Sign Systems and Shared Worlds: Nonhuman Communication, Collective Knowledge and Epistemic Justice in Contemporary Speculative Fiction

Abstract

Contemporary speculative fiction unsettles anthropocentric assumptions about language, intelligence and the production of knowledge. This article compares Laline Paull’s The Bees (2014) to Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea (2022) and The Tusks of Extinction (2024), exploring how the novels represent the conditions under which non-human knowledge is produced, recognized and transmitted. Drawing on biosemiotics and critical posthumanism in conversation with Andrew Lopez's account of epistemic injustice towards non-human animals, it develops a comparative framework based on recognition, access and continuity. The key argument is that the novels depict epistemic harm not merely as a failure to interpret non-human signs but as the institutional restriction of the very environments and social relations through which practical knowledge can flow. In Paull's hive caste is the source of authority which controls access to sensory information; in Nayler's oceanic enclave corporate power turns scientific attention into a potential tool of appropriation; and in the de-extinction narrative, biological restoration is simply not enough without the recovery of the skills that are socially transmitted. The novels are not being read as descriptions of actual animal species. Rather they are being used as a lens through which to examine the political and ethical dimensions of human authority over other ways of knowing. The article makes a contribution to contemporary literary studies by linking multispecies representation to the distribution and preservation of epistemic goods.