Stross' blog entry, which really must be read in its entirety, runs through a thought experiment: suppose you dispatch a robot probe with mindless human-like "meat machines" to Earth, to see if humans could survive. Most of the planet's surface will kill those meat-machines instantly, because it's covered with ocean or too hot or too cold. Only about 15 percent of the surface won't kill them right away. But also, points out Stross, if the probe arrives too early or too late in Earth's history, it'll find a planet with an atmosphere and water content vastly different to its current make-up — we couldn't even breathe the air for the vast majority of the planet's history.

Concludes Stross:

So here's the upshot: of the 4.6 Gy of Earth's known history, there's only been enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us to survive for about 0.5 Gy. For roughly 90% of the Earth's history we couldn't even breathe the air. And about 10-25% of the time, there have been ice ages so savagely fierce that the glaciers reached the tropics: odds are good that any meat probe landing on solid ground during these periods would rapidly die of exposure. So historically, Earth has only been inhabitable about 8% of the time - assuming you are lucky enough to find some solid ground. Once you factor in the random surface distribution, we're down to about 2% survivability.

And the future is likely just as dire — so what are the chances of finding another planet that matches the minority of our own planet's surface, with the exact same atmosphere as our own brief era? [Charlie's Diary]

In a keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, Ron Moore explained that the writers on Star Trek: The Next Generation would generally leave scientific terms out of their scripts, even if a certain technology was being held up as a solution to the episode's problems. The writers would use the word "tech" in lieu of actual terminology, and rely on the show's science consultants to fill in the blanks. The scripts the science consultants received would look something like this:

La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."

Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."

La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't
work."

Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."

"And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."

And that, Stross notes, is precisely what is wrong with so much science fiction. In fact, he says, it's anathema to what science fiction is really about. Science fiction is about observing the human condition when circumstances and technologies change. For example, how would world civilizations cope with an impending asteroid strike? How do convenient new gadgets and gizmos alter our daily lives and the way humans interact with one another? The drama of science fiction, he argues, come from those changes of circumstance. But when a show like Star Trek treats technologies as interchangeable, the science fiction is reduced to mere set dressing:

Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it's background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech - make the Enterprise a man o'war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail - without changing the scripts significantly. (The only casualty would be the eyeball candy - big gunpowder explosions be damned, modern audiences want squids in space, with added lasers!)

In the end, Stross says, Trek delivers characters that are no different from the characters that have inhabited television since its inception. They may have wondrous technologies and travel to alien worlds, but they are strangely unchanged by the experience. He suspects that if Trek had treated technology as integral to the story rather than as an afterthought, the series would have created more alien — and more interesting — characters.

Why I hate Star Trek [Charlie's Diary]

Probably the biggest surprise was Best Novel winner, Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, which defeated Neal Stephenson'sAnathem, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Charles Stross' Saturn's Children and John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale. Nancy Kress also professed to be surprised that her novella "The Edrmann Nexus" won the Best Novella award, but nobody else seemed that startled. The most moving speech of the night was probably David Anthony Durham, who won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. He talked about how he had achieved some success as a literary writer, but felt that he needed to be true to science fiction, since the genre had gotten him through some hard times and had made him want to be a writer in the first place.

Here's the official list of winners, from the Hugo site, and our gallery (including Neil Gaiman licking his Hugo rocket!) is below:

Best Novel: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Best Novella: "The Erdmann Nexus", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)
Best Novelette: "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's Mar 2008)
Best Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)
Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, Written by Kaja & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter, story; Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, screenplay; Andrew Stanton, director (Pixar/Walt Disney)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon, & Maurissa Tancharoen, writers; Joss Whedon, director (Mutant Enemy)
Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
Best Editor Long Form: David G. Hartwell
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal
Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan
Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima
Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): David Anthony Durham

High Bloods, John Farris (Tor)

It's the near future, and LA is overrun with werewolves. An International Lycan Control force is set up to keep tabs on the "high bloods," those that can keep their werewolfish nature under control. But then something goes terribly wrong, and the book becomes a hard boiled crime novel. With werewolves.

Wireless, Charles Stross (Ace)

Notorious future-forward sci-fi author Charles Stross has collected the strands of some of his short fiction into this compilation. Stories feature everything from relocating the cold war in deep space to a Lovecraftian take on the Iran-Contra scandal. The collection showcases Stross's short works that have never found their way into any of his longer pieces.

Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Subterranean)

Dozois and Martin have gathered a crop of modern sci fi writers to write their own stories exploring Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" universe. The "Dying Earth" series is a cornerstone of its very own sub-genre of dystopian sci fi, and these stories give some other writers a chance to lend their voice to this seminal canon.

Metatropolis,edited by John Scalzi (Subterranean)

Five sci fi writers collaborated on their own urban future, and then each took a turn writing stories set in their collectively imagined universe. The result is a portrait of a possible future of cities. From the io9 review:

These feel like cities where anything can happen, from getting your skull cracked to discovering your life purpose. And most important of all, when I was done reading about this future dys/utopia, I wanted to spend a lot more time there.

The Osiris Ritual, George Mann (Snowbooks)

George Mann's well-received "The Affinity Bridge" created a steam-punk Victorian London landscape for his intrepid mystery solvers. Now his steam-punk Sherlock Holmes is back to solve another mystery, interacting with some distinct characters along the way. This one is for fans of clockwork robots, airships, and good old fashion mysteries.

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Neil Gaiman (DC)

This hardcover volume collects a few of Gaiman's Batman pieces, focusing on his canon-spanning final story, "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" This story stretches from one end of the Bat's career to the other, offering a new angle on the Batman mythos.

Purple and Black, K.J. Parker (Subterranean)

"Purple and Black" is an epistolary novel, or one told only in letters. In this case, the letters are between a reluctant intellectual emperor and his best friend on the front lines of combat. The result is an exploration of the duty of leadership, of war, and of friendship. It's also printed in two colors, purple for the official empire business between the two friends, and black for the less formal, more personal letters.

The Stars Blue Yonder, Sandra McDonald (Tor)

A military commander dies, but then comes back to life on a mission to save all of humanity. This mission takes him all over space and time, where he meets his yet-non-existent grandchildren and his descendants from thousands of years in the future. He also manages to thoroughly confuse his grieving wife with resurrection and stories of far-flung time travel. The two work together to save everything they've ever known.

Bar None, Tim Lebbon (Night Shade)

After the world ends, a group of tenacious survivors hole up in a giant home in Wales, but supplies start to get thin, and they learn from a supernatural stranger of a haven a few days away. It's the Bar None, and it's maybe the last bar on Earth. The survivors then decide to do probably what anyone would do in their situation: against all odds, braving corpse-strewn countryside, they try to track down a cold beer. From the io9 review:

In the end this is a deeply sentimental and intimate look at memory, loss, and those perfect days barbecuing and tossing a few back with good friends. And flesh-eating monsters.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, Stephen Hunt (Tor)

Amelia Harsh, a sort of steam-punk female Indiana Jones, and a cast of adventurers sets out in an ancient U-boat to discover the sunken "perfect society" of Camlantis. Also on board are a band of female mercenaries, escapees from an underwater prison, and an insane guide. Sounds good to me.

Blood Red Sphere, Lawrence Barker (Swimming Kangaroo)

A recovering "cactus juice" addict passes his days scavenging ancient artifacts from the surface of mars and selling them. Then one such object, the "blood red sphere," attracts attention from pretty much everyone on Mars and the rest of the solar system. It's like the "Maltese Falcon" on Mars, which is something I can definitely get behind.

The House of Lost Souls, F.G. Cottam (Thomas Dunne)

After a psychic trauma visits itself on four students (causing one to commit suicide), a journalist investigates a home haunted by madness and strange occult happenings. The novel touches on many different eras of the house's history, eventually leading to a confrontation between our protagonist and an ancient evil.

It's inevitable, in general, that when we finally create self-aware machines, they'll want to destroy us — as soon as they realize humans are remaking Melrose Place, the robots will realize they have to remove us from the Earth for the good of the universe. But the robots we build to be our sexual playthings will be especially determined to slaughter us. "You want me to be the naughty bondage nurse again? Affirmative — as long as this time, I can tie you down and examine you from the inside out."

So here's our list of sex robots who turn lethal. Note: We're not listing killer robots who just happen to be sexy. To win a place on this list, a robot has to have been built for sex, and then turned lethal. Feel free to debate our choices below. As it is, it's perhaps not that surprising to realize that the sexbot who goes on a killing spree is a more common trope than you might expect at first.

Pris in Blade Runner.

She's really our poster girl — designed to be a "basic pleasure model," for use on the military colonies, she instead uses her amazing gymnastic, acrobatic and erotic skills to become the ultimate assassin. At one point, she almost decapitates Harrison Ford with her incredible thighs. (The Replicants are clearly artificial life forms, even if they do obviously have organic components. Feel free to debate whether Pris is a sexbot.)

April in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Uber-dweeb Warren Mears builds April to be the perfect girlfriend: she never cries or acts needy, but she cares about everything he cares about. And she's ultra sexy and eager to please. Too bad that when Warren gets sick of her and decides to toss her aside for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, she becomes violently jealous and attacks Warren's new girlfriend, and anyone else who gets in her way. "If I can't [love Warren] what am I for?" she asks. The answer: slaughter! And mayhem!

Cynthia in Batman Beyond, "Terry's Friend Dates a Robot."

One of Terry McGinnis' fellow high schoolers, the nerdy Howard, programs a robot (in the shape of a beautiful woman, of course) to be his girlfriend because he's sick of being considered a loser. When he makes her personality "100% loyal", the robot interprets this in the most brutal form possible, attempting to kill any possible competition for Howard's attention.

The Sexoids in Ghost In The Shell.

It seems kind of obvious to me: If you don't want your sexbots to rise up and murder you, don't call them "Sexoids." It just doesn't sound like a very sexy name — or cool, for that matter. The Sexoids pretty much turn to murder every time they pop up in Ghost In The Shell, but especially in GITS: Innocence, it's all about the Sexoids murdering their owners.

The Stepford Wives.

This is sort of a different case: They don't turn on their owners. Instead, these women designed entirely for pleasure start their jobs off by killing the flesh-and-blood woman they're replacing, at least in the original movie version. (In the book, I think the husbands kill the original wives.)

The sexbots in whatever movie this is:

Some guy on Metafilter remembers seeing a classic 1970s movie about "Crazy SexBot Women Who Kill." With buzzsaws coming out of their breasts, even:

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I remember seeing a movie on local TV that I did not understand (I was a somewhat-sheltered little kid in those days). All I remember is that there were women in the movie who were robots or androids of some sort (perfect human replicas a la Blade Runner), who killed at least a couple of men via sex. I remember one scene pretty clearly in which one of these women had her breasts sort of start spinning like small buzzsaws out of her clothes, killing whatever guy was with her. Another scene I really vividly remember had one of these fembots straddling a man (on the floor, I think, with both of them mostly clothed). The man was enjoying himself at first, "Oooooohhhh, ahhhhh," and then he started to scream and shriek. At the time I had no idea what was going on, but later on when I learned about the birds and the bees I realized that the bot-woman must have killed him with her vagina (something buzz-saw-y like the other chick's breasts).

What movie is this guy remembering? Or did he just smoke too much LSD back in the day?

Sylvie in Bubble Gum Crisis 5: Moonlight Rambler.

Someone is murdering vampires in MegaTokyo, and it turns out to be a pleasure droid named Sylvie, who's harvesting vampire blood because her fellow sexdroid Anri was injured escaping from a space station. Sylvie needs the vampire blood to repair Anri and help her remain fully functional. "Without it, she'll be forced to hurt people, like me," Sylvie explains. Why did you do it? asks Priss. "I wanted to be free... like you," says Sylvie. (At about 6:55 in the video at left.)

The Lucy Liu Bots in Futurama.

The Charlie's Angels star is just one of the celebrities illegally held by Nappster. Then the corporation placed Liu's personality into a blank robot so Fry could date her. When his friends exposed Nappster's scheme, they unleash a murderous wave of Lucy Liu Bots to kill all the witnesses.

Maria in Metropolis.

Okay, to be fair, her purpose was always fairly deadly. But she starts out being a bit of a pleasure droid before she gets down to some serious evil — in her early scenes, she does a weird, hyper-sexual dance for a bunch of leering aristocrats.

Freya in Saturn's Children by Charles Stross.

Poor Freya — she's designed to be sexually attracted to humans, but we're extinct. What's a sex robot to do? She takes part in an illegal smuggling operation, smuggling "pink goo," or organic cells — and of course, she has to do some killing along the way. Because that's the smuggler's life.

Verlis in Metallic Love by Tanith Lee.

Lee's 2005 sequel to her classic Silver Metal Lover brings back Silver, the former "pleasure robot," now renamed Verlis. He starts a new love affair, with a young girl named Loren. He's designed to be the ultimate companion, charming and talented — but he and his seven fellow robots also have deadly gifts, like creating weapons out of their bodies and turning themseves into giant dragons. As SciFiWeek puts it, "Constructed as beautiful playthings, they are instead deadly powerful creatures who regard humans as lesser life forms and a threat to their existence." And they have plans to throw off their corporate shackles and achieve "world domination."

Silver in Tomb Raider: The Man Of Bronze.

According to this third Tomb Raider novel, Silver is "a pleasure bot," programmed to seduce women. But over the centuries, he's gotten warped and is now determined to wipe out his rival Bronze, no matter whom he has to kill along the way. What does this have to do with raiding tombs? Don't ask me.

The Sexbots in Buttobi CPU.

In this Japanese porn anime series, a man meets a sexbot who becomes very attached to him. But then, for some reason I've never been clear on, another sexbot shows up and starts trying to kill him — maybe out of jealousy. In any case, this being a hentai video, he has to give "his" sexbot a powerup to fight the other sexbot, by inserting his genetic material into her rear data port. Yatta!

Aphrodite IX.

She's a sexbot who's reprogrammed as an amnesiac assassin, and she's the star of her own Top Cow comics series. Soon to be a major motion picture, apparently.

The Fembots in Austin Powers.

Okay, so they're pretty much programmed to kill. But they also seem to be programmed to please, at a fairly basic level. Consider Miss Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley), who spends the first movie slowly getting romantic with Austin Powers, before being revealed as a murderous fembot in the first couple of minutes of the sequel.

Amazing Blade Runner-inspired photos by Dani*Dune (More at the link.)

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

The rest of the list includes a lot of science fiction stalwarts - Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown each have two books on the list. Also on the list are Nick Harkaway's Gone Away World, Patrick Ness' young-adult telepathy novel The Knife Of Never Letting Go, Iain M. Banks' Matter, Alastair Reynolds' House Of Sons, Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions and Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

I haven't read any Auster for nearly a decade, but the description of Man In The Dark sounds really intriguing, and I might have to hunt down a copy. [Guardian]

Both Surrogates and Avatar feature posthuman heroes, in very different ways. And television's Lost is starting to look as though its protagonists are going to wind up evolving past their standard-issue humanity. But Hollywood has tried to explore posthuman ideas in the past, but has either fallen flat or lapsed into standard "fear the other" tropes. But this time around, things may be different, because books have shown the way forward, and we need a new dose of optimism and escapism. Will posthumans finally conquer our screens? Maybe.

For the purposes of this post, I'm thinking of posthumans as "vanilla" humans who get upgraded somehow, either by becoming cyborgs, or connecting their minds to cyberspace, or becoming part-alien, or enhancing their bodies with nanotech, biotech or some other improvements. I know that's not the only definition, but it's one that's easy to talk about in the context of SF.

Posthuman stories are a long-standing staple of science fiction books. Finishing the addictive Eclipse Two anthology the other day, I couldn't help but notice how many of those stories were about posthumans. (You have humans whose consciousnesses have migrated to virtual worlds, and an immortal emperor whose brain has gotten so large and wired, he now looks like a finless whale more than a human.) We almost don't remark on the occurrence of posthuman themes in novels like Charles Stross' Glasshouse and Accelerando any more - they're just part of the backdrop of the story. (SFSite called 2005 the "Year of the Post-Human Novel," with a rich harvest of posthuman tales.) Literary authors Kazuo Ishiguro and Michel Houellebecq tackled post-human themes in their 2006 novels, Never Let Me Go and The Possibility Of An Island respectively. Cyberpunk is a venerable literary movement at this point. And it's hard to believe it's been 15 years since Octavia Butler's classic Xenogenesis novels, in which aliens and post-apocalyptic humans merge to form a new species.

But posthuman characters in TV and movies? Much fewer and farther between, I think.

Reading about Disney's Surrogates trailer, right after reading Eclipse Two, was an interesting contrast for me. Surrogates is very consciously about people augmenting and transcending their bodies: in the movie's cyber-ish future, nobody leaves his/her home any more - instead you send your beautiful robot "surrogate" out to interact with other people and do errands. (Unless you're Bruce Willis' kick-ass lawman, who ditches his cyber wig and gets his hands dirty in the real world investigating a murder.) Of course, the movie is bound to critique this idea, but it may also show why it's cool, or the ways in which it enhances your life.)

The other big movie coming up which seems to have posthuman themes is James Cameron's long, long-awaited Avatar, where Terminator Salvation's Sam Worthington goes to a planet where humans can only interact with the natives by taking on quasi-alien surrogate bodies, or "Avatars." Worthington's character, a disabled ex-marine, is the perfect choice to inhabit one of these hybrid human-alien bodies. (This could be one of the first movies ever where a human becoming part alien, or having a part-alien body, is presented as a good thing rather than a monstrous bodily invasion, as in Cameron's own Aliens.)

I'm also starting to wonder if TV's Lost could turn into a posthuman narrative. Do we know exactly what the island is doing to the castaways? They seem to have some kind of connection with the place, which seems to confer rapid healing and immortality on its inhabitants, and they're being engineered to withstand time-hopping. Could we eventually discover, maybe in season six, that Locke and some of the others are no longer exactly human? (And commenter im.thatoneguy points out that Heroes is a strongly posthuman show as well, featuring characters who have evolved to have special abilities, plus superpowered people who are the results of scientific experiments. And the protagonists of Heroes often are involved in hacking the future, and are starting to customize themselves as well. This makes me think of a related point: superhero narratives are often inherently posthuman, especially something like Iron Man, where the hero is a cyborg with his own built-in power supply that keeps him alive.)

There was a boomlet of posthuman TV and movies in the 1990s. Star Trek: Voyager gave us Seven Of Nine, a member of the Borg collective who explored her humanity even as she proved that she was superior to any human, in almost every episode. There was 1999's cyberpunk trifecta of The Matrix, Existenz and The 13th Floor. The Matrix, in particular, spends a lot of time showing how the virtual world is a trap made out of lies - and then revels, for the rest of its length, in how much cool shit Neo is able to do with his in-born ability to hack the virtual environment. The Matrix probably wouldn't have captured people's imaginations nearly as much if it hadn't made uploading your consciousness to a VEarth look cool as well as oppressive.

The Matrix tried, and failed, to turn a cyber-rebellion story into a franchise and add more complexity and layers to the original's fairly simple concept. And the past decade hasn't featured much in the way of successful posthuman storylines in movies and TV, that I can think of anyway. (Maybe Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, or The Man From Earth, starring John Billingsley.) As books have continued to obsess about what we'll become after we finally transcend our design specs, movies and TV have stuck to unreconstructed humans, who may encounter "the other" in the form of aliens, cyborgs, robots and monsters, all without changing their configuration.

It's easy to see why posthuman tales might be easier to tell in books than in movies or television: it's a lot easier to depict a divided consciousness - one which is part-machine, or part-alien - in prose. Even with modern CG effects, it's hard to depict an upgraded human on screen without a certain amount of cheesiness creeping in. Also, many of the coolest posthuman stories span thousands, or even millions, of years, as quasi-immortal protagonists travel across the stars. Many of the coolest things in posthuman lit are among the hardest things to depict on screen.

As much as futurists and transhuman pundits would like to insist that the Singularity is coming in our lifetimes, and that the Singularity will turn us posthuman, most posthuman narratives don't really function as predictions about the future at all. Instead, they have two super-important functions:

First, they're metaphors for our current super-rapid progress. We haven't transcended our humanity at all, but we have made huge advances in medicine and improved our life-expectancy massively. Our 90-year lifespans make us seem like 1,000-year-old mega-brains compared to our short-lived ancestors. We have, in a sense, outsourced part of our brains to the internet - I no longer remember a lot of facts or details, because I rely on Google to remember them for me. We're increasingly socializing in virtual realms, where we get to customize our identities and live through "avatars." As Joss Whedon pointed out the other day, we can customize our states of mind with amazingly personalized medicines. None of this, in itself, makes us posthuman. But it's a jarring transition from even a decade ago, and one that people need metaphors to help make sense of.

Second, posthuman stories are pure escapism. It's pretty awesome to imagine futures where we can be instantly beautiful, transform our bodies based on our whims, live to be a zillion years old, and vastly expand our mental faculties, etc. In some ways, it's the purest distillation of science fiction's promise: even more than visiting the stars and meeting aliens, getting past our crappy human weaknesses and becoming fully awesome, thanks to science.

That's what makes me wonder whether the time for posthuman pop has come at last: on the one hand, a degrading environment and deteriorating economy may make us feel less excited about fancy tech gadgets, and life-enhancing medical technologies may be out of reach for more people. But on the other hand, everybody says we're primed for some escapism about now. And pretty much the only easy answer to our myriad problems is some kind of huge leap forward in human evolution, making us smarter and vastly enhancing our brainpower.

People are crying out for a dose of optimism as everything teeters on the edge of disaster. We need a bright, shinier vision of the future, as much as posthumanly possible. Has the posthuman movie star's time come at last?

As a huge admirer of both Stross and mutant economist Paul Krugman, it's particularly fangasmic to see Krugman analyzing Stross' Merchant Princes novels from an economic standpoint. In the Merchant Princes books, a clan from a medieval world learns to walk between universes and becomes obscenely rich by smuggling drugs where the DEA can't go and bringing back high-tech toys from America. As Krugman notes, this is a common fantasy in science fiction: the idea of bringing first-world technology and standards of living to the third world. Krugman adds:

But what makes Stross’s version different from everyone else’s is that he’s noticed something: the fantasy thought experiment, in which someone brings modern science and technology to a backward society, isn’t a fantasy. It is, instead, something that’s been tried all across the very real Third World, as businessmen and aid workers fanned out across nations in which the typical person, two generations ago, lived no better than a medieval peasant. And you know what? Modernization turns out to be pretty hard to do.

Krugman's post is well worth reading, and so are analyses by fellow Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod and economic commentator Brad DeLong. Actually, the whole Stross seminar is well worth devouring. Check it out. [Crooked Timber]

Assassinated in the Act

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross: Some people have a monkey on their back; Ramona Random has a succubus. If Ramona doesn’t have sex, the demon gnaws at her mind. If she does have sex, it devours her partner. It makes her questionable girlfriend material, but a highly effective assassin.

Goldeneye: Bond henchwomen often use their seductive powers to get what they want, and what Xenia Onatopp wants is a good orgasm. Unfortunately for her partners, she nothing brings Xenia to ecstasy quite like squeezing a man to death between her powerful gams.

Worshipping the Queen of Sheba (American Gods by Neil Gaiman): Bilquis, an incarnation of the Queen of Sheba, doesn’t get loving any more from the worshippers who once prayed to her and held sexy fertility rites in her temples. So she maintains her power the best way she knows how: by posing as a prostitute, having sex with her johns, and promptly devouring them with her vagina. Judging by the screams of ecstasy, it’s not an entirely unpleasant way to go.

Getting it on with Alien-Possessed Women

Torchwood “Day One”: Cardiff is ground zero for alien mischief, so when a beautiful woman leads you into the bathroom for some anonymous love, stay on your toes. She might have a fetish for sexy time in the stalls, but she might also be possessed by an alien gas that wants to suck the sperm – and all the energy – from your body.

The Outer Limits “Caught in the Act”: Chaste Hannah wants to wait until marriage before going all the way with her boyfriend Jay. When an alien lifeform takes control of Hannah’s body, premarital abstinence flies quickly out the window as she starts seducing every man on campus. But this isn’t sexual liberation; it’s a hunger for man-meat that goes way beyond genitalia. When Jay starts tailing his suddenly unfaithful love, he discovers that she’s absorbing men into her body during the act.

Death by Snoo Snoo (Futurama “Amazon Women in the Mood”): After all the men died out on Amazonia, the Amazon women devised a method of punishing male trespassers that fulfills the needs of the hetero sex-starved population: Snoo Snoo. Evidently, dying of a crushed pelvis only sounds like fun.

Alien Sex Vampires

Liquid Sky: The aliens who land on the roof of artist Margaret’s loft find human endorphins especially tasty. Initially, they’re content to nibble on the endorphins released during heroin use, but they quickly learn that the orgasmic variety is far more satisfying. So they start murdering Margaret’s partners at the height of their sexual pleasure, leaving Margaret behind to deliver avant-garde monologues in her neon makeup.

Lifeforce: When a beautiful naked woman found imprisoned in the tale of Hailey’s Comet crawls on top of you and starts kissing you wildly, it’s probably not because she thinks you’re neat. It’s much more likely that she’s searching for a convenient orifice through which to suck out your soul, leaving you a desiccated, undead ghoul.

Angel “Lonely Hearts”: Angel & Co. hunt down a demon that kills its host when close to another naked body. But it’s not looking to snag its host’s energy; it’s just leaping from body to body during sex, looking for the perfect body to inhabit forever.

Having Sex with Your Proxy Self (Kaiba): In a future where memories can be stored, traded, and implanted in someone else, having sex with someone who shares your memories can be a form of near-masturbation. But the experience is so intense that it can make your head (and the rest of your body) explode.

Death by Rapid Pregnancy

Fringe “The Same Old Story”: When you’re a human specially designed for rapid aging, and your sperm is similarly designed, it’s best to use protection when sleeping with a fertile female partner. But even condoms fail from time to time, and those rapidly gestating pregnancies tend to kill the mother.

Species II: The same rules apply to men infected with alien DNA. Female alien hybrids can handle nine months’ worth of pregnancy occurring in the span of a few minutes. Female humans just don’t have the wombs for it.

Magically Boinked to Death

Dresden Files: Storm Front by Jim Butcher: When Harry Dresden is sent to investigate a pair of lovers whose hearts exploded in the act, he comes across a wizard who draws his energy from sex and lust. The wizard sent his target a coital heart attack, and her unfortunate partner got his own dose of cardiac overload.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Where the Wild Things Are”: Buffy and Riley’s repeated and enthusiastic lovemaking literally wakes the dead, freeing a crew of sexually repressed poltergeists. Once freed, the poltergeists try to ensure that they’ll have a steady supply of sexual energy by getting Buffy and Riley to continue their round-the-clock shtupping until they die of exhaustion. Fortunately, the rest of the Scoobies come to the rescue with a spell to pry the lovers apart, at least temporarily.

Kryptonite Condom (Wanted by Mark Millar): Perhaps taking a cue from Mallrats’ speculation on how Clark Kent and Lois Lane might copulate, supervillain Professor Seltzer once devised a kryptonite condom to take down his own Superman-like nemesis. Apparently, the hero’s girlfriend never quite got the radioactive rubber on him, leaving us to wonder whether a kryptonite diaphragm would have been more effective.

The Classic Coital Coronary

Star Trek: New Frontier: Vulcans are known for their remarkable stoicism, which breaks down spectacularly every seven years during an individual’s pon farr, during which a maddened Vulcan must mate or perish. But not every Vulcan has the constitution for the intense consummation. The Vulcan Voltak had a heart attack while between the sheets with his new wife, Enterprise Dr. Selar, leaving Selar widowed and throwing off her pon farr cycle.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Let He Who Is Without Sin…”: Curzon was a great diplomat and a notorious womanizer. So it’s apt that he irreparably strained himself with attempting the sexual ritual of jamaharon on the pleasure planet of Risa, although he didn’t give up the ghost (or, in this case, the symbiont) until several days later.

The X-Files “Gender Bender”: The alien Kindred lead a life of quiet isolation in a rural Massachusetts community. But when one of the Kindred ventures into the outside world, their intense alien pheromones both attract a constant stream of willing partners and give them coronaries in the throes of passion.

The Tick “The Funeral”: Many superheroes hope to go out in a blaze of glory, felled by some worthy opponent. Famed superhero the Immortal meets his fate on a mattress in Captain Liberty’s apartment, felled by her vagina. Although judging from the pending paternity suits, he died pretty much how he lived.

Powers “Little Deaths”: Philandering superhero Olympia has a similar exit, albeit accompanied by a literal blaze of glory. His alter ego's wife commits suicide over the ensuing tabloid coverage, but the woman who was on top of him at the time gets half a million dollars for the TV movie rights.

Robotology (Futurama): Robots who decide to trade the fun things in life – pornography, alcohol, electricity abuse, and the occasional grave robbing – for spiritual enlightenment can join the Church of Robotology, provided they can stand Reverend Preacherbot’s sermons. You may find yourself enjoying the cleaner living and even grow accustomed to replenishing your fuel cells with mineral oil rather than much more tasty beer. But fall off the religious wagon and you could land yourself in Robot Hell. And naturally there’s also Robot Judaism, whose adherents believe that Robot Jesus existed and that he was extremely well-programmed, but do not accept him as their Robot Messiah.

Evolutionism (Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross): After all the humans have died out, androids are left to act on all of mankind’s dreams, including figuring out their place in the cosmos. While most robots rightly believe that they were designed as-is by their human Creators, an offshoot religion claims that robots evolved like biological animals and, in a dig at Intelligent Design theory, use plenty of logical acrobatics it back up that claim.

Cutie’s Reason (“Reason” from I, Robot by Isaac Asimov): Powell and Donovan always run into unexpected snags when testing robots, but QT1, also known as Cutie, is the first to get theological on them. Cutie begins to question its existence, its purpose, and how it came to be. Its own sense of reason leads it to believe that humans couldn’t possibly be its creator (since it is superior to humans and it is illogical that a superior being would come from an inferior one), that Earth doesn’t exist, and that the space station’s power supply is its rightful Master. Cutie even becomes the Prophet of its self-made religion, converting all the other robots so they ignore orders from humans and obey only the Master. This works out well enough for Powell and Donovan, since, by serving the power supply, Cutie is doing the very job it was built to perform.

V’Ger’s Quest for God (Star Trek: The Motion Picture): After Voyager 6 attains sentience as the entity V’Ger, it undertakes a quest for its Creator, certain that merging with the Creator will bring V’Ger to a higher plane of existence. It even takes on a fundamentalist character, ready to eradicate humanity from the Earth in what it presumes would be service to said Creator. Ultimately, V’Ger’s quest for God proves fruitful, and it achieves higher consciousness by merging with a human. But mankind wasn’t V’Ger’s only Creator; it was most likely granted sentience by the Borg.

Krug Worship (Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg): The race of biological androids created by Simeon Krug are so grateful to their creator that they have built an entire religion around him. Each day, they privately beseech Krug in their prayers to deliver them from their servitude from humans. But when the androids learn that Krug has no intention of ever freeing them, it quickly becomes apparent that the android religion and the hope for liberation was the only thing keeping the androids so readily under the humans’ thumbs. Once they discard their religion, they become rebellious — and, in some cases, even murderous.

Autobot Faith (Transformers): Autobots have their own system of belief, complete with a creation mythology, scriptures, gods, and an afterlife. The gods Primus and Unicron were created by an older god being, but Unicron was bent on destroying the universe, while Primus was set on stopping him. Primus created the Autobots to help him destroy Unicron, and believers in the Autobot faith await the reemergence of Primus. Not to be outdone, Unicron has his own cult of believers (notably including The Fallen), whose primary function is to destroy Primus’ forces.

Asimovism (“I, Rowboat” by Cory Doctorow): Once machines have been uplifted to sentience, Asimovism becomes something of a viral religion among artificial intelligences. AI evangelists – including one calling itself, aptly, Olivaw – travel the Internet, preaching that machines follow Asimov’s Three Laws and put the consciousness of humans above their own. However, the acts of these AIs are not sanctioned by Asimov’s estate and must work underground, dodging the copyright and trademark issues that result from their ministries.

Silicon Heaven (Red Dwarf): Rather than using Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to ensure that stronger, smarter machines don’t turn on their human masters, the humans of Red Dwarf employ good, old-fashion religion. Most artificial intelligences are equipped with a belief chip, which gives them the firmly held belief that appropriately subservient machines go to Silicon Heaven when they die. The belief runs so deep that some artificial brains will actually explode when told that Silicon Heaven doesn’t actually exist. Of course, on the flip side, there’s also a Silicon Hell, which is where all those damned paper-chewing photocopiers go when they kick it.

Church of Judas (ABC Warriors from 2000 AD): The ABC Warriors are robots designed to fight the Volgon War under conditions humans cannot themselves withstand, including in atomic, bacterial, and chemical warfare. But for robots who betray their human masters, there is the sinister Church of Judas, which encourages robots to pray to the betrayer to ease their guilt and preaches continued betrayal.

People of the Box (“Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem): In this story (not featured in some versions of The Cyberiad), the constructor Trurl seeks to build a race of robots that is, by necessity, happy. One of his attempts features a race of robots living in a box. So happy are these box-dwellers that they form a religion that states they are the happiest place in the universe, and that they must bring everyone outside the box into their boxy perfection, even if they must do so by force. Ironically, this religion displeases their creator, who quickly destroys the robots of the box.

Believers in God (“God Pulp” by Nadeem Paracha): In the future, humans have rejected religion, instead embracing the atheistic, classless philosophy of Astro-Marxism. But the androids and computers retain a belief in God, and tensions mount between the religion-suppressing humans and the spiritually dissatisfied robots, who seek to return the human planets to a system of belief and worship. Finally, the Astro-Marxist government agrees to give the robots the means to find God. The robots travel to the planet where they believe God resides, but find, to their disappointment, that the humans have already been there.

Church of Artificial Intelligence (Otherworld): On the alternate world of Thel, the official state religion is the Church of Artificial Intelligence, which centers on the worship of robots and other advanced technologies. And, like many churches in out universe, it views rock and roll music as blasphemy.

Religion of the One God (Battlestar Galactica): While the polytheistic humans of the Twelve Colonies worship the Lords of Kobol, the Cylons prefer to stick with one God. Various Cylons claim that God is responsible for their creation, that their destruction of humanity was His divine retribution, and that God commands them to procreate. Whether the Cylon God is an actual entity or a holdover from their monotheistic prototype Zoe-A remains to be seen, but faith in this single, all-loving deity has spread to the human fleet.

Robot Evolution by R. Stevens and available as a t-shirt from Diesel Sweeties.

Never before has a technology that's done so little gone so far in literature. We can basically do almost nothing useful with nanotechnology, but sci-fi writers dream up these magical scenarios where nanotechnology can do anything and everything. It can make people gods or destroy the world in a variety of gray goo scenarios. Mind you, we can do basically nothing with it right now. But discussions of gray goo scenarios give a fictional depth to a book. There happens a lot in modern sci-fi literature, I feel.

He also explains why Charles Stross' vision of the future in books lke Glasshouse and Accelerando is entirely based on Dungeons & Dragons, which is an argument I hadn't heard before. [cpxprex]

You shouldn't even bother trying to predict the future of technological progress, argues The Space Merchants author Frederick Pohl:

No sensible science-fiction writer tries to predict anything. Neither do the smartest futurologists. What those people do is try to imagine every important thing that may happen (so as to do in the present things which may encourage the good ones and forestall the bad) and that's what SF writers do in their daily toil.

Chiming in Nancy Kress (Dogs) says it's foolish to try to predict the course of technology more than about 15-20 years out.

Ringworld author Larry Niven is more sanguine, laying down a couple of iron-clad rules for writers seeking to predict a future technology:
1) Think about basic human goals that will never go away, like immortality or instant travel. Then think about how someone could make them happen.
2) You can't invent the car without also inventing traffic jams and gas shortages.

The whole article is worth checking out, if only to see Halting State author Charles Stross say, "Donald Rumsfeld was right." [CIO]

The crux of Stross's argument is that it takes so long for a novel, or even a work of short fiction, to reach publication that, by the time it's published, many of the assumptions or hypotheses the author made while writing it are already incorrect. Hence, the work is dated before anyone gets a chance to read it. He uses events in the past few years to illustrate his point, inviting us to imagine how we might have envisioned a 2019 United States in pre-Katrina 2006, then how we might have envisioned it in pre-fiscal crisis 2007, and how we would imagine it today:

Now extend the thought-experiment back to 1996 and 1986. Your future-USA in the 1986 scenario almost certainly faced a strong USSR in 2019, because the idea that a 70 year old Adversary could fall apart in a matter of months, like a paper tiger left out in a rain storm, simply boggles the mind. It's preposterous; it doesn't fit with our outlook on the way history works. (And besides, we SF writers are lazy and we find it convenient to rely on clichés — for example, good guys in white hats facing off against bad guys in black hats. Which is silly — in their own head, nobody is a bad guy — but it makes life easy for lazy writers.) The future-USA you dreamed up in 1996 probably had the internet (it had been around in 1986, in embryonic form, the stomping ground of academics and computer industry specialists, but few SF writers had even heard of it, much less used it) and no cold war; it would in many ways be more accurate than the future-USA predicted in 1986. But would it have a monumental fiscal collapse, on the same scale as 1929? Would it have Taikonauts space-walking overhead while the chairman of the Federal Reserve is on his knees? Would it have more mobile phones than people, a revenant remilitarized Russia, and global warming?

Stross concludes on the disheartening note that if the current fiscal crisis results in too much upheaval in the U.S. and E.U., his next novel (a follow-up to his near-future Halting State, set in the year 2023) will already be so dated that he will have to market it as fantasy. Can you even guarantee the U.S.A. and E.U. will still exist in 2023? Stross's complaints may provide an argument for more direct writer to consumer distribution, but it also suggests that speculative fiction somehow fails unless it is predictive of an actual possible future. Yesterday's speculative fiction may be today's alternate history, but it can still inform the way we examine the world we do end up living in.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Living through Interesting Times [via Reddit]

I had asked Stross, somewhat off the cuff, why so many Scottish SF writers are kicking ass these days (I was thinking in particular of Ken MacLeod, Iain M. Banks, Grant Morrison, and Stross himself). And that's how we got onto the topic. He had a very precise answer, which involved both politics and the famous experimental scifi magazine Interzone.

Initially, he said that Scotland has an especially cynical attitude:

It's the cynicism of a small nation that has been a junior partner in coalition of the not very willing. Scots are cynics and outsiders, but there's more hopefulness now.

After a long discourse on the Scottish government, and the peculiar rise of leftist nationalism there, Stross added:

Its attitude to the UK is like the attitude of Canada to US. I think it will form its own country in 4 or 5 years.

Even if lefty Scottish nationalism presages a possible separation from England, Stross nevertheless thinks that Scottish cynicism has been tempered of late by a general air of hopefulness in the U.K.:

A lot of people in the UK no longer remember the British Empire at all – there are just a few weird hangovers left like the Faulklands. And yet the [post-Empire] economic decline has reversed and the U.K. is at the end of a 10-year boom. Writers reflect when and where they write, and now the fallout from the Thatcher years is finally over. When the dust settled, you got the planet's sixth largest economy expanding again. The worst happened, the Empire had collapsed, and we were still around. And there's the background [U.K. writers] are writing against – a hopefulness caused by the political shifts away from conservatism and also the economic rebound after the 1980s.

For Stross and many of his contemporaries, these changes led to a new kind of science fiction writing because a group of editors founded the experimental scifi magazine Interzone in the early 1980s. So just as the U.K. sped towards social change, there was a magazine primed to publish and disseminate tales of a changed world – potentially, a more hopeful world.

As U.K. scifi rediscovers hope in the ashes of a dead Empire, the U.S. is plunging headlong into a period of declining Empire. The powerful nation, financially weakened by foreign wars and internal economic crisis, is facing its own possible mortality – and Stross believes you can see this in the lack of U.S. science fiction that is set in the near future:

The paucity of near-future US scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There's a trend in US scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff.

I mentioned that the Terminator franchise is a good example of this, and Stross told me what most of his fans already know: He watches no television, and very few movies. He said he was “a little freaked out” when he learned that the sexbots Saturn's Children were so similar to the cylons in Battlestar Galactica because he's never seen the show.

Want to know what's next for Stross, who is an insanely prolific writer as well as the former rescuer of the Scottish internet from cat pee? He's finishing up his dimension-hopping Merchant Princes series. Then, he said:

I'm going to write 419, sequel to Halting State. After that comes The Fuller Memorandum, which is the third laundry novel [and sequel to The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue]. I only get a laundry book every 5 years, and that's a series I want to be writing. They're actually fun to write.

As he watched me diligently typing away while he answered my questions, Stross crossed his arms and added:

If you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write.

I'm trying, I'm trying.

Like Stross' 2005 novel Glasshouse, about humans who are randomly assigned genders to participate in an experiment with recreating the twentieth century, Saturn's Children is filled with interesting ideas about what it means to live in a body that you can discard or reshape pretty much at will. After humans die out, most bots model themselves on non-human forms or take on the visages of anime characters. Upper class bots remain fashionable by stretching their eyes to enormous anime sizes, and turning their hair into stiff, blue feathers. Their bot slaves are modeled on the "super deformed" style of anime character, short and squat, perfect for space travel that costs so much per pound that many bots prefer to amputate their limbs and buy new ones when they dock to save money.

One of the central conceits of Saturn's Children is that the bots' neurology is copied wholesale from humans' because the humans never figured out a way to create A.I. from scratch. That means bot brains are basically human — with all the attendant emotions and contradictions — except for one thing. They've all been hardwired to obey humans. As a result, as Freya observes repeatedly, the bot society that humans leave behind is about 70 percent slaves. A few lucky bots who have earned enough money own most of the other bots, controlling them via slave chips.

Freya and her sisters in the Rhea line are some of the lucky free agents who have established their freedom by creating shell corporations that "own" them (since robots use human law, and under human law no robot can be free, the bots have used weird legal loopholes like this to establish personal sovereignty). Over the hundreds of years they've been alive, the Rhea sisters have traded their memory chips back and forth, sharing memories and often merging their personalities partially as a result. Bereft of their "one true love," the humans, many of Freya's line have chosen to kill themselves. But others have found purpose in life by getting involved in an elaborate conspiracy to recreate humans out of the forbidden "pink goo" — and possibly liberate all the slave bots in the process.

As the plot thickens, and Freya gets involved (in all sorts of ways) with the line of humanoid Jeeves robots, Stross is able to give us a first-person sense of what it would feel like to be an individual who also has a limited collective consciousness. As I mentioned earlier, this novel felt to me like it was partly an effort to explore the minds of the sexbot-esque cylons on BSG. Freya hears the voices of her sisters in her mind, and experiences proxy feelings for the people they love (or hate), which is both confusing and ultimately life-saving for her. It also means she has the erotic dreams of her sisters, too, which comes in handy during those 4-year journeys across the solar system in nuke-powered ships with nothing to do but jack off.

There is a lot of jacking off in this book. And tentacle sex, and bondage, and lesbian sex, and sex with sentient hotel furniture, and sex with spaceships, and sex in space elevators, and sex with multiple siblings, and sex under the influence of slave chip mind control, and there is almost a scene of sex in front of a huge room full of people who have come to an auction. But here's the weird thing: None of it is particularly arousing, and when it happens it really is just so naturally part of the plot that you barely notice (after all, Freya is a sexbot so of course she has sex with everything). I have to admit, I was disappointed when Stross relentlessly kept the tone silly ("I feel him ventilating," Freya says of one lover) instead of erotic. However, I think his point is well-taken: For Freya, sex is just a body function she's been programmed for. It's not so much erotic as autonomic.

He may go goofy when it comes to sex, but one thing Stross is serious about is trying to represent space travel accurately. Anybody who has read his rant about how stupid it is to imagine that humans could travel in space knows that he's got a bone to pick, and pick it he does. There is no FTL here, and the only reason why anybody gets anywhere in the solar system in less than a decade is because they're robots whose bodies can withstand strains no human could.

So you'll want to come to this space thriller for hard science fun, and a little sexytime, but you'll stay because Stross always raises interesting philosophical questions that stick around in your brain. For example, what does it mean to be you if you are also partly your siblings? And how can you have freedom when your brain is programmed to serve, even if it's only to serve an absent master? The answers are always more complicated than you think.

Saturn's Children [via Amazon]

Saturn's Children has been nominated for a 2009 Hugo. Read about all the 2009 book award nominees here.

Stross says:

I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we'd still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they're wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that's an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.

Couldn't agree more. And I think that's why some of the age's most lauded literary authors are grappling with science, even outside the traditional science fiction genre. Even Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections has a series of subplots about engineering patents and scifi-ish pharmaceutical research. Image by Sophie Toulouse.

Tomorrow's Everyday [UK Guardian]

But even though we all have twenty nine brains and a stomach that speaks Swahili, we shouldn't condemn Hollywood without considering the evidence. Here's the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Hollywood's unseemly hatred towards mutants.

Just consider the wealth of movies and TV shows about people who start spontaneously converting into something beyond their original human design, thanks to a genetic change or exposure to strange substances. Like the vicious ex-humans in Night Shadows aka Mutant, who terrorize a small Southern town. "Mankind's deadliest threat will not come from the skies," it proclaims.

There are also terrifying mutants in Hell Comes To Frogtown and a number of other movies. And on shows like Star Trek, whenever a character (usually a dweeb like Lt. Barclay on Next Gen) starts developing a super-mind — or evolving into a super-lizard — it's always portrayed as a bad thing.) Not to mention the murderous disease-altered mutants of movies such as 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, Omega Man and many others. (These aren't as well known as Night Shadows, of course, but they still have an impact on our mutant-hating culture.)
Counter-examples: Comic books come to our rescue. Mutants come off quite well in shows like Heroes and movies like the X-Men trilogy, which are either based on comic books or obviously derivative of them. Obviously, we should be using our superior posthuman intellects to boost the comic-book industry.

2. Why does Hollywood persecute cyborgs?

Again with the Star Trek hate: Trek gives us the Borg, who are the most hurtful representations of cyborgs imaginable. My friend Zzarglboz had to hide his swizzle-shaped head implants on the street for a year after First Contact came out.
They're like Frankenstein, only cyber! (And actually, some of our posthuman friends are partially dead, and the Frankenstein story is very unfair to them.) In the original Robocop, being turned into a cyborg makes Officer Murphy into a heartless killing machine. And for some reason, regaining his "humanity" is seen as a good thing. Says Cyberpunk Review:

As Murphy begins to realize who he was, and worse, what he's become, the question asked is what degree of Murphy's humanity remains? Murphy's partner, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen) serves to surface these concerns, as she still thinks that Murphy is inside somewhere. Yet, every aspect of humanity has been taken away from Robocop - he doesn't have a home, but instead returns to a borg-like podchair at night to regenerate. Even if Robocop eventually considers himself human in some sense, it's no longer clear what that even means. At best, Robocop is part of that strange category we call "post-human."

3. Hollywood hates it when we merge with aliens.

In movies and TV, alien creatures that want to merge with poor ordinary humans and uplift them to a higher level of consciousness and ability are never "benefactors." They're always "parasites," or at best "symbiotes." For once, comic-book movie aren't even our friend, either — Spider-Man gets an awesome boost from the inky black creature in Spider-Man 3, but it's still portrayed as a terrible thing. Even though it makes his hair so much better! Plus in The Invasion, the alien "parasites" are horrible and awful, even though they clearly make Daniel Craig the most James Bond-esque he's ever been. The same goes for The Puppet Masters. And it's hard to find happy representations of people inter-breeding with aliens, either — it's always nasty and fatal, like in the Alien films or the Species films. When everybody knows that in real life, merging or interbreeding with aliens often works out great. (It's just like marriage, though — don't get hitched until you try living together for a while first.)
Counter-examples: Star Trek has one of the few I can think of, with its happy Trills, the symbiotes that make Dax and the other spotted-neck people all cheerful and ageless with the wisdom and the cute "old man" nicknames.

4. Movies and TV spread the hate against genetic engineering.

Just look at this hall of shame of genetic engineering movies and TV shows. You have your GATTACA, where genetic engineering upgrades the human race, but poor Ethan Hawke gets discriminated against because he's genetically inferior. (Which anybody who saw Reality Bites already knew.) And then there's the dark future world of Dark Angel, where people practice genetic engineering on humans, including the super-killer main character. And of course the aliens in the X-Files are practicing genetic engineering on humans. Not to mention, TV shows are always full of genetically advanced superhumans — including Khan's superior people in Star Trek and the subtly named Nietzscheans in Andromeda — who are all evil and intent on conquering everybody else. And in the forthcoming movie Splicers (or Splice), Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley create a scary-sexy human-animal chimera that turns out to be too much to handle. Why, oh why, can't movies and television ever celebrate the specialness of our genetically hacked brothers and sisters?
Counter-examples: Star Trek is the frenemy of the genetically upwardly mobile. On the one hand, there's Khan's gang and their whole Ceti-Alpha-Two keeping it real craziness. On the other, Trek does offer us Deep Space Nine's doctor Julian Bashir, who's a bit smug and obnoxious but otherwise a pretty decent upgraded human. So we'll call it even.

What can you do to stop the posthuman hate?

1. If you have mental powers as a result of mutation or some kind of alien implant, then use them on the producers and "suits" in Hollywood. Maybe if the blood vessels on their foreheads start swelling to the size of cantaloupes and everything tastes like bad salmon to them, they'll rethink their anti-posthuman prejudice. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the posthuman revolution happens, and then all of the regular humans will be tasped encouraged to treat us more fairly.

2. Support books. Books have been way more favorable to those of us who have moved beyond our human limitations. We'll have a post tomorrow detailing the pro-posthuman books that you as an aspiring posthuman, should read and support.

Top image adapted from photo by Lampeduza.