Shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards (Non-Fiction) 2022

Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2022

SF has
long been understood as a literature of radical potential, capable of imagining
entirely new worlds and ways of being. Yet SF has been slow to embrace
posthumanist ideas about the human subject. The human of the SF tradition is
instead a liminal being, caught somewhere between the transcendent ‘Man’ of
classical humanism and the subversive ‘cyborg’ of posthumanist thought.



This
study offers a critical history of the 'human' in SF. By examining a range
of SF works from 1818 to the 1970s, it seeks to answer some key questions: What
role does technology play in defining what it means to be—or not to be—human?
How do these writers understand the relationship between humanity and the rest
of nature? And how can we use SF to re-examine our ethical position towards the
non-human world and move to more egalitarian understandings of the human
subject?