American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs theory, first proposed in 1943, positions self-actualisation at the apex of human motivation and flourishing. According to Maslow, it is only after an individual’s basic physiological needs are met – along with the need for safety, love and esteem – that they can go on to achieve their fullest human potential, finding meaning and purpose in their lives.

“What a man can be, he must be,” Maslow states, on his way to explaining that the specific shape this self-actualisation takes will “vary greatly from person to person”.

What’s less well-known is that a year before his death in 1970, the revered psychologist revised his theory, creating an even higher stratum of motivation, which he reserved for self-transcendence. This refers to “transcendence of the selfish Self” and “implies a wider circle of identifications, i.e., with more people approaching the limit of identification with all human beings”.

Review: Arborescence – Rhett Davis (Hachette)

Rhett Davis’s latest novel Arborescence offers up a sort Maslovian dreamscape of transcendental potential.

The novel is set in a not-too-distant future where people are being used as avatars by self-actualising, deadpan artificial intelligences. With humanity going to hell in a handbasket, the possibility of escaping one’s ego and body begins to look more and more appealing to more and more people. What starts off with the odd green shoot here and there quickly grows into a fully-fledged forest, as people start literally turning into trees. Or, as the protagonist’s biosocial anthropologist partner puts it: “I think what it means to be human might be changing.”

Arborescence is a thematically and aesthetically consistent successor to Davis’s 2022 debut Hovering, which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for an unpublished manuscript and went on to be shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The postmodern sway over that subtly surreal earlier novel continues in Arborescence, with nods to the likes of Don DeLillo, John Barth, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.

The ethical imperative and turn toward sincerity typical of post-postmodernism (sometimes called “new sincerity”) also finds its way into the story via the guidance of American satirist George Saunders, whom Davis cited as an influence in an interview........

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