If we can offer one criticism of popular science fiction works about the other-than-human, it is that they often withdraw from their own ambitions by retreating to the human sentimentality they claim to want to transcend. One of the hardest things for us to confront is our own thingness. This is why the desire “to boldly go where no man has gone before” and “to seek out new life and new civilizations” so often disappointingly returns us to life and civilization exactly as we know it.6
