Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition: Jumping Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle might be one of the saner ideas in this book

Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge
Ed Regis
Perseus Books, 1990

I got depressed to tears reading Bill McKibben's Enough as part of my second brief and aborted post/transhumanism kick. I was frustrated with McKibben for not being radical enough in his criticisms of posthumanism, and also because, ironically, I'm intrigued by the posthuman ideas and ideals that McKibben derides. (I'm an SF fan, what can I say?) Another aspect of my funk was my reaction to the knee-jerk adulation and condemnation the book received on Amazon and elsewhere. In the interest of saving what remains of my sanity I put McKibben's book down---with the intention to finish it another day (see my forthcoming review on The Lord of the Rings to understand that sometimes "another day" is a long way from today)---and went in for something that approached post/trans-humanism with what I hoped was a lighter touch.

Luckily for me, Ed Regis' Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge fit the bill. It approaches fin-de-millennium technoscientific hubris with tongue well in cheek. The book begins with a vignette about the late Evel Knievel (!) and somehow manages to connect this famous exemplar of not-thinking -the-consequences-through---deftly, I should add---with contemporary (as of 1990) explorations of nanotechology, space colonization, artificial intelligence, uploading human consciousness, germline genetic engineering, and cosmic conquest. Regis exposes something maddeningly similar between Knievel's failed attempt to jump Snake River Canyon with a "Skycycle" and all the converging technoscientific innovations that threaten/promise to remake fundamentally the world we inhabit and which comprise the core of what is called "transhuman."

According to Regis, the "forward-looking" scientists discussed in this book want

"nothing less than reinventing Man and Nature. They wanted to re-create Creation. They wanted to make human beings immortal--or failing that, they wanted to convert humans into abstract spirits that were by nature deathless. They wanted to gain complete control over matter, and they wanted to extend mankind's rightful sovereignty out across the solar system, into the Galaxy, and out into the rest of the cosmos."(p.7)

Some of the thinkers described in this book "envisioned...a vast interstellar culture, a population of superintelligent robots and disembodied postbiological minds spread out across the stars and galaxies" (p. 7). Superintelligent robots? Disembodied postbiological minds? Spread out across the stars and galaxies? I leave it to you to decide whether this is aptly described as hubris.

And then we have Keith and Carolyn Henson, "a couple of extremely intelligent engineering types" who talk about life on earth as if it were passé:

"There isn't really much left to do here," said Keith. "The highest mountains and the lowest valleys have all been explored on earth. The opportunities are rather limited."

"In other words," Carolyn said, "we were worried about things getting very, very BORING if we stuck around on this planet for too long." (p. 58)

There isn't much left to do here?! Life on earth is boring?! I think the best response to this terrestrial ennui is found in Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle. Berry discusses the infinitesimal beauty of the living world and talks about being able to explore almost infinitely the details of a single tree in our own back yard. He advocates this sort of attention to particularity and to detail as an antidote to the depression and boredom of our contemporary late-capitalist, technoscientific worldview. I also wondered as I read this quote what type of pathological boredom afflicts one to the point where LIFE ON EARTH (the only type of life with which any of us is familiar) is boring? What is the psychology behind that? I know that I occasionally get bored with my current life circumstances, but to be bored with terrestrial existence itself seems a wee bit mental. Aren't there always more books to read, movies to see, conversations to have, foods to eat, beers to drink, friends to make? What's truly crazy is that these same people are talking about scientifically engineered immortality! Why?? If three-score-and-ten years leave you breathless with boredom, why shoot for a millennium-long lifespan? Hubris isn't a strong-enough word for this lunacy.

Of course, some of these thinkers aren't just possessed of hubris. Some also seem terminally clueless. Take for instance an author named Tom Heppenheimer who wrote in the book Colonies in Space that Native Americans would find in space colonies a new homeland to replace the one that white folks stole from them:

"We may see the return of the Cherokee or Arapaho nation, not necessarily with a revival of the culture of prairie, horse, and buffalo, but in the founding of self-governing communities which reflect the distinctly Arapaho or Cherokee customs and attitudes toward man and nature." (73)

This is possibly the most transparent attempt on the part of technoscience to appeal to "liberal guilt" and utopian desires. Thankfully Dartmouth psychology prof Jack Baird pointed out the patent absurdity of this proposal:

"To the Native Americans, land is especially sacred...and today it is the particular land of their ancestors they would dearly love to recover and preserve for future generations. Circling the earth in a mammoth space station would hardly qualify as a promising spot from which to revive and pay homage to the traditions of their forebears." (73-4)

By viewing particulars, whether particular geographical locations or particular embodied minds, as interchangeable generals, a living world of singularities is reduced to an inventory of parts. Thus nothing untoward is seen about proposals to REPLACE these organic particulars with mass-manufactured simulations.

And then there's other talk in this book that frightens me, in part I guess because it is so TOTAL in its scope. Regis calls this type of talk the "Bashful Confession of Omnipotence." It is the belief among some of these forward thinkers that we humans will soon be able to "make anything that is physically possible" (120, emphasis in text) by having "complete control over the structure of matter" (p. 123). This is, after all, the fundamental premise of nanotechnology which seeks to replicate nature's means of building stuff atom by atom. And of course, there are the concomitant appeals to utopianism : this sort of power will mean no more poverty, no more human labor, no more centralized control, no more disease, no more death. The problem with these utopian appeals is that, like all utopian appeals, they suffer from naïveté. Will we transform human greed and selfishness nanotechnologically? After all, poverty and labor stem more from the need for some humans to be billionaires and to live off the sweat of others than from some fundamental lack of food and natural resources.

Futurist Hans Moravec comes on the scene with his notions of uploading human consciousness and of making back-ups of people. While I certainly understand the appeal of "saving copies" of those I love, at precisely the same time the implications horrify me. Don't I love my wife, daughter, family, and friends precisely because they are singular, irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime individuals? But for Moravec these issues are moot, since it is impossible for us to really determine whether or not we are live or Memorex (i.e., living in a simulation). I guess this is what happens when those midnight hookah circle discussions of being a brain in a jar go horribly awry. So is this hubris or solipsism?

Just when we think these scientists can get no more bizarre, we come to the ultimate example of hubris, in David Criswell's proposal to use the sun as a natural resource. Not a natural resource in terms of the light, warmth, and energy it supplies to the earth, but as raw material for absurd construction projects needed to support the trillions of people inhabiting the inside of the inevitable bubble around the solar system. And some folks are even wondering how on earth we humans will survive the heat death of the universe 10+ billions of years from now. Uh-huh. We can't even figure out how to live in peace with one another on the earth we share and how to feed every mouth with the food we already grow. Worrying about how we'll survive the end of the universe seems a bit premature if you ask me.

So do the ideas discussed herein constitute hubris or are they merely the inevitable march of technoscientific progress? That is the question left me by this book. Maybe the answer, chilling as it is, is both. Or maybe, just maybe, the seemingly imminent collapse of industrial society (read global warming + peak oil + peak water + peak population) will actually be a blessing in disguise, saving us from the futures outlined in books like this. That's a scary thought.

"Certainly the prospect for 'normal' humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories." Amen to that assessment.

Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
Gardner Dozois, editor
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002
0312275692

“Would we ordinary, garden-variety human beings like the Posthuman Future if we were somehow suddenly catapulted into it? Or would we find it a terrifying, hostile, and incomprehensible place, a place we were no more equipped to understand and deal with successfully than an Australopithecus would be equipped to deal with Times Square? Are human beings, as we understand the term, as the term has been understood for thousand upon thousands of years, on the way out? Doomed to extinction, or at the very least to enforced obsolescence in some future equivalent of a game reserve or a zoo? Certainly the prospect for “normal” humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories, with author after author postulating the inevitability of a constantly widening gap between the human and the posthuman condition… with the humans left ever father behind, unable to cope.” (Preface, pp. xii-xiii)

As with almost every book I read, this one fits into a larger context. A few years ago, one web search or another introduced me to this idea called "the Singularity." It seems that science fiction writer Vernor Vinge came up with this term to describe that point in the near-future where developments in germline genetic engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and associated disciplines will accelerate and converge in such a way as to create a scientific analog to the fundamentalist Christian "Rapture." Those of us who came into existence before this singular convergence will be radically different from those whose lives are defined by the terms of a post-Singularity world. The latter, deemed "posthumans" (or "transhumans") by various commentators on this vision, will be in control of the the fundamental constituents of the human universe---matter, life, and mind---to such a degree that they will effectively be as gods to the mere humans who preceded them.

I was fascinated by this idea, in part because these developments do seem to presage a variety of unprecedented social, cultural, and other realities. After all, just consider the impact that computer and mobile phone technologies have had on all aspects of global society in the last twenty years, and envision those changes compounded and sped up. I read a few novels that I've previously reviewed here (i.e., Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Rudy Rucker's Moldies and Meatbops and Realware, and The Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod) and sort of burned through the most intense phase of the interest before I moved on to more pessimistic appraisals of our collective future (mainly dealing with the issue of Peak Oil, a prospect thatjust might put the kibosh on the whole transhumanist project).

This series of pessimistic appraisals then led me back to the topic of transhumanism in the form of Bill McKibben's book Enough. In this well-written but not entirely convincing book (more about which when I actually finish it), he argues against the posthuman/transhuman future implicit in these technologies on the grounds that it will be devoid of meaning, since meaning is grounded in our limitations, defects, and finitude. His book got too preachy too quickly, and so I put it down and picked up a variety of other relevant books, including Jeremy Rifkin’s The Biotech Century, Rapture, The Future and Its Enemies, and a bunch of SF, including this volume. So that's all by way of an explanation as to why I picked this book up.

Regarding this collection of short SF itself, editor Gardner Dozois provides a rough sketch of a "superhuman" posthumanity in his outline of the criteria used in selecting these stories. Science fiction, once dominated by stories of space conquest and interstellar adventure, had by the early 1970s begun to yield to the fundamentally unsettling discoveries of modern cosmologists and space researchers. Solar system changed into galaxy, which in turn had gave way to galactic clusters, galactic superclusters, and ultimately to a universe of such analogy-defying proportions that the space conquest fantasies of the 1950s came to be regarded as impossible. So SF writers and some scientists began to develop new scenarios and strategies for space colonization; after all, if the crux of the problem is a dearth of nearby earthlike planets, then two possible solutions are to make planets earthlike (i.e., terraforming) or to change the nature of human beings and adapt them to a wide variety of habitats. It is this latter notion, changing the very nature of what it has meant thus far to be a human being, that is the subject of this collection.

But it is not just any change of what it means to be human. Dozois invokes various filters in his anthology: the stories contained don't deal with "accidental" posthumanity brought about through mutation or post-apocalyptic scenarios, nor do they deal with posthumans who are angels, machines, or gods in disguise (it is SF after all and not fantasy), nor do they deal with virtual realities and downloaded posthuman consciousness. In this collection, all the posthuman situations are the direct result of deliberate change, often for the purposes of space colonization and conquest, and occur primarily in the "meat" world, as opposed to that of disembodied cyberspace.

Alas the stories in this collection did not, for the most part, live up to the promise of Dozois' introduction. While many of the tales were quite good in terms of craft, not many very meaningful or memorable. Too often I found myself shaking my head at the glibness of the authors and at how far they hadn't come from the Wild West, Manifest Destiny, cowboys in space mentality that characterized much of so-called Golden Age SF. A few stories do stand out, though, and so merit special mention.

• In “The Chapter Ends,” by Poul Anderson, the Earth has become a rustic backwater that has been traded to an alien civilization in a cosmic territorial exchange. The posthuman descendents of Earth, who have absolutely no connection to this obscure planet in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, move the few thousand remaining human beings off of the homeworld. They leave behind one Wendell Berry-esque holdout who realizes what it like to be the last person on earth--after the last flight out has gone.
  

• “Aye, and Gomorrah,” by Samuel R. Delany, is the sort of sexy science fiction I'd expect from Phillip Jose Farmer. The story centers on spacers, "modified" posthumans whose exotic asexuality makes them the target of fetishists called frelks.
  

• "Understand,” by Ted Chiang, features a patient who is resuscitated from a vegetative state through the use of an experimental new synthetic hormone. Of course, the vegetable becomes an uber-genius, escapes from the hospital as a fugitive from CIA, begins meddling in the affairs of humanity in pursuit of his posthuman aesthetic agenda, and finally discovers another pharmaceutically engendered uber-genius out to save the world.
  

• “None So Blind” finds Joe Haldeman (one of my favorite authors) telling a love story of sorts about an odd couple whose love begets an experimental surgery that turns regular folks into geniuses. And all they need to do is give up their eyes.
  

• “Border Guards,” by Greg Egan (another author I've always liked), poses a good challenge to the McKibbenses of the world with their argument that death gives our lives meaning and dignity. Egan asks the simple question, "is that true?" If we could find a way to get rid of death once and for all, would it be fair to our children not to do so?
  

• “A History of the Human and Post-Human Species,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, was my favorite story, I think. It is found in the epilogue, and constitutes a "scientific" abstract covering all the speciation and evolution, engineered and naturally selected, that facing the human race in the next few million years. Intelligent species arise after humans, but none achieve spaceflight, and in a final twist reminiscent of Dougal Dixon's Man After Man, posthuman descendants of Terrestrial colonists on Mars return to Earth in the far future, with no memory of their original connection.
  

On the whole this is a great work of speculative fiction, in terms of both the speculation and the fiction

Blood Music
Greg Bear


Intelligent aliens are invading. There doesn't seem to be anything humanity can do to stop them. The invaders aren't from outer space, though; they originate in a genetics lab in La Jolla. Vergil Ulam, a brilliant loner scientist who's not big on thinking consequences through, injects himself with his research results (the invaders--genetically engineered, intelligent microbes) in order to prevent them from being destroyed. After radically improving his health and moving on to reconfigure his skeletal structure, the microbes escape the confines of Ulam's tissues to become a plague that threatens the entire world. Imagine that the billions of microbes on your toilet seat or in a dirty diaper are intelligent, purposeful beings intent on reshaping the material world. A scary thought, no? That's the vision of Blood Music.

Bear's engaging novel plays with themes from various sub-genres of science fiction--alien invasion, nanotech gray goo apocalypse, near-future post-human utopia--but perhaps the most salient comparison is to Shelley's Frankenstein, to which Blood Music itself alludes. The novel successfully forces us to examine the possible long-term consequences of altering genomes and of creating a post-human future. Although the novel is a bit dated (for example it relies on the Soviet Union for its element of international intrigue), the general thrust of the ideas and the story is still fresh and compelling. Toward the end, the story begins to suffer from the occasional confounding paragraph, wherein the ideas expressed outstrip the author's ability to clearly convey them (OK, perhaps they merely outstripped this reader's ability to comprehend them), and the conclusion is a bit less than satisfactory, but on the whole this is a great work of speculative fiction, in terms of both the speculation and the fiction.

(This review was originally written on December 4, 2006.)

Mixed feelings

Realware
Rudy Rucker
HarperCollins, 2000

After finishing the Moldies and Meatbops trilogy, I was compelled to check this fourth installment (in the now-tetralogy) out from the public library. I am certainly glad I didn't pay for it because, while the novel was fun to read, it was also not as wild, innovative, or thought-provoking as its three predecessors. It basically felt like one of those tacked on, pay-the-mortagage kind of books. Whereas there was a significant time lapse between each of the first three installments of this series, this novel begins mere months after the concluding events in Freeware. The first half of the book is given over to a half-baked story involving a Tongan monarch, a homicidal pseudo-Limey, a lunar girl with questionable taste in men, while the second comprises a too-fast-to-be-true love affairs of not one, but two, couples. Realware, the only interesting thing in the novel, takes a back seat to these plots for most of the novel.

Yet, it is the concept of realware, the culmination of Rucker's "life as information" idea, that makes the book interesting and worth reading. Realware is an alien technology that is able to build anything material (including living things) from the ground up, so to speak. Although it is never explained completely (being one of those technologies that is advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic), it seems to be a form of nanotechnology whose workings somehow derive from higher-dimensional physics. Rucker's love of the 4th (and higher) dimensions comes into play in the novel, as does his sense of spirituality (though it is a bit more saccharine than is his wont). The idea of realware is definitely interesting, and Rucker sees it as a technology that humanity still won't be ready for in a half-century. (Looking at the contemporary state of the world, I hesitate to disagree, but I digress.)

Yet he does not allow this rather pessimistic appraisal of humanity's capacity to deal with the end of scarcity rain on the reader's parade. Instead, the Metamartians (i.e., the cosmic ray information aliens from the conclusion of Freeware) come to the rescue like the proverbial cavalry or deus ex machina. Tears are shed, the world is saved, and warm smiling California sunshine reigns.

(This review was originally written on September 28, 2006.)

Exhilarating SF tour de force---brings "cyberpunk" from the neck down

Moldies & meatbops: Three *ware novels : Software ; Wetware ; Freeware
Rudy Rucker
Doubleday Direct, 1997

This volume collects three of the four novels in Rudy Rucker's intellectually stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable *Ware series: Software, Wetware, and Freeware. The arc of these three novels carries the reader from the dawn of the 21st century, when humanity's lunar robots reprogrammed themselves for freedom and consciousness, to the middle of the century, the radical future of artificial life, and beyond. In Rucker's mostly optimistic vision of the near-future, robots (from the Czech word for "slave", remember) give way to self-directing boppers (and human-dominated asimovs), who in turn pave the way for the quasi-organic moldies, who themselves become the staging ground for something far more transcendent. Meanwhile, humanity tries as best it can to keep pace with its new neighbors while inadvertently catalyzing their evolution from time to time. An exhilarating intellectual romp!

Rucker's novels work on so many levels that it beggars description. His intellectual and philosophical speculations about the nature of conscious life itself provide the skeleton, his joycean linguistic inventiveness enrobes his fresh ideas in strange flesh, and his sheer joy at being embodied succeeds both in animating his creation and in bringing the genre of science fiction, which has long been decidedly cognitively top-heavy, from the neck down. This is science fiction for people who love the raw stickiness and smelliness of physical existence. Moldies and Meatbops, or, more properly, the novels collected therein, easily ranks as Rucker's SF masterpiece.

(This review was originally written on September 4, 2006.)