How Earthlings Challenges Our Ideas About Healing, Chosen Family, and Imagination

Queers at the End of the World is a thoughtful, nerdy, and very queer conversation on the apocalypse. We discuss classic and contemporary novels, poetry, comics, games, tv-shows, and films that help us understand our dystopian moment—and imagine what could come next.

Nat and Nina get into Earthlings, Sayaka Murata’s novel about aliens, dissociation, hedgehogs, trauma, violence, and cannibalism in our very own dystopia. Published in Japan in 2018 and translated to English by Ginny Tapley Takemori in 2020, Earthlings is like a lot of great queer art in that it’s somehow nauseating and thrilling all at once. It challenges our ideas about healing, chosen family, and imagination, and we’re so excited to talk about it. That said, this episode has a big old content warning attached. We talk about sexual assault, child abuse, and other violence throughout the episode.

If you need someone to talk to, no matter when you were assaulted (or even if, you don’t have to say), you can contact your local rape crisis center, visit rainn.org, or call the national rape crisis hotline at 1-800-656-4673.

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