Entering the Chthulucene? Making Kin with the Non-human in Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s Starbound Trilogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s YA Starbound Trilogy takes its readers to a faraway future in which humanity has colonized several foreign planets. This is made possible through the invention of hyperspace travel by engineer and entrepreneur Roderick LaRoux, who—upon discovering that the dimensions affected by this mode of travel are inhabited by a sentient collective consciousness—imprisons and enslaves parts of this consciousness to exploit them to maximize his profits. Throughout the trilogy, six teenage protagonists encounter the imprisoned sentient non-humans (known as “whispers”), form collaborative relationships with them, and eventually set them free. In this article, I argue that while the Starbound Trilogy advocates for multispecies justice through its representation of teenagers who form alliances with non-human beings and stand up to corporate practices exploiting them, the novels ultimately fall short of abandoning their anthropocentric perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".