Naomi Mitchison’s (1897–1999) science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) offers a speculative exploration of human-technology relations, particularly as they intersect with reproduction, interspecies communication and embodied scientific experimentation. This article argues that Mitchison’s novel can be read as a sustained reflection on reproductive technologies, where bodies, affective relations and technoscientific practices merge into what we conceptualise as biomachines. The biomachine should here be understood as a formation that operates as a site of material reproduction, affective attachment and ethical negotiation. Through episodes involving grafting, haploid reproduction and interspecies interference, the novel stages reproductive scenarios that destabilise normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, ethics and the continuity of the self. Mitchison’s protagonist, the spacewoman Mary, inhabits thresholds – of species, systems, places and temporalities – and functions as a reproductive actor across biological and machinic boundaries. Reading Memoirs of a Spacewoman through the lens of reproductive biomachines allows us to trace how processes of individuation unfold in entangled configurations of care, control and transformation as well as normative moral systems. The article thus positions Mitchison’s novel as a feminist speculative archive that anticipates current concerns around biotechnological reproduction, post-human embodiment and technological mediation. Its imaginative rendering of biomachinic reproduction challenges logics of mastery and normalcy by foregrounding improvisation, vulnerability and ethical openness as conditions of life. In doing so, the novel not only reflects but expands contemporary debates on reproductive technologies, offering speculative insights into how time, relationality and technicity shape what counts as human life
Steiner et al. (Wed,) studied this question.