HU 3900: Beyond the Human: Transhumanist Literature

Abstract:
Ann Taves's argument about "special things" permits religion scholars to analyze secular texts fruitfully. Notably, Ernest Cline's Ready Player One speculates about humanity's possible future and how technological advancement could reshape it. Although the narrative assumes an atheistic stance, its central, conceptual tensions are categorically religious. Cline's imagined cyberworld sensorily immerses users into an alternative kind of space and allows them to inhabit bodies of their own choosing; this represents a kind of transhumanist, utopian impulse similar to shamanism. However, Ready Player One problematizes this created world ontologically and questions whether relationships formed in such a place can be authentically meaningful. Contrasting the book, the film adaptation, and fan fiction illustrates the controversial stakes at play.

Abstract:
Nisi Shawl's novel Everfair addresses the suffering of the Congolese population by King Leopold of Belgium and turns a history of oppression into a tale of resistance. This analysis celebrates this resistance by unpacking the role of transhuman bodies in relation to (dis)ability within the framework of de/colonialization.

Abstract:
In this paper my aim is to analyze the theme of simulation in Charles Stross’ hard science fiction novel titled ‘Accelerando’ (2005). The discussion shall start by pointing out the enormous significance of the ideas of simulation both in the world of pure science as well as in the fields of philosophy, arts and literature. We shall show by adopting an informational approach and by using the theoretical framework of Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ that science fiction novels like Charles Stross’ ‘Accelerando’ treat simulation not just as an abstract mathematical entity existing independently of human beings; rather they treat simulation as an indispensable step for mankind in their journey of ascension to the Posthuman plane of existence. This paper will also try to prove that Stross’ ‘Accelerando’ not only relies upon the description of the effects of use of many incomprehensibly powerful simulation technologies in various forms to produce the effect of estrangement upon the readers but it also implies that the very fabric of reality which deem to be real is composed of binary oppositions between different strands of contradistinctive signs and symbols which in a posthuman world will crumble together to give way to a Posthuman world replete with endless possibilities. This novel like many other contemporary hard science fiction novels implies that the reality is essentially indistinguishable from the simulation once the influence of human perception or consciousness is deducted from the equation and then the entire Universe can be interpreted as one gigantic computational entity consisting of myriads of quantum informational field operators through the manipulation of which we can derive a semblance of power indistinguishable from the actual one.

Keywords:
Science Fiction, Posthumanism, Simulacra and Simulation, Quantum Nature of Creation, Portrayal of Future

Abstract:
Shelley’s novel has been fertile ground for ecocritics over the last two decades. In Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture (2014, 2016) I wrote about Frankenstein and culture’s dialectical horror of nature. As a narrative of failed continuity, Frankenstein also exhibits our fear of culture, its machine determinism, of monstrous production in place of sustainable reproduction. Victor, the isolated, compulsive scientist is not unlike the figure of the lone programmer, coding
for the “enhanced” human or cyborg of his uncritical posthuman dreams. Our world and its problems demonstrate that Frankenstein continues to be a prescient novel: before Darwin’s theory of evolution, and long before genetic modification and what we call information technology, Shelley imagined the creation of a being as an assemblage of contingent “natureculture” in a bildungsroman that juxtaposes its creator’s. While the novel invites us to consider the political promise of the monster (as I’ve argued elsewhere), it is also a commentary
on the dangers of solitude, the dangers of failing to honour the social and ecological
contingency, the entanglement, of all things in the pursuit of knowledge.