Posthuman voices: Alien infestation and the poetics of subjectivity

This article analyzes narrative representations of posthuman subjectivity in a range of sf texts that deal with a takeover of human beings by aliens, from Golden Age classics such as John Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (1938) and Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951) to the contemporary blockbusters Infected (2006) and Contagious (2008) by Scott Sigler. I argue for a narratological analysis of such texts in terms of their deployment of the techniques of voice and point of view and suggest that, rather than being dismissed as naïve political allegories, these works should be read in terms of discursive and ideological tensions within humanism.