Science Fictions and Cyber Myths: or, Do Cyborgs Dream of Dolly the Sheep?

Abstract

Abstract For most science writers and theorists, the history of the cyborg begins in 1960 with a neologism coined by the research scientist Manfred Clynes and the clinical psychiatrist Nathan Kline to refer to a technologically enhanced man or ‘cybernetic organism’ — a fusion of organism, machine, and code — capable of surviving and working in hostile alien environments. This chapter examines what constitutes feminist science by dissecting the work of Donna Haraway and the modern myth of the ‘cyborg’. It shows how the utopia of feminist science fiction is modelled upon ancient myths of hybridity, but at the same time seeks to distance itself from that ancient legacy. In her ground-breaking and now ‘classic’ analysis of feminism in the post-modern Western world, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Haraway proposes some provocative ways of rethinking human subjectivity, invoking the term ‘cyborg’ as a metaphor for the late 20th-century subject.