| Sumario: | This paper explores the relationship between technological novum, estrangement, and cognition in Philip Reeve's Railhead trilogy. Set in a futuristic world governed by AI, the trilogy features humans, drones, and androids traveling across the galaxy with sentient trains. Building on Darko Suvin's (1979) theory of alternative worlds in science fiction, which posits that such worlds are created through the defamiliarization of empirical material from the real world, this paper will analyze the posthumanist and ecocritical conditions of Reeve's world-building. Specifically, these strategies generate cognitive estrangement concerning the relationship between technology and the human/non-human environments.
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