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Old 01-07-2018, 11:06 PM   #65
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: The best Transhuman scii-fi novels?

'Transhuman' covers a lot of territory.

In SF, there's a tendency to look at it through the lens of transhuman mental power, intellectual power, or growth in knowledge and perception beyond human limits. It can also include physical change as well, though. For ex, at least technically, the old Six Million Dollar Man is a transhuman character (the TV show, anyway, since he was objectively better than he started out, in the novel it was less all-up). Steve Austin the cyborg is transhuman in terms of his physical abilities, but he's still easily comprehensible because he's quite human mentally and spiritually. It's not hard to relate to him in the same sense it is to relate to Paul Atreides, for all that Paul is the more physically mundane.

But for all that it was a TV show in the 70s focused on action-adventure, from time to time it did touch on the moral and spiritual themes of such matters. For ex, we learn at one point that Steve Austin handled his new power far better than some other people who received it. Power often corrupts, and if Austin resisted that temptation some others did not.

Which can be a subtheme of transhumanism. Transhumanism can lead to dehumanization, to a downward change, as well as an upward.
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