Genre bleed, reproduction and the climate crisis in Louisa Hall's Reproduction (2023)

This paper argues that Louisa Hall's Reproduction (2023) represents an example of genre bleed; a text that engages with multiple genres in order to represent the crisis of the contemporary moment. It argues that pregnancy should be read as a form with specific affordances (following Caroline Levine's work), and that such a position has implications for the wider field of medical humanities and specifically literature and medicine where texts are often grouped on the basis of illnesses, disabilities or medical conditions. The paper situates science fiction as a genre that has always had birth and creation at its heart and explores the importance of birth as a metaphor in science fiction, before turning to examine the depiction of birth (as metaphor and as itself) in Reproduction. Reproduction is a contemporary retelling of Frankenstein that uses a number of genre conventions in order to navigate its subject matter including science fiction, dystopia and autofiction. Through a reading of Hall's novel, this paper argues that the apocalyptic themes that characterise the contemporary landscape-most centrally the climate crisis and the precarity of the future-are provoking contemporary reflections on reproduction and its complications. The provisional nature of the future-the unlikeliness that the future will take place, the inability to imagine a stable future-creates a generic pressure on science fiction, a genre which has always relied on the fantasy of a future, particularly the future as a space for technological development. This pressure on the genre results in the kind of self-conscious genre-bleeding to be found in Reproduction.