If robots and AI represent one trajectory of the future of humanity as imagined by sf, then biological change is the other, with an equally long tradition in the genre. This mode of sf has become particularly prominent since the 1990s, in the era of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and its promises of personalized medicine, but the idea of perfected embodiment was a central part of the sf imagination from the beginning, especially visible in the pulp tradition emerging from American magazines. The early, nineteenth-century iterations of such themes focus on evolutionary change, generally toward some superior form, although concerns about devolution were also apparent, especially in works by H. G. Wells.
Such texts respond to the popularization of Darwinian ideas and resultant disruption to previous understandings of human history and futures. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), for example, goes into the future of year 802,701 to discover that Victorian segregation of classes became so intensive as to prompt the speciation of humanity. At first, the Time Traveller thinks the elegant, pale Eloi (the gentry) are the dominant species, but he is soon discomforted by their childlike intellect. In contrast, the Morlocks, a darker, stockier hominid (the working class), seem to be monstrous animals but ultimately show more curiosity and initiative. He concludes that danger prompts evolutionary advance, and without it the Eloi are static. The novel’s symbolism questions the longstanding axiom that the upper classes have somehow earned their privilege through inherent superiority. The Traveller then proceeds some thirty million years into the future, long after humanity has gone extinct, briefly observing the strange creatures that now roam the earth. He makes a series of further jumps forward, until he sees the sun growing dim, before returning to his present day, further unsettling notions of human centrality from the point of view of evolutionary, cosmic time.
More common are works that envision the next stage of human evolution and the new capacities—increasingly associated with psychic powers such as telekinesis and telepathy. An important early work is Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), a future history of the species that explores our evolution over a timescale comparable to that of Wells’s Traveller. Current humanity is the first of eighteen species that will evolve, and alongside imagining these new iterations Stapledon narrates the social and political histories that cause speciation: for example, Second Men are all but wiped out by a war with Mars; Fifth Men leave a destroyed Earth for Venus and thus face different environmental conditions; Tenth Men are a new path of evolution, evolving from the animal species into which Ninth Men devolved. Fourth Men to Ninth Men are deliberately engineered by their predecessors, an idea that Stapledon drew from J. B. S. Haldane’s contemporary biological treatise Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924); the final Eighteenth Men have many gender variants and a group mind.
Haldane, a genetics researcher and Fellow of the Royal Society, also wrote the fictional The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), about a child of superior intellectwho presages the next stage of evolution but is destroyed by human jealousy. In their youth, Haldane and his sister Naomi Mitchison, who also went on to be a writer, explored Mendelian genetics in mice, even publishing their results, the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals.1 Mitchison mainly wrote outside the genre, but her novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), set far in the future, depicts a female researcher living in a society of gender equality and is notable for the inventive detail used to represent the distinct biology of species from many different planets, celebrating how variations in gender, intelligence, reproduction, and more might evolve differently. Mitchison’s work is an ideal demonstration of how social themes about gender and sexuality need not be divorced from rigorous engagement with science.
Haldane’s Daedalus also imagines a future of ectogenesis (coining the term) and in vitro fertilization, ideas that influenced Huxley in Brave New World. Whereas Huxley imagined such technology would be used for manipulative social control—the fetuses incubated in their bottles are selectively nurtured or damaged to ensure that birthrates match needed skills to sustain the class system—Haldane was optimistic about how science could be used to improve human health and society. Shulamith Firestone’s feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex (1970) returns to the idea of ectogenesis to argue that the bodily burdens of reproduction unduly disadvantaged women and that an artificial womb could thus offer freedom, an example of how the same technology may be envisioned to produce both dystopian and utopian futures. The early twentieth-century scientific imaginary is deeply entangled with contemporary eugenics, and thus stories of the future of humanity often betray the same prejudices against people of color that shape this material history.2
Questions of intervening in pregnancy and childbirth through technology are a significant theme in sf, much of it predating the mapping of the human genome and almost all of it from before CRISPR-Cas9 editing techniques were developed. To be clear, my point here is not that sf somehow inspired or anticipated this technology, but rather that the capacity to edit the genome emerges in a world that has already been conditioned by sf that expresses a range of hopes and fears about the future of the human body, even the human species. Among the reasons that pulp sf in particular fosters visions of the next, transcendent iteration of humanity is that Gernsback encouraged early fans to see themselves as a vanguard of a coming scientific age. His “new sort of literature” was to be consumed by a new sort of reader, one motivated to learn about cutting-edge scientific developments, to tinker with and improve upon existing technologies, to prioritize scientific over other kinds of knowledge. (Crucially, as we have seen, this is not the only kind of sf or sf reader.) In 1940, Astounding Science-Fiction, under Campbell’s editorship, serialized A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan, which was later collected and published as a novel in 1946, about a race of super-beings who evolve superior intellects, telepathic communication, and enhanced physical capacities. It recounts their struggles as they are persecuted to near extinction by an inferior but numerically superior old-style humanity, until the slans are eventually saved when it is revealed that the earth’s dictator is secretly a slan, playing a long game.
What is most significant about Slan in this context is how it was taken up within the sf community: the phrase “fans are slans” reinforced the idea that sf fans and their investment in science would eventually triumph over a waning nonscientific culture, and also gave solace to fans and writers stung by the dismissal of their interests as childish, equivalent to comic strip heroes such as Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. This tension is another dimension of the struggle between sf’s literary and scientific tendencies, and we see a similar prejudice against the genre today when people refuse to call serious novels about the future of technology “science fiction,” preferring to call them speculative fiction or literature about science. Van Vogt’s motif was followed by a number of similar tales, most notably Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), about aliens guiding the evolution of humanity into a superior species. This idea of benevolent intergalactic civilizations, which we might one day aspire to join, is a recurrent motif in fantasies about the next stage of evolution. Such dreams of evolutionary transcendence inform the fantasies of technological immortality explored in chapter 5.
These imaginative patterns have material significance: they shape the expectations people bring to advances in genomics and biotechnology, and thus the ethos that informs how technologies are designed. Especially since the 1990s, genetics research has reshaped medicine and become the basis for many biotechnological start-ups, launching an industry as influential and lucrative as the Silicon Valley start-ups a generation before. As with cyberpunk, sf quickly began to explore the implications of this new territory and how its tools were reshaping humanity, socially and physically. Imitating the marketing success of cyberpunk, there have been attempts to coin a term to describe this new fiction of biological modification, including Paul Di Filippo’s Ribofunk (1996), the title for a collection of short fiction, a portmanteau fusing “ribosome” with “funk”: whereas Sterling argues in Mirrorshades that cyberpunk hackers display something of the countercultural rebellion of punk music, Di Filippo proclaims both cybernetics and punk to be dead cultural forms, and argues the future is in biotechnology and its capacities for remixing, just as funk created new forms from soul, jazz, and R&B.3 The term biopunk, however, was more widely adopted, part of an endless series of new labels made by attaching the word “punk” to a transformative technology—steampunk, nanopunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk, etc. Di Filippo’s coinage points to a more interesting shift in the technological imaginary, namely remixing.
These imaginative patterns have material significance: they shape the expectations people bring to advances in genomics and biotechnology, and thus the ethos that informs how technologies are designed.
Science fiction of this type takes its cue from the idea that biology has become a science of engineering. Here, too, the sf imagination predates the technological tools. Another of Wells’s texts, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), about a scientist trying to evolve sentient Beast Folk by experimenting on animals, is foundational. Such works often raise questions about the ethics of experimentation, especially whether any limits should restrict science from certain manipulations of nature. Frankenstein’s tale of reanimating flesh to overcome mortality belongs to this tradition, although the novel’s themes tend to be oversimplified in journalistic reference: the prefix “franken” connoting ethical concerns about genetic change. Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius (1944) fuses Moreau with Frankenstein to explore the life of an eponymous dog who is modified to human intelligence but isolated in a world in which he is shunned by people and has no other community. David Brin later puts a more positive spin on this idea in his Uplift Universe series (1980–1998), set in a future in which humans have “uplifted” chimpanzees and dolphins to human-equivalent intelligence and the three species share an interstellar civilization with aliens, who regard the humans themselves as animals only recently uplifted to space-faring capacity.
Brin’s work is mainly space adventure, but the idea of uplift opens the door to ethical questions about biological species difference that are explored in more depth in other works, such as Karen Traviss’s Wess’har series (2004–2008), about cultural conflict between humans and other sentient species in the universe: only humanity has an ethical tradition that privileges one dominant species (humans). Traviss’s work points to the historical entanglement of biological categories with social and political systems. Nancy Kress more squarely takes on questions of genetic modification in many of her works, including the early Beggars in Spain trilogy (1993–1996), which postulates a future in which a genetic modification allows some to go without sleep, resulting in even more economic bifurcation as power and wealth accrue with the highly productive sleepless, leaving the unmodified humans increasingly irrelevant to work and therefore the social world. Kress’s later Yesterday’s Kin (2014) adds a genetic engineering and environmental twist to the motif of aliens with superior technology coming to save humanity. An alien species abducts and modifies several children, returning them to Earth to start a new variant of the species, one able to survive the inevitable ecological crisis we have caused.
A similar theme is explored in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989),4 although in this case the aliens, Oankali, insist that human genetics are flawed due to the contradictions that come from their combined propensity for intelligence and for hierarchy. When humans indulge their fear of difference, they use their intelligence in destructive ways, the Oankali conclude, and thus humans can no longer be allowed to breed freely. Humanity has already destroyed itself in a nuclear war, and the humans we meet in this work are a few survivors saved by the Oankali and nurtured off-world. If unmodified humans were simply to be returned to the surface once radiation has dissipated, the Oankali believe, humanity will inevitably create a “civilization that will destroy itself as certainly as the pull of gravity will keep their new world in orbit around its sun.”5 Yet human and human-Oankali hybrid characters contest this genetic determinism, pushing us toward a more complex understanding of human cultures that is rooted in biology and yet leaves room for contingency and choice. Butler’s work offers a nuanced vision of how biological propensity and social history entwine, reminding us of historical abuses of scientific data in movements such as Social Darwinism, experimentation on enslaved African Americans, and eugenic sterilization that targeted groups marginalized by race or class or ableness. In other works, such as her Patternist series,6 Butler explores the psionic powers beloved of an earlier generation with equal subtlety, interrogating rather than perpetuating the visions of a superior species of human, thus showing this fantasy’s ideological links to racism.
Butler is an ideal example of how sf can supplement discourses of science, providing a way of thinking through not only what might be possible, given a new technique or evolutionary change, but also how such changes could transform social and political life. The genre functions as a space for working through these intellectual questions, and although it is often critiqued for getting details of scientific plausibility wrong, a better way to think of sf’s exchanges with science would be in terms of the cultural fears and desires that are mobilized around a particular technology and the transformations it portends. Stories of clones existed long before techniques of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) came into widespread use, after Dolly the Sheep electrified public imaginaries in 1996 and science turned to therapeutic cloning to create tissues for regenerative medicine. Just as Darwinian theory catalyzed an earlier generation to think differently about human biological futures, the possibility of cloning rather than sexual reproduction raises philosophical questions about individuality, autonomy, and uniqueness. This way of thinking about clones, of course, is rooted in misunderstandings regarding how a clone is born (not manufactured or decanted) and also relies on a limited understanding of DNA as an immutable code, failing to recognize how gene expression is conditioned by environmental factors, not to mention that subjectivity is more than simply the expression of one’s genome. Still, the point is not whether sf gets the science right but rather that it is a site where the ripples caused by significant scientific change become visible across other sites of knowledge and social organization.
As cloning became possible, commonplace understandings about civic and social identity were disrupted, and early stories about clones reflect the challenges this posed. For example, Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) depicts a future in which cloning becomes necessary due to widespread infertility caused by environmental damage. Use of cloning is imagined as a temporary stage as scientists work to reverse infertility, but as the clones become dominant, they do not want to return to heterosexual reproduction. The clones are highly dependent on the collective, with strong emotional and mental bonds, and prolonged separation from other clones is damaging. A clone whose accidental isolation leads her to develop a sense of individuality eventually has a child, and this child, Mark, proves to have more creativity than cloned children do. The clones eventually degenerate and die out as they lose the capacity to maintain the equipment they need to reproduce, while Mark becomes the seed of a returned “natural” humanity that thrives.
This sense that clones represent an inferior species, something that can be mass-produced, is reflected in the many works that imagine clones as a biobank of spare parts for their originals, a recurrent motif most famously depicted in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), widely known through the 2010 film adaptation directed by Mark Romanek. Clones are generally imagined as produced by ectogenesis rather than gestation, reinforcing the sense that they are somehow lesser than so-called natural humans. C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen (1998) imagines a future in which highly capable individuals are cloned to ensure their abilities are preserved, but Cherryh also depicts a future in which these “womb tank” children are shaped by “tape,” a computer-controlled conditioning that programs their personalities to reproduce traits of the original. Her clones have distinct names, and their close resemblance to the original person is clearly a matter of cultural shaping, not biology. What all of these texts share is an interest in thinking through how biological uniqueness has become culturally bound up with notions of being a rights-bearing subject, since clones so often are imagined as lacking this status.
More recent work directly raises question of bioethics and cloning, not only reflecting a more accurate understanding of the science but also engaging in debates about the commodification of biology that have been taken up in contemporary social science. In the introduction to Reframing Rights, Sheila Jasanoff argues that “periods of significant change in the life sciences and technologies should be seen as constitutional or, more precisely, bioconstitutional in their consequences” and thus rights discourse needs to be reframed to acknowledge the changing definition of the human and to redefine “the obligations of the state in relation to lives in its care.”7 Entities such as immortal cell lines used for research,8 genetically modified laboratory animals such as Oncomouse, or patents on specific human DNA sequences, such as the Myriad Genetics patent on the sequence used to diagnose a propensity toward breast cancer,9 all challenge political and ethical paradigms instantiated in a world without bioengineering. By engaging imaginatively with these technologies and projecting them into the future, sf helps us think about the implications of precedents that are set in a context when the visible stakes might seem quite small. It also helps clarify how existing values or cultural axioms may transform in light of new research developments, preparing us for what such innovations could look like when they are embedded in the world rather than isolated in a laboratory.
Carola Dibbel’s The Only Ones (2015) represents cloning with well-researched attention to technical details. She projects a postapocalyptic future following a pandemic, in which fertility is compromised, biotechnology vilified (as the source of the plague), and economic disparities intensified. Her protagonist, Inez Fardo, survives by selling her biological capacities—for sex, as someone willing to clean spaces known to be contaminated by new strains of the plague, as a research test subject, and as a source of materials such as eggs. The fact that these things operate on a continuum speaks to how Dibbell interrogates the commodification of biology and its potential to abuse marginalized subjects, compelled by poverty to participate in clinical trials in parallel to how they are compelled to sell sex.10 Inez becomes part of a SCNT enterprise, initially to clone children lost to plague, which ultimately results in the birth of a child cloned from her own somatic tissue that she raises as her daughter. We follow Inez and her relationship with this child, Ani, and the novel raises a variety of questions about medicine, economics, and marginalized communities, as well as about the relationship between biology and environment in cloning and ectogenesis. It directly confronts an imaginative history that has depicted clones as less than human: when Ani learns she is a clone, she is horrified based on her viewing of a television series that offers the stereotypical vision of clones as psychically linked, mass-produced automata.
Questions of biology, commodification, and rights are also foregrounded in Rose Montero’s Tears in Rain (Spanish 2011; English 2012), set in a world where synthetic biology is used to manufacture artificial laborers, bringing us back full circle to Čapek’s R.U.R. and concerns about the dehumanization of labor. Montero’s novel takes its title from Roy Baty’s moving speech at the end of Blade Runner about the injustice of replicants’ short lifespans: this film is part of the fictional world’s popular culture and is seen by the technohumans (called “reps” as a racial slur) as a tragic tale about their exploitation. By thinking of her exploited classes as entities of synthetic biology, rather than manufactured machines, Montero’s novel engages with the questions of bioconstitutionalism foregrounded by Jasanoff, a move reflected in several contemporary texts about fleshy, manufactured beings who are treated as disposable, including the British television series Humans (2015), adapted from the Swedish Äkta människor (Real Humans, 2012–2014), and the HBO revisioning of Westworld (2016–).
One final example of the way sf intersects with the reframing of the human in contemporary biological sciences is the recent turn toward conceptualizing the human as a multispecies entity comprised of the human organism and the microbial communities living in and on our body. The NIH funded the Human Microbiome Project from 2007 to 2016, and this project has transformed research and popular understandings of health—the latter evident in the widespread probiotic products now available. Several novels by Joan Slonczewski, who is also a microbiologist, explore a future in which humans communicate and collaborate with microbial communities. For example, in Brain Plague (2002), collectively intelligent microbes form a partnership with the artist-protagonist, enabling her to create new aesthetic forms; The Highest Frontier (2011) interrogates the human history of antagonism toward microbes via a story in which Earth is invaded by a single-celled species large enough to be visible, while a colony of such beings animate a human-shaped body who attends college with human students and engages in debates about cross-species relationships. The frequency with which our microbiome changes—as compared to the fixity of genes—means that this paradigm opens up another set of questions about identity and agency. The microbiome is not yet as prominent a theme in sf as genetic engineering or cloning, but it is also a more recent scientific framework. A history of microbes and sf remains to be excavated, but there are prominent examples in early sf: the Martian invaders are defeated in Wells’s The War of the Worlds, for example, not by human technology but by their physiological incompatibility with Earth microbes.
The microbiome is not yet as prominent a theme in sf as genetic engineering or cloning, but it is also a more recent scientific framework.
In chapter 5, I discussed the relationship between sf texts about human-machine integration and a discourse of transhumanism that has become mainstream in the twenty-first century. The texts discussed in this chapter, about the human/nonhuman boundary and about how biotechnology is changing what it means to be human and challenging the premises of humanism, are related to a discourse called posthumanism. Initially transhumanism and posthumanism were used somewhat interchangeably, but more recently a differentiation has taken hold: transhumanism describes discourses interested in transcending the limitations of human embodiment while posthumanism describes a range of approaches interested in decentering the human in our knowledge systems and questioning the historical privilege of the human.11 Work in posthumanism thinks differently about humanity and its relationship to other species and to materiality in general, drawing attention to the exclusion of many people from the category of “the human” in our history, and reconceptualizing many of the philosophical ideas central to humanism, such as agency, consciousness, choice, and intelligence.
Posthumanism is not as tightly linked to sf as transhumanism, for which the genre functions as something like a how-to manual, but many theorists of posthumanism find themselves turning to sf for concrete examples of the new theoretical paradigms their work highlights. Similarly, posthumanist ideas are taken up by many scholars of sf in their readings of the genre. Donna Haraway, especially her hugely influential “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1984), is the most prominent among these examples: she extensively uses sf texts to explore her theoretical ideas and her work has been used frequently by sf scholars, so much so that as early as 1991 sf critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. dubbed her and Jean Baudrillard (who writes about the blurring of simulation with materiality) authors of “the SF of theory.”12