Die closer to me: David Kuhnlein and the Dishuman Realms

Reading David Kuhnlein’s opening salvo in what will be known for its strangeness. David Lindsey the author of A Voyage to Arcturus once suggested that the leit-motif of all fantastic literature is its “strangeness”. Mark Fisher in his essay on The Weird and Eerie tells us,

“What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us”. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.”

This is the feeling I get in reading Kuhnelin’s short vignettes and stories, a sense of that fusion of Body Horror, SF, and the whole gamut of fantastic literature ala Stanislaw Lem and P.K. Dick among others. To say his vision is warped is not a demeaning term but rather the state of our world as it shifts into the posthuman realms of the Outside. An Outside that we do not so much know as feel our way into growing new sense organs that must combine with all the known and unknown aspects of organic, metal, and artificial experience and experiments. Throw such creatures as have moved off into this realm into a world for disability rejects and one is aware that survival is not only a mode of being but a mode of non-being as well. Is this hell? Depends on one’s viewpoint and mythologies. In the old monotheistic religion’s hell was a place of absolute pain and punishment, a torture chamber for the priestly class’s dark mendaciousness. In the secular world hell is other people (or creatures?) as Sartre would express it in his bland fashion. In the posthuman world hell may be just another mode of survival in a realm where even Freud’s ‘death drive’ no longer demarcates the limit and litmus test of our secret secretions.

This is David Kuhnlein’s dark fable of our dishumanization at the hands of our own transhumanist experience/experiments. The supposed future of our desperate dreams becomes a lonely planet of rejects who are stuffed away in a Real of absolute loss to fend for themselves the best they can. As one character says:

“Where there is meat,” Jo said, “there’s hope.”

You can find David’s work on Amazon: here.