Tears in Rain: An Ecogothic Hardboiled Tribute to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Abstract

Tears in Rain is set in Madrid in 2109, a large city in a heavily polluted dystopic world which has seen several wars, alien contacts, genetic engineering, teletransportation, pollution and dramatic climate changes due to ecophobia and a limitless appetite for resource exploitation. It is a world in which the management, privatization and monopolization of vital resources by large multinationals have caused scarcity; exacerbating the environmental injustice towards those who contribute least to it. Mixing the SF with the Postmodern EcoGothic and the hardboiled model, this fictional society is immersed in a civilizational crisis that affects our own conception as subjects. This situation of environmental injustice  translates into social tensions and the marginalization of those humans, replicants and aliens who are forced to live in the most degraded areas. These underprivileged marginalized beings serve to renegotiate human identity, but also to ignite fanatical fundamentalisms that define their identity in aggressive opposition to the ‘other’. The goal of this article is to explore fear, the dissolution of the self, the construction of peoples as monstruous others, the preoccupation of bodies which are modified and nature as a space of crisis as markers of Postmodern EcoGothic in Rosa Montero’s novel.