The Posthuman Patriarchal Villain as Absolute Military Threat : Winston Duarte's Wars in The Expanse Novel Series
Martín Alegre, Sara (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística)

Publicación:	London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2025
Resumen:	Following my own work in Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort (2020) and on masculinity and sf, I discuss how posthumanism and transhumanism help enhance warmongering patriarchal villainy. This chapter discusses thus how Corey's series is a warning not so much about hostile first contact with aliens but about the difficulties of progressing as long as warmongering male patriarchal villainy persists. The warning is manifested not only through Duarte but also through the villains Dresden and Mao, who run Protogen, the corporation illegally experimenting with the protomolecule before Duarte steals it. Duarte's difficulties to remain human and his megalomaniac decision turn humankind into a single entity to defeat a more powerful alien species, are the stuff of pulpish space opera. However, the popularity of Corey's highly entertaining series means that for many persons the ideas about the posthuman come basically from sf of this type, and not from intellectual debate, and that war remains a center of attention on connection with this topic. The Expanse is a series of nine space opera novels-Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban's War (2012), Abaddon's Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon's Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat's Wrath (2019) and Leviathan Falls (2021)- accompanied by a short fiction collection (Memory's Legion, 2022), by American author James S. A. Corey, the penname of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. The series, popularized by its SyFy/Amazon adaptation (2013-), narrates how captain James Holden and his crew deflect the threat posed by a protomolecule engineered by an extinct alien civilization. This protomolecule radically transforms human bodies, which rebel Martian Admiral Winston Duarte (who appears in the last three novels) takes advantage of to enhance his own body and establish a planetary military dictatorship after waging war for control of the portals linking the planets in the Solar system and elsewhere.
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Lengua:	Anglès
Documento:	Capítol de llibre ; Versió publicada
Materia:	Embodiment ; Gender ; Masculinity ; Posthumanism ; Science fiction ; Space opera ; Transhumanism ; Villainy
Publicado en:	Wars We Never Fought: Armed Confict in Speculative Fiction, 2026, p. 177-194, ISBN 9798765121535

Disponible a partir de: 2100-12-01 32 p, 2.1 MB

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