Asked about writing fantasy versus space opera, Williams explains:

Creation myths tap into the same kind of issues as post-human SF, albeit sometimes turned upside-down: "Where are we going?" instead of "Where did we come from?" "What does it mean to be human or to play god?" I find these kind of questions perpetually interesting, so will probably keep coming back to them forever. The solo space opera books are certainly tapping into the same vein, perhaps more overtly than ever. This is what comes of being an atheist, perhaps: we think about these things more than most people. Obsess about them, probably.

That said, I do find that writing SF and fantasy can be very different on both a nuts-and-bolts level and in terms of other fundamental perspectives. Fantasy is more overtly about character and landscape, while good SF self-consciously uses science and the scientific method to take us places on wings made of metal, not feathers. There are crossovers, of course: the Star Wars novels felt like fantasy half the time, and I was more strict with The Crooked Letter's worldbuilding than I am with some of my SF. I like both approaches to speculative fiction. It keeps me fresh.

- interview with Sean Williams at SFF World.

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?

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.

Just think about the era Bertie Wooster comes from for a sec: the automobile, the telegram and the telephone are both incredibly new, and they massively boost his ability to travel and communicate across vast distances. The first Wooster and Jeeves collection, The Man With Two Left Feet, came out in 1917. He's an early adopter, and the car and the phone (and later the airplane) play a huge role in setting up his imbroglios with his various aunts and suitors.

But all this technology doesn't make Bertie wiser or cleverer — the ability to talk to anyone, access any piece of information, travel anywhere — it just enables him to make more of an idiot of himself than ever. More gaffes, more misunderstandings. Wooster's propensity for tooling around the countryside in his newfangled car gets him into lots of scrapes. And then there are the cryptic telegrams and cables that launch many of his storylines. Like this one, from "Jeeves And The Impending Doom":

"A telegram, sir," said Jeeves, reentering the presence.
"Open it, Jeeves, and read contents. Who is it from?"
"It is unsigned, sir."
"You mean there's no name at the end of it?"
"That is precisely what I was endeavoring to convey, sir."
"Let's have a look."
I scanned the thing. It was a rummy communication. Rummy. No other word.
As follows:
REMEMBER WHEN YOU COME HERE ABSOLUTELY VITAL MEET PERFECT STRANGERS.
We Woosters are not very strong in the head, particularly at breakfast time, and I was conscious of a dull ache between the eyebrows.

So what makes us think our posthuman descendants (or us, if we're lucky) will be any luckier? According to the internet's own disinformation campaign, "posthuman" refers to people who have extended their capabilities so far, that they no longer meet the strict definition of humanity. Enhancements could include neural connections to the cyberverse, artificial intelligence grafted onto our own, cyborg limbs, nanotechnology, mind-enhancing drugs or biotech, and unlimited rice pudding.

But extending our capabilities also means expanding our ability to make jackasses out of ourselves. It will be a jolly nuisance once we start receiving encrypted instant messages directly into our brains. We'll be stuck, in the middle of backing up our consciousnesses, trying to figure out exactly who tunneled that animated video directly into our visual cortex. And how to deal with that attractive but misguided young person who may have mistaken the grace and liveliness of those who have transcended ortho-bodies for flirtation.

The fabric of society will rend and fray, like our old blue jeans the first time we try to fit our new cyborg legs into them.

Our most private internal monologues will accidentally go out on an insecure channel for our brother-in-law to pick up. Our canniest plans to escape from social gatherings, or help our less-suave friends find romance, will dash to pieces because we were wearing the wrong pelvis, and sent diametrically the wrong signal. Or you'll forget to tie up your spare exo-body, and it'll stagger in circles around your favorite local bar, convincing everybody that you've finally succumbed to utter dissoluteness.

And yes, maybe our implanted artificial intelligences and neural networks will be wise and all-knowing. But that could just make them the Jeeves to our Woosters. I picture the A.I. in your head trying to advise you of the correct spoon to use at dinner, or help you navigate a tricky nest of social relationships. You'll get more and more dependent on the sagacious A.I. in your head, and thus more and more helpless if your neural link ever goes down. And whenever you disregard your A.I.'s advice because you know best, total disaster will result.

Not to mention, posthumans will have bizarre fads that make Wodehouse's weird affectations seem like nothing. There will be cyber-pants. You will sport hats emblazoned with the rudest thing your subconscious is thinking at any given moment. You will try backing up your consciousness and restoring it in a sentient aquarium, with some disastrous consequences due to incompatible hardware. It will seem like a terribly amusing idea to play tennis using your own head as the ball — until it suddenly isn't.

And then there are the aunts and suitors. If you think Bertie had a hard time getting away from his relatives and would-be relatives in the Woodhouse stories, just imagine how hard it'll be when everybody can ping him all the time. Our bally relatives will always know exactly how to get a hold of us, and our every move will be trackable by someone who knows how to track the IP addresses your brain piggy-backs onto. Your alibis will be futile!

So I'm hoping someone will take up the challenge and write the Wodehouse/Varley mashups we deserve. Give us the incredibly advanced, yet clueless demigods who may, if we're lucky, replace us on this planet eventually. And make sure there are lots of cocktails involved!