By deconstructing these different approaches, this article reveals how Yancey’s series promotes an interesting framework for assessing our own potential posthumanity as well as the relation we entertain with those who do not entirely seem to fit within the traditional category of the human. Exposing the irreducible presence of the traces of each in the other and the field of discourse they inhabit, the series finally enacts this différance through the interplay of several variant discourses about transhumanist enhancement, hybrid posthumanity and a becoming-with that reveals the human already alien to itself. These ontological categories are then projected onto the becoming bodies of the novel’s young adult protagonists in order to underscore the structures of différance which underlie human and alien relations. Over the course of three books, the ontological status of both humans and aliens is continuously questioned and redefined, shifting our view from traditional paranoid notions of an Other hiding among us to an approach which sees this alien Other as always already part of the human, a shift which forces us to negotiate the boundaries of our own hybrid becomings. Starting from the vantage point of traditional invasion narratives, the novels quickly reveal the alien Other as essentially absent and replaced by a human-alien hybridity that engages in transhumanist notions of technological enhancement and enacts paradigmatic shifts in self-realization of the human as posthuman. Now, its the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. This article discusses negotiations of humanity and posthumanity in the contemporary alien invasion narrative of Rick Yancey’s Young Adult novel series The 5th Wave, The Infinite Sea and The Last Star.

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey