The Representation of Fukuyama’s Pathways to a Posthuman Future in Brave New World and Never Let Me Go

Abstract

SummaryDealing with the in-vitro creation of human beings, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and Kazuo lshiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) share the dystopian tradition, holding a catastrophic view of a technocratic society in a future in which humanity is depicted to be in a state of crisis. This article aims to examine the above-mentioned novels in terms of posthumanism, focusing on one of the well-known theorists of this field, Francis Fukuyama, who in Our Posthuman Future treats posthumanism as a threat to humanistic values. Fukuyama warns against a posthuman future in which technology will give us the capacity to modify the essence of human nature gradually, over time. The focus of this article will be on “Factor X”, a concept introduced by Fukuyama, and the ways in which the characters of the novels possess it, or come into its possession. The ways in which Fukuyama's pathways to a posthuman world are realised in the dystopian worlds that Huxley and lshiguro create, are also discussed.