Nonhuman Pasts in Contemporary New Weird Fiction: Agency, Voice and Entangled Temporalities in China Miéville’s Work

In this paper, I examine how contemporary New Weird fiction reconfigures multispecies relations through nonhuman agency and entangled temporalities. In this way, the main objective is to analyse how this genre transcends allegorical functions to present nonhuman beings as biographical subjects and bearers of historical memory. Drawing on a theoretical framework that integrates Critical Animal Studies, posthumanism and narratology, I argue that speculative fiction serves as a mythopoetic space, where alternative, more-than-human pasts can be imagined beyond linear human history. Through the analysis of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Un Lun Dun (2007) and other selected works by the author, this study explores the textual mechanisms, such as focalisation and heterochrony, that enable nonhuman memories to emerge within the narrative present. This paper concludes that New Weird fiction does not merely reimagine alterity, but also constructs a sort of multispecies memory, which is essential for a new ethics of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, it may be argued that contemporary fantasy acts as a critical tool to rethink myth through a postanthropocentric lens, allowing the appearance of paths towards shared and multispecies futures.