“Great Clumsy Dinosaurs”

Abstract

If Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can arguably be considered the first science fiction (SF) novel, then it is fair to say that SF has been interested in the practical and philosophical consequences of posthumanism since its inception. SF narratives have long explored the anxieties and promise of the posthuman, what Neil Badmington calls “an activation of the trace of the inhuman within the human” (171). For instance, in two influential texts in posthuman SF, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker and Greg Bear’s Blood Music, the next step in human evolution demands the divorce of consciousness from the physical body, so that the “inhuman” can help transcend the person into a higher plane of existence. In Star Maker, the nameless narrator becomes a disembodied person, able to span galaxies and unite with alien minds, which grant him expanded consciousness. In Blood Music, the entirety of humankind unites to an enormous organism that dispenses with the physical body but allows “participants” to retain their intellectual and emotional identities. The promise that such visions of posthumanism express toward the relationship of the inhuman and the human body is applauded by many critics within feminism and queer theory, perhaps most famously in Donna Haraway’s essay on the cyborg. The interaction between the inhuman and the body destabilizes the ability to enforce normalcy, so that “ambiguity and difference are redefined to become signifiers of an inclusive posthuman embodiment” (Wolmark 76).