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With luminous precision and conceptual rigour, S.C. Hickman (of the iconic Social Ecologies blog) traces the first eight volumes of Daniel Y. Harris’ hypercomplex epic poem The Posthuman Series as both archive and organism: a recursive architecture of daemonology, cosmology, and code. His study reveals Harris as a poet whose xenopoetics operates not merely as theme but as structure, where language itself mutates into the circuitry of the posthuman. This is criticism as interface and mystical hermeneutics. Indeed, more than an interpretation, Hickman inhabits the recursive engine of Harris’ thought. The result is a text as rare and alive as the one it anatomises: precise, speculative, malwaric, and contagiously attuned to the evolving ecologies of poetry.
—Andrew C. Wenaus, author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature (Lexington Books, 2021) and Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies and Associate Faculty Member at Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario.
The Xenopoetics of Daniel Y. Harris is far more than a wonderful introduction to one of the most interesting experimental poetry projects of our time, but first and foremost a deep and detailed study about xenopoiesis—the poetic force emanating from the ever-evolving intellectual environment with which Harris' poetry is entangled. Following Hickman's analysis of the eight volumes of Harris' The Posthuman Series, we might realize that, being the posthuman condition, by definition, ungraspable, the human-as-posthuman xenopoetic viewpoint is the only one that remains available—both philosophically and aesthetically— to write about the present. As Hickman writes, systems do not end with transcendence or apocalypse but with grotesque aftermath. What remains is residue, the abject trace that cannot be assimilated.
—Germán Sierra, author of Zipf Maneuvers: On Non-Reprintable Materials (with Andrew C. Wenaus, Erratum Press Academic Division, 2025) and Associate Professor of Biochemistry, and a member of the Humanities Research Institute (iHUS) at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
S.C. Hickman is a literary writer, independent scholar and critical theorist whose work explores the intersections of philosophy, theology, literature, and the posthuman. His essays and fictions trace the hidden machinery of thought and the subterranean histories of technē, weaving myth, theory, and critique into a singular recursive thread. He writes from the margins of the academy, where literature becomes a site of experiment, autopsy, and illumination. His publications include Artstation, BlazeVOX Journal, Cengiz Erdem, Diffractions and Onscenes. His website with accompanying blog is located at socialecologies.wordpress.com and is entitled “The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts” in which his scholarly essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and digital art are archived in the following categories “Chthonic Necropolis,” “Weird Literature,” “Disquisitions,” “Politics of SF,” “Accelerationism”
