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Full Description
Shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards (Non-Fiction) 2022
Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2022
SF has
long been understood as a literature of radical potential, capable of imagining
entirely new worlds and ways of being. Yet SF has been slow to embrace
posthumanist ideas about the human subject. The human of the SF tradition is
instead a liminal being, caught somewhere between the transcendent 'Man' of
classical humanism and the subversive 'cyborg' of posthumanist thought.
This
study offers a critical history of the 'human' in SF. By examining a range
of SF works from 1818 to the 1970s, it seeks to answer some key questions: What
role does technology play in defining what it means to be—or not to be—human?
How do these writers understand the relationship between humanity and the rest
of nature? And how can we use SF to re-examine our ethical position towards the
non-human world and move to more egalitarian understandings of the human
subject?
Contents
Introduction: 'Beyond the common range of men': H.G. Wells, the OncoMouse, and the Human in Anglo-American SF
1. Worlds Lost and Gained: Evolution, Primitivism, and the Pre-Human in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Jack London's The Iron Heel
2. Soma and Skylarks: Technocracy, Agency and the Trans-Human in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark Series
3. Homo Gestalt: Atomics, Empire, and the Supra-Human in Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars
4. Disaster and Redemption: Utopia, Nature, and the Post-Human in J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed
Conclusion: Bio/Techno/Homo: The Future of the Human in SF
