Science Fiction and the Posthuman Shift
*This is an essay published as part of Gale Researcher's collection, 20th and 21st Centuries in American Literature, made available here for viewing. The essay may not be republished without the express permission of Gale Cengage.
ARTICLE SUMMARY
The article tracks the relationship between posthumanism and speculative fiction, particularly science fiction. Over the past half century or so, science fiction has incorporated posthuman imagery in an intensely critical manner, meaning that it not only pursues posthuman visions for their own sake but does so in order to raise questions about what constitutes the human: human being but also human values. Tracing the development of science fiction since the late 1960s, this article articulates the various ways that the posthuman appears in literary texts and how its manifestations serve cultural and even political purposes. Posthumanist science fiction speaks to issues of race, sex, and gender and reveals how these institutions are closely tied to preconceptions about human essence and behavior. The story of the posthuman is also the story of the human—the discovery that the human is not only something we are, but something we made. Properly understood, posthumanism is more than a study of how technology has transformed, augmented, or enhanced humanity; it is a study of how the human mind and body, both of which are often assumed to be the essence or origin of human being, are in fact discursive constructions. In other words the values and definitions of humanism are not traceable to any natural source but are produced by cultural conditions: the economic, legal, and political structures in which we are all embedded. The story of how we became human is a posthuman story.
In terms of literary imagery and tropes, the posthuman appears well before the second half of the twentieth century, at least as early as Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851). Throughout the nineteenth century, traces of the posthuman manifest in a number of gothic and early science fiction (SF) texts, emerging in strong form in novels such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells (1866–1946), and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). The speculative interests of these fictions persist into the twentieth century in the publications of the Gernsback era, when most American SF was restricted to popular venues such as pulp magazines. Eventually writers such as Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), and Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) would expand the cultural influence of SF during its “Golden Age” of the 1940s and 1950s. As interested in science and technology as these stories were, however, they often remained entrenched in humanist values of individualism and cultural progress (a notable exception being 1953 novel Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, 1917–2008). With the advent of the Cold War, and the cultural unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, SF began to explore posthuman images and concepts that throw older values and institutions into doubt.
In its postwar form posthumanism is more than a set of speculative images depicting alternatives to human existence; it is a poignant critique of humanist values, many of which derive from the European Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles describes the history of humanism as the construction of the “liberal self,” or the cultural belief in human being as a self-sustaining and self-governing essence (1999, 3). For Hayles the human is a social construction, not an original essence: something produced by centuries of legal and philosophical discourses aimed at providing a definition for the human. Compared to the centuries-long history of Enlightenment humanism, critical interest in posthumanism is relatively recent. In What Is Posthumanism?, Cary Wolfe describes the term as having appeared in the humanities and social sciences “during the mid-1990s” (2010, xii). Traces of posthumanist theory are present, however, in poststructuralist writings such “The Ends of Man” (1972) by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and The Order of Things (1966) by Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Despite the variety of approaches throughout posthumanism’s discursive history, they all share at least one common concern: illuminating the historical processes that displace the human from its position as a source of meaning and power.
Philip K. Dick’s Posthuman Androids
As a literary figure, the human operates according to several structural binaries, the foremost of which is human and nonhuman—a primary distinction that falls back on the binaries of self/other and inside/outside. Posthumanist literary critics often focus on texts that call these binaries into question by depicting them in ambiguous or confusing ways. Postwar speculative fiction in particular offers no
shortage of posthumanist representations: for example the android/cyborg, which blurs the line between the organic and the technological, or artificial consciousness, which blurs the line between the animate and the inanimate. Since the 1960s SF and other related brands of speculative fiction have explored increasingly posthumanist expressions, invoking nonhuman images for the purpose of emphasizing the contingency and artificiality of humanist values. These literary expressions often appear in the form of conceptual reversals, or moments in which the text radically undermines its audience’s expectations, such as the conclusion to I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson (1926–2013), in which the protagonist realizes he has become a figure of terror to the transformed race of vampiric humans. The novel’s posthumanist framework emerges in these closing moments, as readers discover an unexpected association with the novel’s horrific creatures: an association that reframes the identity of the human.
Whereas authors have heavily featured figures such as the vampire and the zombie in posthumanist narratives, many authors since the 1960s have instead focused on artificial intelligence, complex machines, and cybernetic technologies, such as in the work of Philip K. Dick (1928–1982). In Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the author imagines a dystopian future crippled by war, in which androids are mass produced to act as servants for humans. The novel follows two main protagonists: Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who “retires” escaped androids, and John Isidore, who suffers cognitive impairment due to fallout from the war and offers his home to several renegade androids. Identical to humans in every physical sense, androids differ only in their inability to experience empathy toward living things, a trait that Deckard exploits by administering empathy tests. As the narrative develops, however, Dick complicates this distinction by raising the possibility that androids, as imitative creatures, may in fact develop the capacity for empathy. The text introduces another element to this confusion when Deckard realizes that he feels empathy toward androids—technically inanimate, nonliving objects. Destabilizing the categorical function of empathy, the novel presents its readers with an uncomfortable possibility: that empathy is only meaningful as an imitative or communicative effect and therefore something capable of being reproduced mechanically.
In addition to blurring the boundary between androids and humans in an empathic sense, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also explicitly connects the human ideologically to institutions of racism and colonization. Early in the novel, the character John Isidore hears an advertisement for androids on the television: “—duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot …” ([1968] 2007, 445). Invoking the history of slavery in the antebellum American South, the novel establishes another cultural layer on top of the human/android distinction. The narrator even suggests that the colonization efforts on Mars, underway during the narrative, would collapse without the manufacturing of androids. In other words the human/android binary is analogous to the racial binary of white/black, respectively—the suggestion being that humanism is historically intertwined with the legacy of colonialism, racism, and slavery.
Posthuman Politics
Dick’s novel illuminates how posthuman imagery can make strong political and cultural statements. Following the publication of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, numerous other SF authors explored the ramifications of posthumanism in different ways. Feminist writers such as Marge Piercy (1936–) and Joanna Russ (1937–2011) explore speculative utopian realities in which gender roles between men and women have been radically transformed. One of the most striking expressions of feminist posthumanism, however, appears in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–), which imagines a species of genderless humans on the fictional planet of Gethen. The Gethenians only assume a particular sex during a brief mating period each month known as kemmer. The novel describes the efforts of Genly Ai, an ambassador on behalf of an intergalactic league known as the Ekumen, to bring the Gethenians into the larger community of planets and peoples. Erasing the strictures of patriarchal culture, Le Guin’s novel offers a posthuman vision in which gender no longer plays a determining role in political and social interactions. Readers experience the estranging Gethenian society through Ai’s perspective: “My efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own” ([1969] 2000, 11–12). Readers struggle along with the narrator as he attempts to reconcile his acutely gendered orientation with the bisexual society in which he finds himself.
The complexities of sexuality and racial difference also feature extensively in the works of Samuel R. Delany (1942–), often manifesting in ways that challenge normative associations of race and gender. Novels such as Triton (1976) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) examine the literal augmentation of sexuality and gender through various means: technology in Triton and alien anatomy in Stars in My Pocket. Depicting sometimes-explicit scenes of sex and violence, Delany’s fiction draws its readers’ attentions to how race and gender structure not only physical and biological but sociocultural assumptions about the human. The work of Octavia Butler (1947–2006) is no less estranging, and her novel Dawn (1987) imagines a future in which an alien species called the Oankali removes humans from earth in the wake of a nuclear war. In an added twist on Le Guin’s genderless Gethenians, Butler’s Oankali possess three sexes: male, female, and the obscure Ooloi sex. As the novel’s protagonist, Lilith, learns, the Oankali have the ability to genetically alter human DNA and do so in an effort to prepare their human guests for a generations-long process of interspecies reproduction, which the Oankali translate as “trading”: “We trade the essence of ourselves. Our genetic material for yours” ([1987] 1997, 39). The narrative depicts Lilith’s experience in a manner troubling for readers, as she attempts to acclimate to the Oankali’s extremely alien appearance while being taken and held against her will. Butler’s sympathetic portrayal of the Oankali complicates matters for the readers, who must negotiate their resistance to the Oankali’s actions and simultaneous curiosity toward the aliens’ seemingly benign intentions.
Issues of race and gender lend themselves helpfully to posthuman imagery, and they find many outlets during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when the political ramifications of racial and gender discrimination were surfacing in unavoidable and sometimes violent ways. Writers of speculative fiction sought in posthumanist figures and tropes a means of expressing not only the alienation faced by members of marginal communities, but possibilities for political agency that did not conform to humanist values. Figures such as the android and the alien allowed writers to emphasize points of difference from the human but without succumbing to a reactionary protection and privileging of the human. Instead, these writers encouraged their audiences to think about humanism in a more critical way—to perceive its exclusive and even oppressive effects on certain identities. While the political by no means disappears in more recent SF of the late 1980s and 1990s, it does become less directly observable, especially as speculative fiction assumes a more radically posthumanist form with the emergence of the cyberpunk and biopunk movements.
The Technologies of Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is most readily associated with the work of William Gibson (1948–), particularly his novel Neuromancer (1984), in which he popularized the term cyberspace, coined in his earlier short story “Burning Chrome” (1982). Neal Stephenson (1959–) and Bruce Sterling (1954–) are also cited as influencing the movement, yet critics usually identify Gibson’s fiction in the early to mid-1980s as
cyberpunk’s watershed moment. Set in a future in which technology and metropolitan density have spread across the planet and even into low-level orbit in the form of massive space stations, Neuromancer explores questions of human consciousness and intelligence in an age of virtual experience and technological mediation. The novel’s protagonist, Henry Dorsett Case, is an excomputer hacker hired by the mysterious Armitage to assist in a job on an unknown target. In a style comparable to that of Thomas Pynchon (1937–), Case finds himself embroiled in a multilayered conspiracy involving technologically altered humans, an incestuous corporate family, and an artificial intelligence named Wintermute. As he unravels the many strands of his job, Case is confronted with numerous episodes and situations that challenge his conceptions toward human being.
One of Gibson’s most effective means of interrogating the set of assumptions that surround human consciousness and intelligence is his use of a popular SF trope: the virtual replication of human personalities as computer code. Neuromancer makes use of this trope in the figure of the Flatline named Dixie McCoy, a ROM (read-only memory; a type of memory used in computers and other electronic devices) construct composed of a deceased hacker named McCoy Pauley. When Case asks the Flatline if he is sentient, the construct offers a subtly ambiguous response: “Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess …” ([1984] 2000, 128). Acknowledging the metaphysical dilemma of his existence, McCoy highlights the ambiguity of his humanity. He can respond in a human manner, and even feel the sensation of being human, yet he suggests that his lack of an anthropomorphic body prohibits him from qualifying as human. Despite conventional humanist models that elevate consciousness as a seat of human essence and value, the Flatline denies the human element of his existence by citing his disembodiment.
While Dixie’s language seems to underscore the importance of the body for human existence, however, the novel troubles the prospect that the body might serve as the primary source of human being. In a disturbing passage, the character Molly Millions describes her dehumanizing experience as a sex worker in the narrative’s technological future, which involves being reduced to nothing but bodily functions and impulses: “I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain.… You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space” ([1984] 2000, 143). This passage reverses the Flatline’s experience of disembodied consciousness, imagining a scenario of intensely embodied non-consciousness. In both cases, however, the text emphasizes the inhumanity of the characters, suggesting that human essence can be located neither in the mind nor in the body. These estranging depictions raise perplexing questions as to the qualities of consciousness and embodiment, even rendering ambiguous what might constitute these qualities. These ambiguities culminate in the appearance of the titular AI, whose complexity allows it to absorb and perfectly replicate human personality.
The Technologies of Biopunk
Gibson’s cyberpunk vision of technological prosthesis and augmentation challenges the traditional notions often associated with human bodies and minds. In a similar fashion the biopunk imagery found in the works of Greg Bear (1951–) presents an equally compelling critique of humanism’s foundations. In one of Bear’s more famous stories, “Blood Music” (1983), scientist Vergil Ulam injects himself with technologically crafted “nucleoprotein computers” ([1983] 2002, 21)—nanotechnology modeled on human genetic material but capable of increasing its own complexity. Vergil injects himself for the purpose of smuggling the nanotech out of his lab, but as time goes on the microscopic computers begin to alter his genetic makeup, to transform his physical body and even to communicate with him: to rebuild him “from the inside out” ([1983] 2002, 20). By the story’s conclusion, the nanotech has spread to the narrator and others, inaugurating the rapid process of transforming humanity into the material substrate of a new kind of intelligence, an intelligence not centered in individual human consciousness.
“Blood Music” shares conceptual similarities with Neuromancer regarding the transformative effect that technology has on human subjects. Both texts explore how technology undermines the foundations of human being, revealing the fragility and impermanence of those foundations. Speculative fiction suggests yet another element of posthumanist thought that, while they might not be detectable in earlier works such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, becomes more apparent in later biopunk and cyberpunk narratives: that the human is perhaps not something we are or ever were at one point but only something we imagine and approximate. This revelation finds a striking expression in recent works of black cyberpunk and Afro-futurism, such the short story collection Futureland (2001) by Walter Mosley (1952–). Mosley unites the imagery of cyberpunk with the politics of race, imagining technology as a determining factor in the struggle to overcome racial inequality. Like Mosley, many contemporary writers perceive in the posthuman a tool for combatting the exclusionary effects of humanism. As speculative fiction and SF imagine increasingly estranging forms of posthuman existence, a historical shift occurs by which we perceive “the human” as a brief cultural paradigm, or particular way of organizing our sense of the world.
We Have Never Been Human
Since the 1990s speculative fiction has developed in radical and imaginative directions, often situating the human in the rapidly receding past. Such representations continue to encourage the sense that we have never been human, as Donna Haraway in When Species Meet suggests (2008, 1), and have found their way into texts by writers not often categorized as “speculative”: Thomas Pynchon, whose Bleeding Edge (2013) imagines a virtual afterlife for 9/11 victims; or Don DeLillo (1936–), whose Zero K (2016) depicts a billionaire’s search for immortality via cryopreservation. British speculative fiction writers such as M. John Harrison (1945–) and China Miéville (1972–) have also pushed deeper into posthumanist territory. A landmark case for the posthuman’s contemporary trajectory is the work of Peter Watts (1958–), whose 2006 novel Blindsight depicts an interstellar mission to make first contact with an unknown and potentially intelligent alien organism. None of the novel’s characters can be comfortably thought of as human, and the narrator, Siri Keeton, ends by contemplating the meaning of the human and whether he qualifies.
Watts’s work marks a recent turn in speculative fiction toward cognitive science and neuroscience, and an interrogation of the evolutionary development of consciousness, including artificial consciousness. American writers such as Jonathan Lethem (1964–), Richard Powers (1957–), and Jeff VanderMeer (1968–) have also explored the complexities of cognition in their work, resulting in striking reversals by which human thought and consciousness appears less as a possession of human being and more as a material effect of evolution. In other words contemporary speculative fiction often treats consciousness not as the culmination of evolutionary development, but as an evolutionary accident: temporary, and liable to be superseded by another kind of intelligence. As more contemporary writers pursue the mysteries and complexities of human consciousness, the appearance of the human will continue to transform, contributing to the evolving field of posthuman knowledge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY (Primary sources, works cited, and further readings)
Bear, Greg. “Blood Music.” 1983. In The Collected Stories of Greg Bear, 15–37. New York: Tor Books, 2002.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013.
Butler, Octavia E. Dawn: Book One of the Xenogenesis Series. 1987. Reprint, New York: Warner, 1997.
Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Delany, Samuel R. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. 1984. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton. 1976. Reprint, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Ends of Man.” 1968. In The Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 109–136. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. In Four Novels of the 1960s, edited by Jonathan Lethem, 431–608. New York: Library of America, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Gibson, William. “Burning Chrome.” 1982. In Burning Chrome, 179–204. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. Reprint, New York: Ace Books, 2000.
Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995.
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the
Late Twentieth Century.” 1985. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–182. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. 1969. Reprint, New York: Ace Books, 2000.
Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. 1954. Reprint, New York: Tor Books, 2007.
Mosley, Walter. Futureland. New York: Warner Books, 2001.
Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tor Books, 2006.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
ARTICLE SUMMARY
The article tracks the relationship between posthumanism and speculative fiction, particularly science fiction. Over the past half century or so, science fiction has incorporated posthuman imagery in an intensely critical manner, meaning that it not only pursues posthuman visions for their own sake but does so in order to raise questions about what constitutes the human: human being but also human values. Tracing the development of science fiction since the late 1960s, this article articulates the various ways that the posthuman appears in literary texts and how its manifestations serve cultural and even political purposes. Posthumanist science fiction speaks to issues of race, sex, and gender and reveals how these institutions are closely tied to preconceptions about human essence and behavior. The story of the posthuman is also the story of the human—the discovery that the human is not only something we are, but something we made. Properly understood, posthumanism is more than a study of how technology has transformed, augmented, or enhanced humanity; it is a study of how the human mind and body, both of which are often assumed to be the essence or origin of human being, are in fact discursive constructions. In other words the values and definitions of humanism are not traceable to any natural source but are produced by cultural conditions: the economic, legal, and political structures in which we are all embedded. The story of how we became human is a posthuman story.
In terms of literary imagery and tropes, the posthuman appears well before the second half of the twentieth century, at least as early as Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851). Throughout the nineteenth century, traces of the posthuman manifest in a number of gothic and early science fiction (SF) texts, emerging in strong form in novels such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells (1866–1946), and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). The speculative interests of these fictions persist into the twentieth century in the publications of the Gernsback era, when most American SF was restricted to popular venues such as pulp magazines. Eventually writers such as Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), and Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) would expand the cultural influence of SF during its “Golden Age” of the 1940s and 1950s. As interested in science and technology as these stories were, however, they often remained entrenched in humanist values of individualism and cultural progress (a notable exception being 1953 novel Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, 1917–2008). With the advent of the Cold War, and the cultural unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, SF began to explore posthuman images and concepts that throw older values and institutions into doubt.
In its postwar form posthumanism is more than a set of speculative images depicting alternatives to human existence; it is a poignant critique of humanist values, many of which derive from the European Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles describes the history of humanism as the construction of the “liberal self,” or the cultural belief in human being as a self-sustaining and self-governing essence (1999, 3). For Hayles the human is a social construction, not an original essence: something produced by centuries of legal and philosophical discourses aimed at providing a definition for the human. Compared to the centuries-long history of Enlightenment humanism, critical interest in posthumanism is relatively recent. In What Is Posthumanism?, Cary Wolfe describes the term as having appeared in the humanities and social sciences “during the mid-1990s” (2010, xii). Traces of posthumanist theory are present, however, in poststructuralist writings such “The Ends of Man” (1972) by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and The Order of Things (1966) by Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Despite the variety of approaches throughout posthumanism’s discursive history, they all share at least one common concern: illuminating the historical processes that displace the human from its position as a source of meaning and power.
Philip K. Dick’s Posthuman Androids
As a literary figure, the human operates according to several structural binaries, the foremost of which is human and nonhuman—a primary distinction that falls back on the binaries of self/other and inside/outside. Posthumanist literary critics often focus on texts that call these binaries into question by depicting them in ambiguous or confusing ways. Postwar speculative fiction in particular offers no
shortage of posthumanist representations: for example the android/cyborg, which blurs the line between the organic and the technological, or artificial consciousness, which blurs the line between the animate and the inanimate. Since the 1960s SF and other related brands of speculative fiction have explored increasingly posthumanist expressions, invoking nonhuman images for the purpose of emphasizing the contingency and artificiality of humanist values. These literary expressions often appear in the form of conceptual reversals, or moments in which the text radically undermines its audience’s expectations, such as the conclusion to I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson (1926–2013), in which the protagonist realizes he has become a figure of terror to the transformed race of vampiric humans. The novel’s posthumanist framework emerges in these closing moments, as readers discover an unexpected association with the novel’s horrific creatures: an association that reframes the identity of the human.
Whereas authors have heavily featured figures such as the vampire and the zombie in posthumanist narratives, many authors since the 1960s have instead focused on artificial intelligence, complex machines, and cybernetic technologies, such as in the work of Philip K. Dick (1928–1982). In Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the author imagines a dystopian future crippled by war, in which androids are mass produced to act as servants for humans. The novel follows two main protagonists: Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who “retires” escaped androids, and John Isidore, who suffers cognitive impairment due to fallout from the war and offers his home to several renegade androids. Identical to humans in every physical sense, androids differ only in their inability to experience empathy toward living things, a trait that Deckard exploits by administering empathy tests. As the narrative develops, however, Dick complicates this distinction by raising the possibility that androids, as imitative creatures, may in fact develop the capacity for empathy. The text introduces another element to this confusion when Deckard realizes that he feels empathy toward androids—technically inanimate, nonliving objects. Destabilizing the categorical function of empathy, the novel presents its readers with an uncomfortable possibility: that empathy is only meaningful as an imitative or communicative effect and therefore something capable of being reproduced mechanically.
In addition to blurring the boundary between androids and humans in an empathic sense, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also explicitly connects the human ideologically to institutions of racism and colonization. Early in the novel, the character John Isidore hears an advertisement for androids on the television: “—duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot …” ([1968] 2007, 445). Invoking the history of slavery in the antebellum American South, the novel establishes another cultural layer on top of the human/android distinction. The narrator even suggests that the colonization efforts on Mars, underway during the narrative, would collapse without the manufacturing of androids. In other words the human/android binary is analogous to the racial binary of white/black, respectively—the suggestion being that humanism is historically intertwined with the legacy of colonialism, racism, and slavery.
Posthuman Politics
Dick’s novel illuminates how posthuman imagery can make strong political and cultural statements. Following the publication of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, numerous other SF authors explored the ramifications of posthumanism in different ways. Feminist writers such as Marge Piercy (1936–) and Joanna Russ (1937–2011) explore speculative utopian realities in which gender roles between men and women have been radically transformed. One of the most striking expressions of feminist posthumanism, however, appears in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–), which imagines a species of genderless humans on the fictional planet of Gethen. The Gethenians only assume a particular sex during a brief mating period each month known as kemmer. The novel describes the efforts of Genly Ai, an ambassador on behalf of an intergalactic league known as the Ekumen, to bring the Gethenians into the larger community of planets and peoples. Erasing the strictures of patriarchal culture, Le Guin’s novel offers a posthuman vision in which gender no longer plays a determining role in political and social interactions. Readers experience the estranging Gethenian society through Ai’s perspective: “My efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own” ([1969] 2000, 11–12). Readers struggle along with the narrator as he attempts to reconcile his acutely gendered orientation with the bisexual society in which he finds himself.
The complexities of sexuality and racial difference also feature extensively in the works of Samuel R. Delany (1942–), often manifesting in ways that challenge normative associations of race and gender. Novels such as Triton (1976) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) examine the literal augmentation of sexuality and gender through various means: technology in Triton and alien anatomy in Stars in My Pocket. Depicting sometimes-explicit scenes of sex and violence, Delany’s fiction draws its readers’ attentions to how race and gender structure not only physical and biological but sociocultural assumptions about the human. The work of Octavia Butler (1947–2006) is no less estranging, and her novel Dawn (1987) imagines a future in which an alien species called the Oankali removes humans from earth in the wake of a nuclear war. In an added twist on Le Guin’s genderless Gethenians, Butler’s Oankali possess three sexes: male, female, and the obscure Ooloi sex. As the novel’s protagonist, Lilith, learns, the Oankali have the ability to genetically alter human DNA and do so in an effort to prepare their human guests for a generations-long process of interspecies reproduction, which the Oankali translate as “trading”: “We trade the essence of ourselves. Our genetic material for yours” ([1987] 1997, 39). The narrative depicts Lilith’s experience in a manner troubling for readers, as she attempts to acclimate to the Oankali’s extremely alien appearance while being taken and held against her will. Butler’s sympathetic portrayal of the Oankali complicates matters for the readers, who must negotiate their resistance to the Oankali’s actions and simultaneous curiosity toward the aliens’ seemingly benign intentions.
Issues of race and gender lend themselves helpfully to posthuman imagery, and they find many outlets during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when the political ramifications of racial and gender discrimination were surfacing in unavoidable and sometimes violent ways. Writers of speculative fiction sought in posthumanist figures and tropes a means of expressing not only the alienation faced by members of marginal communities, but possibilities for political agency that did not conform to humanist values. Figures such as the android and the alien allowed writers to emphasize points of difference from the human but without succumbing to a reactionary protection and privileging of the human. Instead, these writers encouraged their audiences to think about humanism in a more critical way—to perceive its exclusive and even oppressive effects on certain identities. While the political by no means disappears in more recent SF of the late 1980s and 1990s, it does become less directly observable, especially as speculative fiction assumes a more radically posthumanist form with the emergence of the cyberpunk and biopunk movements.
The Technologies of Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is most readily associated with the work of William Gibson (1948–), particularly his novel Neuromancer (1984), in which he popularized the term cyberspace, coined in his earlier short story “Burning Chrome” (1982). Neal Stephenson (1959–) and Bruce Sterling (1954–) are also cited as influencing the movement, yet critics usually identify Gibson’s fiction in the early to mid-1980s as
cyberpunk’s watershed moment. Set in a future in which technology and metropolitan density have spread across the planet and even into low-level orbit in the form of massive space stations, Neuromancer explores questions of human consciousness and intelligence in an age of virtual experience and technological mediation. The novel’s protagonist, Henry Dorsett Case, is an excomputer hacker hired by the mysterious Armitage to assist in a job on an unknown target. In a style comparable to that of Thomas Pynchon (1937–), Case finds himself embroiled in a multilayered conspiracy involving technologically altered humans, an incestuous corporate family, and an artificial intelligence named Wintermute. As he unravels the many strands of his job, Case is confronted with numerous episodes and situations that challenge his conceptions toward human being.
One of Gibson’s most effective means of interrogating the set of assumptions that surround human consciousness and intelligence is his use of a popular SF trope: the virtual replication of human personalities as computer code. Neuromancer makes use of this trope in the figure of the Flatline named Dixie McCoy, a ROM (read-only memory; a type of memory used in computers and other electronic devices) construct composed of a deceased hacker named McCoy Pauley. When Case asks the Flatline if he is sentient, the construct offers a subtly ambiguous response: “Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess …” ([1984] 2000, 128). Acknowledging the metaphysical dilemma of his existence, McCoy highlights the ambiguity of his humanity. He can respond in a human manner, and even feel the sensation of being human, yet he suggests that his lack of an anthropomorphic body prohibits him from qualifying as human. Despite conventional humanist models that elevate consciousness as a seat of human essence and value, the Flatline denies the human element of his existence by citing his disembodiment.
While Dixie’s language seems to underscore the importance of the body for human existence, however, the novel troubles the prospect that the body might serve as the primary source of human being. In a disturbing passage, the character Molly Millions describes her dehumanizing experience as a sex worker in the narrative’s technological future, which involves being reduced to nothing but bodily functions and impulses: “I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain.… You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space” ([1984] 2000, 143). This passage reverses the Flatline’s experience of disembodied consciousness, imagining a scenario of intensely embodied non-consciousness. In both cases, however, the text emphasizes the inhumanity of the characters, suggesting that human essence can be located neither in the mind nor in the body. These estranging depictions raise perplexing questions as to the qualities of consciousness and embodiment, even rendering ambiguous what might constitute these qualities. These ambiguities culminate in the appearance of the titular AI, whose complexity allows it to absorb and perfectly replicate human personality.
The Technologies of Biopunk
Gibson’s cyberpunk vision of technological prosthesis and augmentation challenges the traditional notions often associated with human bodies and minds. In a similar fashion the biopunk imagery found in the works of Greg Bear (1951–) presents an equally compelling critique of humanism’s foundations. In one of Bear’s more famous stories, “Blood Music” (1983), scientist Vergil Ulam injects himself with technologically crafted “nucleoprotein computers” ([1983] 2002, 21)—nanotechnology modeled on human genetic material but capable of increasing its own complexity. Vergil injects himself for the purpose of smuggling the nanotech out of his lab, but as time goes on the microscopic computers begin to alter his genetic makeup, to transform his physical body and even to communicate with him: to rebuild him “from the inside out” ([1983] 2002, 20). By the story’s conclusion, the nanotech has spread to the narrator and others, inaugurating the rapid process of transforming humanity into the material substrate of a new kind of intelligence, an intelligence not centered in individual human consciousness.
“Blood Music” shares conceptual similarities with Neuromancer regarding the transformative effect that technology has on human subjects. Both texts explore how technology undermines the foundations of human being, revealing the fragility and impermanence of those foundations. Speculative fiction suggests yet another element of posthumanist thought that, while they might not be detectable in earlier works such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, becomes more apparent in later biopunk and cyberpunk narratives: that the human is perhaps not something we are or ever were at one point but only something we imagine and approximate. This revelation finds a striking expression in recent works of black cyberpunk and Afro-futurism, such the short story collection Futureland (2001) by Walter Mosley (1952–). Mosley unites the imagery of cyberpunk with the politics of race, imagining technology as a determining factor in the struggle to overcome racial inequality. Like Mosley, many contemporary writers perceive in the posthuman a tool for combatting the exclusionary effects of humanism. As speculative fiction and SF imagine increasingly estranging forms of posthuman existence, a historical shift occurs by which we perceive “the human” as a brief cultural paradigm, or particular way of organizing our sense of the world.
We Have Never Been Human
Since the 1990s speculative fiction has developed in radical and imaginative directions, often situating the human in the rapidly receding past. Such representations continue to encourage the sense that we have never been human, as Donna Haraway in When Species Meet suggests (2008, 1), and have found their way into texts by writers not often categorized as “speculative”: Thomas Pynchon, whose Bleeding Edge (2013) imagines a virtual afterlife for 9/11 victims; or Don DeLillo (1936–), whose Zero K (2016) depicts a billionaire’s search for immortality via cryopreservation. British speculative fiction writers such as M. John Harrison (1945–) and China Miéville (1972–) have also pushed deeper into posthumanist territory. A landmark case for the posthuman’s contemporary trajectory is the work of Peter Watts (1958–), whose 2006 novel Blindsight depicts an interstellar mission to make first contact with an unknown and potentially intelligent alien organism. None of the novel’s characters can be comfortably thought of as human, and the narrator, Siri Keeton, ends by contemplating the meaning of the human and whether he qualifies.
Watts’s work marks a recent turn in speculative fiction toward cognitive science and neuroscience, and an interrogation of the evolutionary development of consciousness, including artificial consciousness. American writers such as Jonathan Lethem (1964–), Richard Powers (1957–), and Jeff VanderMeer (1968–) have also explored the complexities of cognition in their work, resulting in striking reversals by which human thought and consciousness appears less as a possession of human being and more as a material effect of evolution. In other words contemporary speculative fiction often treats consciousness not as the culmination of evolutionary development, but as an evolutionary accident: temporary, and liable to be superseded by another kind of intelligence. As more contemporary writers pursue the mysteries and complexities of human consciousness, the appearance of the human will continue to transform, contributing to the evolving field of posthuman knowledge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY (Primary sources, works cited, and further readings)
Bear, Greg. “Blood Music.” 1983. In The Collected Stories of Greg Bear, 15–37. New York: Tor Books, 2002.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013.
Butler, Octavia E. Dawn: Book One of the Xenogenesis Series. 1987. Reprint, New York: Warner, 1997.
Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Delany, Samuel R. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. 1984. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton. 1976. Reprint, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Ends of Man.” 1968. In The Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 109–136. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. In Four Novels of the 1960s, edited by Jonathan Lethem, 431–608. New York: Library of America, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Gibson, William. “Burning Chrome.” 1982. In Burning Chrome, 179–204. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. Reprint, New York: Ace Books, 2000.
Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995.
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the
Late Twentieth Century.” 1985. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–182. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. 1969. Reprint, New York: Ace Books, 2000.
Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. 1954. Reprint, New York: Tor Books, 2007.
Mosley, Walter. Futureland. New York: Warner Books, 2001.
Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tor Books, 2006.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
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