The Modification, Enhancement and Hybridisation of the Human in Recent Science-Fiction Literature

The recent and intense shift of academic interest towards the posthuman has mainly occurred in the fields of philosophy and cultural studies. Many foundational tropes of posthumanism, however, were originally born in the minds of science-fiction writers. This paper explores recent literary developments of the posthuman, with a special emphasis on recent novels such as Andri Snær Magnasonn’s Lovestar (2002), Mar- garet Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (2003-2009-2013) and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005).
This paper dwells on the types of modification of the human imagined – or fore- seen – by the authors and their impact on the posthuman characters’ inner lives, on their strategies of socialization as well as on broader contexts such as culture, society and the environment. It highlights the recurrence of a particular motif of hybridiza- tion of the human with the natural as evidenced in different forms of enhancements inspired by nature, i.e. the animal, the vegetal and even the mineral.
This study also returns to the distinction between transhumanism – which “pro- motes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportuni- ties for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology” – and the posthuman. Instead of regarding them as separate, well-defined categories, these two terms can often be linked by correla- tion, causality or continuity until they become so closely intertwined that they are virtually undistinguishable from one another.