AustLit

In a close reading of Gillian Rubenstein's Galax-Arena, Sawers examines how children's science fiction novels reflect and mediate the overarching influence of science and biotechnology as an authority on the production of 'new realities' (23). Sawers contends that narratives that engender a particular set of responses to science and its treatment of bodies are fundamentally political and hence, deserve close analysis, particularly as children's bodies are a crucial part of biomedical research. Sawers argues that children's SF is both constitutive of and produced by the biotechnological imaginary and it is through 'literature that challenges the boundaries of science and fiction that the anxieties surrounding the animal-human hybrid are articulated' (27). What needs to be considered and critiqued, says Sawers, is whether such articulations 'simply reinscribe humanist ideology and the division between science and humanities or offer a more responsible engagement with scientific practices' (23).