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Originally Posted by stefanj
Transhumanist? Well, it has been many years since I devoured his stuff, but I find the connection a little hard to make.
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I almost want to say it's more like biotech cyberpunk, though I never read that much. You do have some H+ technologies -- the animal-incorporating Underpeople C'Mell are parahumans, and you've got the immortality drug. Yet overall it feels grim and subdued.
(wikipedia)
Sheol, a prison planet where prisoners have their organs removed and regrown for transplants. Niven didn't go that far.
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For me, the modern notion of transhuman was established in Frederik Pohl's 1967 short story "Day Million," which describes a love affair between a metal-skinned cyborg and a prenatally transgendered otter-woman. Love affair = exchange "analogues" of each other so they can have what amounts to virtual reality sex.
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Heh. As a kid, I think my first real transhumanism, not called as such, was Pohl's Gateway books. It starts out hardscrabble alien space tech prospecting dystopia, but things get better. Synthetic food, people born in cows, uploads, full-blown posthumanity. Maybe not superintelligence as such.
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Originally Posted by whswhs
Transhumanism goes back at least to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, a future history something like two billion years long, originally published in 1930. His Third Men, a species of naturally gifted geneticists and biologists, undertake the creation of the Fourth Men, a race of gigantic brains with superhuman intelligence and almost purely intellectual motives. Later on in his future history, other races undertake the creation of their superior successors, culminating in the Eighteenth Men, who represent his vision of a perfected humanity—but perfected through scientific transformation. Of course, Stapledon didn't have a clue about computer science, molecular genetics, or any of the other technologies that are the basis of THS. . . .
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Cool. I've only read Star Maker.
As for the history of the idea, you can get precursors a few centuries back, like Condorcet and Ben Franklin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism#History