Imagining Transhumanity?
“Science fiction writer” must be the best job description in the world. It’s literally all about sitting around imagining the future and making up stories to fit the most interesting ideas that come up. And it doesn’t even have to involve completely plausible futures, either. You can kick back and let your imagination run wild, playing around with all the Big Themes, like Time Travel, Space Colonisation, First Contact, Space Wars, Alien Invasion, and the one that has been entertaining me for almost a decade now, Transhumanity.
Transhumanity is all about the technologies that we are currently developing to prolong life, and enhance physical and cognitive performance, taken to the point where we are no longer quite the species we used to be. Perhaps the new, enhanced people that are coming will no longer be able to breed with us – or want to – becoming a completely new species. Perhaps the whole idea of breeding will become passé – when you have complete control over your own biology, or you have moved beyond biology altogether, you no longer need to breed to enable evolution, you only need to dream up new designs for yourself.
I’m certain that transhumanity is coming and that “post-human” species are not very far away now. The only questions are what kinds of technology will take us there soonest and, what will we do with it when we have it?
In my Placid Point stories, I have imagined a world in which the first technology past the post involves uploading human minds into computers. To create some tension, I have made the process extremely difficult and expensive so that only the richest among us can afford it. Can you imagine how that would go down? Not only do the 1% get to own 50% of the world while they’re alive, but then they get to live forever and keep it! And then I’ve thrown religion into the mix. How would our “spiritual leaders” feel about people who can cheat death, cheat God’s judgement, effectively thumb their noses at repentance and forgiveness and laugh at the fires of Hell? And where does the soul go when a mind is uploaded? Would it follow the upload and live inside a computer? It seems to me that questions like this would quickly lead the major churches to denounce the whole business and add uploads to their list of the damned.
But what about the uploads themselves? Transhumans are people too. In fact the vast majority of people in the 1% didn’t earn their money by being ruthless entrepreneurs, they inherited it or married into it. They’re just ordinary people who got lucky, and now they can be immortal and live in virtual paradise for all time. But they can also do and be so much more than that if they choose. Once your brain is replicated in a computer, you can augment it – add more memory, add more processing power, run it faster, change its methods of working. You might want to tinker with your simulated emotions, your instincts and limits. You might want to put your shiny new mind into a spaceship, or some other kind of robot body. You might want to try to pass as human again.
I wanted to look at how all this works out for the people involved. I’ve written a number of short stories to explore here and there in this gigantic space of possibilities. These are gathered in a collection called “Placid Point” which you can pick up for free from most online book sellers. But it is in the novels that there is really room to explore the way all the many facets of such a society interact, and how the people cope – on both sides of the transhuman divide.
The first of my novels in this world is The Credulity Nexus. It’s about the growing tension between the religious right and the transhumans they resent so much, in a tale told from the perspective of an ordinary and very human man who becomes a pawn in their power-plays. And, because I’m a science fiction writer, and because all this is happening in the future, the story also has spaceships, and robots, Moon colonies, and satellites. But like all good sci-fi stories, this one is about the people and how they struggle to be true to themselves as they are tossed on the stormy tides of history.
Because I’m about to release the second book in this series, The Sentience Machine, The Credulity Nexus is available for about a dollar on all the major online book stores (prices vary because of exchange rates and local taxes – but, roughly, one US dollar).
And there is so much yet to come. I plan to do one more novel in this series and then move on to a slightly more distant future – about three hundred years from now. It will be the same “world”, the Placid Point universe, but I’ll be throwing in another Big Theme – First contact. There is an idea, “Aliens”, that sends a shiver down the spine of all sci-fi fans. I want to tip my future humanity, with its transhuman outcasts and its squabbling factions into the fires of a first contact drama. And you might have guessed, I don’t expect our alien neighbours to be popping round with a welcome-to-the-neighbourhood gift.
