‘The human is constantly created through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machine-like and not quite human […]’. These words, lifted from the extract of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s essay ‘Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things to Race’ below, point to the habitually unexamined racialised and colonial structures of […]
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Donna Haraway famously pronounced, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” in her influential A Cyborg Manifesto.[1] This statement epitomises the myriad connections between the genre and posthumanism: entwined discourses that ask similar questions about what it means to be human and whether the ‘human’ should be the limit of […]
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William Gibson (1948-) is an American author who has been resident in Canada throughout his writing career. He is best known for his 1984 novel Neuromancer which has had an important impact on posthumanism, both philosophically and culturally. Gibson’s novel depicts a future in which subjectivity is not confined to the “human” and is […]
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Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction which explores posthuman identities primarily through the representation of close relationships between human subjectivity and artificial intelligence or computer hardware.[1] Its influences are wide-ranging with echoes of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip K. Dick among others. The New Wave of science fiction which included Ursula K. Le […]
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