Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

Supermen
Tales of the Posthuman Future
Gardner Dozois
ST. MARTIN'S GRIFFIN

The fact that the other planets of our solar system were not likely abodes for life was becoming obvious even by the early middle of the twentieth century to anyone who kept up with science— which usually includes science-fiction writers. As the century progressed and space probes actually began to
visit
other planets to collect hard data, it became harder and harder for SF writers (those who respected what was "known to be known" about the physical universe by scientists, anyway) to get away with stories set on a fictional Mars or Venus with Earthlike conditions, unlike previous generations of writers who could fill the Solar System with oxygen-breathing, English-speaking humanoid natives for their heroes to have sword fights with and/or fall in love with. Who knew any better? Certainly not the general public, probably not even the science-fiction-reading general public.

By the late sixties and early seventies though, space probes had "proved" that the solar system was nothing but an "uninteresting" collection of balls of rock and ice, or hellholes of deadly heat and pressure with atmospheres of poisonous gas. No available abodes for life, or at least for anything resembling Terran life. No sword-swinging, six-armed green warriors. No beautiful egg-laying princesses in flowing diaphanous gowns. Little room, in fact, for any story line that didn't feature the characters lumbering around in space suits for the entire arc of the plot.

So where were the SF writers going to
set
the "realistic" tales of space exploration and colonization that had become increasingly popular since the fifties, ushered in by "new" generations of SF writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, and a dozen others?

Although some writers immediately whisked themselves and their stories away to other solar systems or even to other Galaxies, far outside the writ of embarrassing and hampering Fact where they could set up whatever worlds they chose, to many writers (especially those with a "hard-science" bent, who were the very types to want to write a "realistic space story" in the first place), this was cheating— as the now more-widely-understood limitations of Einsteinian relativity seemed to say that Faster Than Light travel was impossible, and that therefore interstellar travel itself (let alone far-flung interstellar empires) would be difficult-to-impossible, to achieve.

If humans couldn't live on the available worlds in the Solar System, and you couldn't
leave
the Solar System to find more salubrious real estate else
where, then what were you going to do if you were a writer who wanted to write about the exploration and colonization of alien worlds?

Increasingly, as the last decades of the century unwound, SF writers (those who didn't ignore the whole problem and create a magic Faster Than Light drive, anyway) turned to one of two strategies.

Science-fiction writer James Blish described those two strategies rather succinctly: You can change the planet to accommodate the colonists, or the colonists to accommodate the planet.

The first of these methods, changing the planet to provide more Earthlike conditions for the colonists, creating new, inhabitable worlds out of old, uninhabitable worlds by science and technology, has become known in the genre as "terraforming," and it was the territory explored in the previous anthology in this sequence,
Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming
, previously released by St. Martin's Griffin.

The
second
method, redesigning humans so that they are able to survive on alien planets under alien conditions, has become known as "pantropy" (a word coined by Blish himself), and it is the territory explored (along with other deliberate, engineered changes to the human form and nature) in the anthology that you hold in your hands,
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
.

*

One of the characteristics of genre is that ideas about a given topic
evolve
as the years progress, and one writer builds upon the work that another has done. "Consensus futures" form, as writers come to de facto agreements as to what a certain aspect of the future will be like, if only by having their own thinking on the subject influenced by the ideas set forth in other work; especially attractive or persuasive "memes" can race across the genre in only a couple of years, transforming everything in their path, like Kurt Vonnegut's "Ice-Nine," so that suddenly everyone is writing about O'Neill colonies, or nanotech, or Virtual Reality… only to erode again as the old paradigms and the old assumptions are questioned by
new
ideas that make
new
alternatives possible… so that a new consensus future forms. And so on, ad infinitum. This kind of literary evolution can happen with dazzling speed, with sometimes two or three paradigm-shifts in ideas about the future jostling each other in the span of a single decade.

The "pantropy" story has evolved as well, in the more than forty years that have passed since Blish coined the term. At first, in most stories, only relatively minor changes in the basic human form were made, just enough, say, to enable humans to survive in the thin-air and low-oxygen (as it was perceived then) environment of Mars (the culmination of this kind of "pantropy" story is probably Fred Pohl's
Man Plus
). Gradually, the changes became more radical, with the technicians in something like A. E. Van Vogt's
The Silkie
creating whole space-living races who shared almost nothing in common with the basic human stock from which they were conjured from. At some point, the concept began to broaden-out from the idea of creating new forms of humans for a specific practical purpose, adapting them to survive in a specific alien environment, to stories wherein new forms of humans were
created just because we
could
create them. Where the reins of evolution are taken over by humans, who then consciously direct it, using science and technology to radically alter the basic form and function of the human animal, deliberately creating "supermen" —or, at least, our evolutionary successors.

At first, these changes were brought about by surgery or other brute-force technological methods, but, as the century progressed, and speculation about the oncoming Biological Revolution proliferated, this sort of story increasingly merged with the "genetic engineering" story (almost all of Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality" stories could be fit into this category, for instance), and, later, even began to employ nanotechnology as well as an enabling device in the creation of its superhumans: cyberpunk attitudes— brought into the field in the eighties by writers such as Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and others— about the weakness of the ties between human identity and the human body itself, especially the idea of "downloading" the intelligence and personality of a human into a computer or an artificial-body-environment of some sort, would also have a major influence on the superman story… by this time already beginning to be referred to here and there as the "Posthuman" story.

This kind of story kicked into high gear in the mid nineties as writers such as Greg Egan, Brian Stableford, Michael Swanwick, Robert Reed, Paul J. McAuley, and a number of others began to devote a large part of their considerable output to it, and it has continued to proliferate— and perhaps even to pick up speed— as we continue on into the new century ahead. To date, in the short-fiction arena,
Interzone
and
Asimov's Science Fiction
are the markets that have devoted the most attention to explorations of what we might call (we'd
better
, actually, since it's the subtitle!) the Posthuman Future— but it spreads farther all the time, and I strongly suspect that examination of the idea of posthumanity, with all its complex and sometimes contradictory implications for both good
and
ill, is going to be (in fact, already
is
) one of the major thematic concerns of science fiction in the first part of the twenty-first century. Other than the authors included in this anthology, and those already mentioned, the posthuman future has also been explored (or is being explored), to one degree or another, by writers as various as Greg Bear, Iain Banks, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, Gwyneth Jones, Colin Greenland, Richard Wadholm, Ian McDonald, Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, A. A. Attanasio, Peter F. Hamilton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alastair Reynolds, Geoff Ryman, Kage Baker, John Varley, Brian W. Aldiss, Kate Wilhelm, Stephen Dedman, Phillip C. Jennings, R. Garcia y Robertson… and in the multidimensional, infinitely expandable version of this anthology, I'd use stories by all of these authors, and a dozen more besides.

Back here in the real world, however, the space available was sharply limited. Of course, as always, some stories I would have liked to use had to be omitted because the reprint rights were encumbered in some way, or because they'd been reprinted too many times recently (like Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain") or because they were just too long (like Walter Jon Williams's "Elegy for Angels and Dogs") to fit into even a long book like this one with all the
other
long stories I wanted to use— but even with all those stories out
of the running (and even discarding all those stories that
suck
— or, at least, that I didn't like), there were still a
lot
of stories left to consider. The superman theme is one of the most popular in genre history, and has generated hundreds of stories over the last fifty years, ranging from the rawest of juvenile power-fantasies to profound and sophisticated work such as Theodore Sturgeon's "Baby Is Three." More winnowing-screens were clearly called for.

The most obvious winnowing-screen, and the most useful, was to eliminate stories wherein the posthumans were produced by accident, as part of the aftermath of atomic war, or by the blind, random forces of evolution; I wanted stories where the creation of posthumnans was
deliberate
, a willed act, something accomplished through the use of science and technology. Although it cost me good stories from everybody from Kuttner to Van Vogt to Sturgeon, this winnowing-screen
also
eliminated at a blow hundreds (if not thousands— there must be hundreds from the fifties alone, when such stories were one of the most common tropes in the genre) of stories about "mutants" —usually mutants produced by the effect of radiation on human DNA— as well as stories about people who spontaneously develop psi talents (telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and a host of other "wild talents"), either because of the effects of radiation (or some other contaminant) in the environment, or just because they represent "the next step" in the process of human evolution, whose day has come (it also eliminated the more comic-bookish sort of story where someone is given superhuman powers by being bitten by a radioactive spider, or falling into a vat of toxic waste— although they were never really serious contenders in the first place).

The next winnowing-screen was that I didn't want any stories where the superman turned out to be
really
an alien in hiding among us, or an android, or a robot. (Or an angel, or a demon, or a wizard, or a witch— I didn't want any fantasy stories about people with magical powers; this was going to be a science-fiction anthology, by God! …and any superhuman powers exhibited would have to have some kind of reasonably plausible scientific rationale.)

I also decided that stories about people who have themselves "downloaded" into computers or remote-controlled artificial "bodies" of some sort, or who are "copied" in a discorporate state into Virtual Reality worlds— although such stories could reasonably be said to be about people living a posthuman existence, and so potentially includable— were not really what I was after here: being off at a slight tangent to what I
was
looking for; stories of individuals living into the posthuman future in their own flesh— or what remained of it, anyway— after the incomprehensibly advanced science and technology of that future was done with them.

Even with all these winnowing-screens in place, there were still too many stories I would have liked to use to use them all, forcing me into some of the toughest choices I can recall in my entire career as an anthologist. There's a
lot
of good material of similar sorts out there to be found, once you're through with
this
book.

*

Would we ordinary, garden-variety human beings
like
the Posthuman Future if we were somehow suddenly catapulted into it? Or would we find it a ter
rifying, hostile, and incomprehensible place, a place we were no more equipped to understand and deal with successfully than an Australopithecus would be equipped to deal with Times Square? Are human beings, as we understand the term, as the term
has been
understood for thousands upon thousands of years, on the way out? Doomed to extinction, or at least to enforced obsolescence in some future equivalent of a game reserve or a zoo? Certainly the prospect for "normal" humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories, with author after author postulating the inevitability of a constantly widening gap between the human and the posthuman condition… with the humans left ever farther behind, unable to cope.