair, a species often injected with a neurovirus called the Whisperer that gives them the ability to conceptualise space in multiple dimensions but also leaves them vulnerable to infection and likely to die young. In much of the novel, Ohan is unable to eat with the rest of the crew due to their special dietary needs. Dr Chef, however, always sets a place for them at the table so that they “know that they’re always welcome” (Chambers 44). The empty chair points to the symbolic importance of the meal to the crew: Ohan is part of the crew and therefore has a seat at the table. Ohan is cured of the Whisperer virus towards the end of the novel but nonetheless decides that he wants to stay with the Wayfarer.3 His first statement after he announces this decision is “[a]nd I want to have dinner. With my crew” (398). Still weak from his recovery, he chooses to sit in his “never-before-used seat” to watch Dr Chef prepare food (399). The evolution of Ohan’s place at the table demonstrates the significance of shared eating in the life and relations of the crew.

19George argues that in Long Way the shared meal “works to create a home and promote the feeling of togetherness amongst a space crew that consists of multiple alien species from radically different cultures and communities” (625). Yet, the ritual evening meal is also the site for experimentation with the adaptation for corporal species difference. Sissix tells Rosemary that she does not need to eat one big meal because she is cold-blooded but states that: “I like sitting down with everybody in the evening. It's one of my favourite Human customs” (Chambers 45). Sissix therefore picks at her meal of red coast bugs, whereas Dr Chef—who eats only once a day—tucks into seven of the insects (45). Moreover, the dining table itself has been adapted to accommodate difference: the crew eats around a singular dining table, but the chairs are “mismatched” and “only about a third of them designed to fit non-Human posteriors” (33-34). That this “Human” custom takes place around a dining table is perhaps a sign of an underlying Eurocentrism because, as Claude Fischler notes in his own work on commensality, some cultures are “table-less” (534). Nonetheless, the Wayfarer’s dinners allow each species to eat according to their needs, in a chair adapted to their bodies so that everyone can participate in the ritual. Reading the aliens as both alien and animal thus deepens the understanding of the ethical experimentation on board the Wayfarer.

20Finally, the Wayfarer crew extends hospitality to other communities through the sharing of food. An Aeluon ship discovers mines planted in its hull and is forced to make an emergency landing on the Wayfarer. Kizzy goes with the captain of the Aeluon ship, Pei, to defuse the explosives while the rest of the crew waits. Dr Chef states, “[o]h I don’t think that’ll be so bad […] It’s just about time for me to start preparing breakfast” (Chambers 224). The morning meal is framed as a source of distraction and comfort at a stressful time for both crews. He tells the other crew that his recipes “weren’t exactly made with Aeluons in mind” but invites them to look through his food stocks to find ingredients that suit them (224). Again, the communal meal accommodates difference as Dr Chef tries to make a meal that the Aeluons will enjoy. Later that day, the two crews eat a dinner of red coast bugs together and Rosemary sees that “everybody [is] swapping stories and chowing down” (246). The word “everybody” implies a new community has been formed temporarily through the sharing of food, emphasised by the juxtaposition of storytelling and eating.

21The Wayfarer’s table thus appears to be a space in which difference is accepted and accommodated so that the whole crew can participate in the ritual of commensality. Entomophagy plays an important role in this ethical experimentation, as the crew may eat the red coast bugs according to their needs and also offers the insects to the Aeluon outsiders. The shared table is, of course, more literal than the one imagined by relational ethicists like Derrida or Haraway. Yet, Chambers’ depiction of alien and human animals eating together undermines animal ethics frameworks premised on proximity to humans and points to the importance of the adaptation for difference in the ethical experimentation that takes place on board the Wayfarer.

Multispecies tables: Discipline and the boundaries of community

22Grignon cautions that commensality should not be confused with conviviality; the latter is possible only because “commensality first allows the limits of the group to be redrawn, its internal hierarchies to be restored and if necessary to be redefined” (24). Similar concerns are expressed by Haifa Giraud about narratives of entanglement because “creating space to be affected or to express agency does not take into account prior (and future) ways this agency has already been molded” (130). This suggests that the images of shared tables in relational ethics may still be subject to power dynamics that may (re)produce extant hierarchies such as anthropocentrism. This section explores the disciplinary aspect of commensality on board the Wayfarer, paying particular attention to the role of entomophagy as a marker of the border between in-group and ex-group.

23Fischler argues for the importance of the table as “a social space” not least because the “arrangement of participants around it both reflects and determines relations between them” and “also places them in a hierarchical structure” (535). The table on the Wayfarer is ovular, indicating that the crew members are not equal but rather hierarchised. George presents an analysis of the seating arrangements for the Wayfarer crew: “Ashby, as the captain, sits at the head of the table, and Dr Chef sits right across from him. Sissix, Jenks, and Kizzy choose to sit at the same side of the table while Corbin sits across from them, indicating the strained relationships that he has with the rest of them” (627). Ashby invites Rosemary to sit on his right, on the same side as Corbin and the empty chair left for Ohan (Chambers 42). This could be a sign of welcome, a captain indicating that he will take care of the newcomer by placing her near him. However, it could also be a sign of distance between a newcomer and the rest of the crew, as she is placed on the same side of the table as the other two misfits. Thus, the choice of an ovular—rather than, say, a circular—table signals the hierarchy of the spaceship and the ways in which some members of the crew may be distanced from the others.

24At first glance, the form of the meal might seem non-hierarchical: “Filling one’s plate was a free-for-all affair” (Chambers 42). Yet, the meal also confirms Ashby’s precedence amongst the crew, not least because it is he who gives the toast that begins her first meal on board (42). The shared meals also confirm the important position of Dr Chef in the ship’s hierarchy—he is, as his position at the dining table signals, second only to Ashby. The morning after her first meal, Dr Chef shows Rosemary the caffeinated tea and “he wag[s] one of his pudgy fingers at her. ‘But no more than three cups a day, and definitely not on an empty stomach’” (63). The wagging of his finger evokes the ways in which adults may treat small children, and his power is further reaffirmed through the control over how much caffeine the crew is allowed to drink and when. Later in the novel, Sissix teases Dr Chef, “you’re so parental sometimes,” to which he responds, “I feed you and heal you, how else am I supposed to be?” (145). Dr Chef thus infantilises the rest of the crew, confirming his status as one of the heads of the Wayfarer family. This is not, then, an egalitarian community but one with a clear power hierarchy that is (re)produced continuously through quotidian rituals such as meals.

25Moreover, shared meals (re)produce the borders of the Wayfarer community as inclusion is premised on consumption of the same foodstuffs. As mentioned above, Rosemary had never eaten red coast bugs before her arrival which establishes her as an outsider to the crew (Chambers 38). George presents an analysis of her first dinner on board that concentrates on the interpersonal bonding it (re)produces, particularly when Sissix teaches Rosemary how to eat red coast bugs (626). However, the disciplinary role of this scene goes unmentioned in George’s work: in order for the bond between Sissix and Rosemary to develop, Rosemary must leave behind the dietary customs of her Martian community and adopt those of the Wayfarer community. When Rosemary admits that she has not tried red coast bugs before, Sissix asks her if she has eaten “mammals” and when Rosemary says she has, Sissix “recoil[s], making sounds of amusement and disgust” and says “[o]h no, yuck” (Chambers 39). If the shared table accommodates many different corporal and nutritional needs, this reaction suggests that dietary customs are not so open to negotiation. When she comes to eat her first meal of red coast bugs, Rosemary’s internal narration describes how her “embarrassment at being unfamiliar with the food disappeared the moment she placed the first bit of bug in her mouth—tender, savoury, comforting” (43).

26A similar process is at play when the Aeluons make their emergency landing on the Wayfarer. The Aeluons view red coast bugs as pests and therefore exclude them from their parameters of edibility. Dr Chef nonetheless cooks a meal of the insects for the shared dinner: the Aeluons “had been a little weirded out by the bugs at first […] but they warmed up to it, maybe out of novelty more than anything” (Chambers 246). The narrative once again points to the normative constitution of edibility as the Aeluons are able to eat the red coast bugs but do not generally do so. However, it also shows that to participate in the intergroup bonding that takes place at this dinner, the Aeluons must put aside their own dietary customs. As Fischler argues, “[i]f eating a food makes one become more like that food, then those sharing the same food become more like each other” (533). Thus, the consumption of insects not only allows the characters to eat according to their needs but also polices the boundaries of the Wayfarer community.

27Furthermore, hospitality itself is more complex than simple generosity towards others. In his work on the gift, Marcel Mauss argues that to give and to receive gifts is to display power and wealth (51-52). In particular, Georges Bataille notes that “the eating of one species by another is the simplest form of luxury” because “generally vegetation is less burdensome than animal life” (33-34). The Wayfarer is a relatively small space for so many inhabitants, turning the breeding tanks for red coast bugs into just such a display of luxury. Indeed, Dr Chef takes care to mention that the red coast bugs for Rosemary’s first meal on the Wayfarer are “fresh” rather than from storage (Chambers 38). Sissix hammers the point home as she gives Rosemary “a friendly nudge” and says, “We only get fresh ones for special occasions” (38). Such a demonstration of hospitality towards a newcomer is also, therefore, a display of luxury through the fresh insects. The only other reference to fresh red coast bugs is during the Aeluon dinner, suggesting that “special occasions” means moments when the crew is welcoming outsiders. Thus, the crew offers hospitality across difference and at the same time displays their capacity to provide fresh nonhuman animals for consumption.

28The depiction of shared meals in Long Way thus highlights the disciplinary role of commensality. Internal hierarchies are (re)produced through the form of the meal while group identity is policed through dietary practice. As Vint argues, one of the benefits of bringing speculative fiction and animal studies together is that the former provides space for “thinking through” the issues discussed by the latter. Here, Long Way highlights how shared tables may accommodate difference but nonetheless how they remain the site for the uneven distribution of power and agency. For narratives of entanglement, this suggests the need to be alert to how this uneven distribution of power may manifest even when laying claim to the ethical power of interdependence.

Uninvited insects: Entanglements, ixclusions, and anthropocentrism

29Although the authors of many narratives of entanglement recognise exclusion, Haifa Giraud argues that “the ethical emphasis remains on the potential inherent in encounters, relations, and comings-together rather than on the boundary-making practices that instantiate them” (173). Yet, exclusion means both that “certain forms of agency, practices, or realities are marginalized by given sociotechnical arrangements” and that some relations “cannot even come into being when other relations exist” (176). This section opens by arguing that the multispecies communities in Long Way are contingent on a binary between sapient and non-sapient that excludes other nonhuman animals from ethical consideration. It then turns to explore the effects of this binary on insect life, focussing on the ways in which the disturbing potential of entomophagy is largely foreclosed upon.

30In “A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds: Semblances of Insects and Humans in Jakob Von Uexküll’s Laboratory” (2013), Loo and Sellbach argue that

  • 4 Loo and Sellbach are referring here to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” i (...)

when qualities pertinent to human ethics, such as “self-awareness” or “sentience,” are extended to other animals, the anthropological machine may not necessarily be disenabled; rather the divide between ethical and instrumental life is redrawn in a new way.4 (47)

31The multiple species that make up the GC are all defined as sapient, which means “wise” and is also an adjective for homo sapiens (“Sapient” 1578). The name thus evokes a binary distinction between sapient and non-sapient that recalls the binary between human and nonhuman. This suggests that the anthropological machine may simply have been redrawn to include some nonhuman animals at the expense of others. While the Wayfarer crew members may not compare each other to animals, they do not hesitate to refer to members of adversary ships as animals. For example, Akarak pirates board the Wayfarer and act aggressively towards Rosemary, at which point Jenks yells “she’s unarmed, you fucking animals, leave her alone…” (Chambers 160). When the Toremi attack the Wayfarer, Rosemary thinks to herself “and what the fuck had they done for those four-legged animals to fire at them anyway” (355). The “animal” in these two quotations is used as an insult, intended to debase the sapient to which it refers and able to do so only because the animal is seen as lesser.

32In some ways, this points to the mutability of the category of the sapient in ways reminiscent of the racialised and gendered boundaries of the category human. In his theorisation of the anthropological machine, Giorgio Agamben writes that the modern human “functions by […] animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human” in ways that would, for example, be deployed to exclude Jewish people from the category of the human (38). In the examples given above, Jenks and Rosemary seek to exclude the Akaraks and the Toremi respectively from the category of sapient by pointing to their animal qualities. Yet, this awareness that the category of the sapient is mutable does not extend to questioning the automatic relegation of the non-sapient outside the realms of ethics. Indeed, when Rosemary expresses her worries about the inherent capacity of evil brought to the fore by her father’s actions as a war criminal, Dr Chef responds “all you can do, Rosemary—all any of us can do—is work to be something positive instead. That is the choice that every sapient must make every day of their life” (Chambers 213). With reference to the first three Wayfarers novels, Stuart Fletcher argues that “it is the non-human animals who practise the greatest cultural and social sophistication or the most complex formations of selfhood” (113). Yet, through these examples it emerges that this is true only for sapient animals; non-sapient animals continue to be relegated to “instrumental life”.

33The portrayal of insects in Long Way in particular points to the limits of the ethical experimentation with difference in which the community engages. Insects are largely excluded from the pericapitalist space of the Wayfarer. Even before Rosemary is allowed to board, she is scanned for “contaminants” and informed that she is carrying “a few blacklisted bugs” (Chambers 17). Rosemary reflects on her journey to the spaceship, “[t]hree tendays since she’d left Mars, and already she’d picked up some alien plague” (17). She feels that her bodily borders have been breached by the pejorative “alien plague” while the ship protects its own borders by decontaminating her. The only insects mentioned on board are the red coast bugs that Dr Chef breeds. Rosemary describes the incorporation of these insects into the diet of the GC: “The insects were a mild nuisance to the Aeluons, but the Humans saw food and lots of it” (38). Sands argues that insects’ “indifference to human structures and hierarchies affronts the human perception of itself as arbiter of universal standards” (155). Their characterisation as pests through “mild nuisance” suggests that the red coast bugs may indeed have been free to disturb or ignore Aeluon structures. However, in their move to human food, these possibilities are restricted, and the non-instrumental aspects of their lives are ignored. Indeed, the difference between sapient and insect is brought into sharp visual contrast when Rosemary and Sissix are chatting, “leaning against one of Dr Chef’s bug breeding tanks” (229). While the sapient population is free to move about the ship, the red coast bugs are contained and relegated to the backdrop of sapient lives. Thus, insects are excluded from the pericapitalist experimentation with ethics of difference on board the Wayfarer.

34During a visit to a planet to visit friends of Kizzy and Jenks, the human members of the crew encounter a swarm of ketlings, the insect native to the planet: “At a distance, the twitching clouds of insects looked almost like clusters of malfunctioning pixels. The ketlings darted madly across the sky as they fertilised, killed, and sometimes ate one another” (Chambers 193). As in the red coast bugs’ role as pest on the Aeluon planet, the ketlings’ disregard for sapient structures is conveyed through the image of “malfunctioning pixels,” which suggests that the insects are indifferent to sapient understandings of order. The use of “madly” and the reference to cannibalism suggest that the insects are irrational and thus emphasise their difference from sapient animals. This difference can also be seen when, immediately before the ketlings swarm, the younger sister of one of the hosts kills one. Its dead body is described through Ashby’s internal narration: “The pillow-like sac beneath its jaw wasn’t exactly leaking, as Ember had said. More like gushing in slow motion. Sticky, oily, sour-smelling green gunk pooled around the thing’s nightmarish head” (185). The insect’s “nightmarish head” and the fact that it bleeds “green gunk” rather than blood render the creature very different from Ashby.

35However, the possible incorporation of this difference into the realm of ethical consideration is largely foreclosed. In their article “Insect Affects: The Big and Small of the Entomological Imagination in Childhood” (2015), Loo and Sellbach present an analysis of a scene in J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Terra Amata (1975) in which an insect is squished and bleeds. They argue that “when a shared sense of animal vulnerability with insects is most palpably felt in the story, it is through the squashed bodies of the bugs in a way that effaces their distinctive physiology, instincts and distant perceptual worlds” (83). Such an effacement can also be seen in Ashby’s reaction to the ketling: “Layer upon layer of sharp-edged wings lay in a broken heap. Its legs were contorted and broken, some of them curling inward at rigored angles. There were thin hairs round its mouth and beneath its belly, which somehow made Ashby shiver more than any of the rest of it” (185). As in Loo and Sellbach’s critique of Terra Amata, emphasis is placed on the insect’s wings and legs that draw attention to the vulnerability that characterises human and nonhuman animal life. Moreover, the hairs on the mouth and stomach of the ketling provoke the most visceral response and it is perhaps no coincidence that these are often locations for visible hair on human bodies too. In other words, Ashby can only feel empathy for the insect through its similarity to himself, thereby erasing its difference.

36Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, Loo and Sellbach argue that the consumption of insects may provoke the abject and therefore prompt engagement with repressed insects; because these instincts are no longer held in check by social norms, they may also prompt the formation of new communities (“Eating” 20). When she is told that the community eats ketlings, “Rosemary’s eyes were fixed on the sticky puddles beneath the ketling’s damaged head” (Chambers 188). The puddles are the gunk that Ashby describes, suggesting that the insect’s difference disturbs Rosemary. This effect continues to the meal: “Once she had got past the memory of the oozing ketling carcass, she found the shreds of spicy, flame-licked insect […] actually made for an enjoyable meal” (194). The word “oozing” suggests that the ketling continues to disturb her even at the moment at which it will be consumed and so opens to the kinds of possibilities described by Loo and Sellbach. However, this effect appears to be largely foreclosed as the phrase “once she had got past” suggests that Rosemary must overcome or ignore this memory of its dead body. This recalls Rosemary’s first meal of red coast bugs: “The bug was nightmarish to look at, but it smelled incredible and Rosemary was hungry enough to try anything” (42). The term “nightmarish” recurs in both this description of red coast bugs and Ashby’s description of the ketling, affirming the disturbing difference of insects. Again, however, the disturbing potential of the red coast bugs is foreclosed through the “but,” suggesting that Rosemary puts aside its nightmarish qualities in order to eat.

37Thus, the pericapitalist experimentation of the Wayfarer is premised on a binary between sapient and non-sapient that redraws the anthropological machine: certain extraterrestrial human and nonhuman animals are included in the realm of ethical consideration while non-sapient nonhuman animals remain relegated to instrumentality. In particular, the ethical experimentation with difference fails to accommodate insect difference and insect lives are subject to an intense level of control and are largely reduced to their instrumental purpose as food. Insects may not, then, be excluded only from much of animal ethics but speculative fiction may also be at risk of reproducing this exclusion.

Conclusion

38Capitalist exploitation of human and nonhuman continues apace across the galaxy as the Galactic Commons expands in search of new resources. Yet, the Wayfarer’s liminal existence affords the crew the space to experiment with ways of living otherwise. Reading the nonhuman characters as both alien and animal brings out the radical thrust of the experimentation on board the Wayfarer: difference is embraced and accommodated for across species. Shared meals prove important to this pericapitalist experimentation as both furniture and ingredients are adapted to the needs of the consumer. At the same time, the shared table is also the site for discipline, (re)producing social hierarchies and communal borders. Insects both allow the creatures to eat according to their needs and symbolise the border between Wayfarer community and others. However, not all nonhuman creatures are invited to the shared table: non-sapient animals—notably, insects—are excluded both from the meal and from ethical consideration. This brings a new perspective to the extant critical literature, which has so far been overwhelmingly positive about the way in which the characters interact, ignoring the prior exclusion of non-sapient nonhuman animals from the communities.

39In this context, entomophagy does not embrace the challenging difference of insects as Loo and Sellbach hope. Rather, insect-eating seems to limit insect life: instrumentalised as food, insects are subject to restrictions and their disturbing potential is limited. Even the ketlings, the most disruptive of the insects depicted, fail to durably provoke repressed instincts: initially unsettled, the crew represses these feelings at the moment of consumption. This raises provocative questions for Loo and Sellbach’s work, not least whether the disturbing potential of entomophagy is only available when insect-eating is an abnormal practice. In The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, insect-eating has been normalised and so the disturbing potential of insects is foreclosed. If so, then the scalability of their proposal could be limited, available only to the few and therefore unlikely to produce the kinds of new interspecies communities needed in the face of ecological crisis.

40Reading animal studies and speculative fiction together has proven productive, as Vint’s Animal Alterity or Giulia Champion and Nora Castle’s more recent Science Fiction and Animal Studies (2024) suggest. Addressing the depiction of animals can bring out new perspectives on speculative fiction works and also experiment with ethical tools for confronting anthropocentrism. Yet, as Vint writes, the genre may still be influenced by “the sedimented weight of the species boundary” (21). Not so much a species boundary as many, insects may be particularly susceptible to exclusion when new relations are imagined in both speculative fiction and in animal studies. Yet, the ethical challenges they pose point to the deficiencies in many animal ethics frameworks, pushing for the elaboration of new and more capacious ideas.

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Notes

1 Animal ethics frameworks can be loosely sorted into two broad categories. The first, characterised by Matthew Calarco as “identity-based,” emphasises that many human characteristics—such as sentience—are also to be found in nonhuman animals and therefore argues that the interests of these animals should not be excluded from ethical consideration (13). This approach is particularly associated with Peter Singer (1975) and Tom Regan (1983). Calarco names the second approach “the difference tradition,” whose ethics are founded on “an appreciation of the manifold differences that exist between and among human beings and animals” (28). This branch is often associated with continental philosophers like Jacques Derrida (1989, 2006) as well as subsequent scholars like Haraway (2007, 2016) and Cary Wolfe (2018).

2 See, for instance: Peter Admirand, “Compassionate, Gentler Sci-Fi: Extraterrestrial, Interspecies Dialogue (EID) in Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers Series” (2021), 133; Stuart Fletcher, Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology, and Cultural Futures (2020), 118; Jari Käkelä, “Everyday Heroism and the Journey of the Community in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers” (2024), 24; Nayana George, “Commensality and Togetherness in Becky Chambers’ The Long way to a Small Angry Planet” (2022), 63; and Beatriz Hermida Ramos’ “Hope is the New Punk: Politics Of Storytelling, Queerness and Marginalized Communities in Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet” (2020), 37.

3 Ohan’s pronouns change from they/them to he/him after he is cured of the Whisperer virus.

4 Loo and Sellbach are referring here to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” in The Open: Man and Animal (2002). Agamben argues that “Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human” (26). Loo and Sellbach argue that the subject of insects, to which Agamben returns repeatedly in The Open “draws attention to the mobility of the mechanisms by which we define the human, and the fact that this is a strategic rather than a natural divide” (“Picture Book” 47).

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Phoebe CHETWYND, « Eating Insects with Alien Friends: Entanglement Ethics and Anthropocentric Exclusions in Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) »e-Rea [En ligne], 23.1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20516 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15cj1

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Phoebe CHETWYND

Royal Holloway, University of London
phoebechetwynd@gmail.com
Phoebe Chetwynd is a temporary lecturer at CY Cergy Paris Université and received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2025. Her doctoral project looked at anthropocentrism and ideologies of meat-eating in twenty-first century fictional meat futures. Her research focuses primarily on animal studies, food studies, and speculative and science fiction. She has recently published in Extrapolation and has spoken at conferences in the United Kingdom, France, and Holland.
Phoebe Chetwynd est enseignante contractuelle à l'université CY Cergy Paris et a obtenu son doctorat à Royal Holloway, University of London en 2025. Son projet de thèse portait sur l'anthropocentrisme et la représentation de l'avenir de la viande dans la science-fiction du XXIe siècle. Ses recherches portent principalement sur les études animales, les food studies et la science-fiction. Elle a récemment publié dans Extrapolation et est également intervenu lors de colloques au Royaume-Uni, en France, et aux Pays-Bas.

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