In a New Yorker essay a few weeks back, Laura Miller considered the various ways in which science fiction writers have imagined aliens, from the 18th century through today. Perhaps inevitably, the way we think about the alien tends to say something about us: “These aliens may not all be made in the image of their creator,” Miller observed, “but each one is a child of our psyche.”

Ian Bogost begins his recent book Alien Phenomenology by noting the speculative fascination with the stubborn old rumor of flying saucer remains hidden away at Roswell Army Airfield. But his real point is that we are immersed in the alien already. In fact, almost every thing is alien to us, except us: We have no idea what it’s like to be a tree, a bat, a coffee mug, a skyscraper. And unlike human-imagined aliens, they exist. “The alien isn’t in the Roswell military morgue, or in the galactic far reaches,” Bogost writes. “It’s everywhere.”

Speculative Realism: What are the key texts I need to read. I am interested in Speculative Realism (SR) (and Speculative Materialism (SM)) as attempts to overcome 'Philosophies of access' (those which privilege the human being over other entities; anthropocentrism).

Also, any texts that cover...

• How do SR and SM overlap/not overlap with object-oriented philosophy (OO)?
• How do SM and OO relate to post-humanism and anti-humanism?

Thanks

Speculative Realism reading list

Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my attempt to address what I see as the fundamental issue facing contemporary philosophy: how does human experience fit into the world described by science? Contemporary philosophers can be sorted into two basic camps: in the first, there are those who want to explain science in terms of human experience; in the second, there are those who want to explain human experience in terms of science. The former argue that science cannot explain human experience because there’s something about it that will always resist scientific explanation. The latter maintain that the explanation of experience will require us to revise both our understanding of it and our relationship to it