Deleuze and Guattari's plateau ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible …’ invokes a range of SF texts. Even more than the preface to Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze adjoins philosophy to SF, in A Thousand Plateaus the genre is accorded great significance: ‘Science fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things imperceptible’ (TP: 274). What interests Deleuze and Guattari about SF is its figures of contagion. They draw on a range of literature and film: Melville and Kafka are read alongside Lovecraft and Borges; the faces of Doctor Moreau's leopard men return (TP: 189, 273) and Scott Carey from Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) replaces Carroll's Alice (TP: 308), who preoccupied Deleuze throughout The Logic of Sense. The nonhuman animal, its viruses, bacteria, genes, deterritorialisations, nomadism, affects and intensities – that is, its capacity for contagion – is one of the most powerful figures in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze and Guattari's animal is one of the specific concepts that attracted Baudrillard's critical attention. His ‘The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses’ developed a sustained critique of their position. This chapter will focus on Deleuze and Guattari's becomings-animal. It will take seriously their thesis that there are three animals, Oedipal, State and demonic, and far from being a general taxonomy, they are ontological categories defined by the intertwinement of desire, technoscientific experimentation and investments of capital. This chapter will establish the organising theme contagion. In so doing, it will seek to show how Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and SF acquire a new relevance in biocapitalism.

To trace the line from control to contagion, we turn to the first SF text (Aldiss 2001), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), and the Oedipal animal, Frankenstein's monster. Thence we will look at the State animals in H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Erle C. Kenton's Island of Lost Souls (1932).