After Human

Shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards (Non-Fiction) 2022

Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2022

SF haslong been understood as a literature of radical potential, capable of imaginingentirely new worlds and ways of being. Yet SF has been slow to embraceposthumanist ideas about the human subject. The human of the SF tradition isinstead a liminal being, caught somewhere between the transcendent ‘Man’ ofclassical humanism and the subversive ‘cyborg’ of posthumanist thought.

Thisstudy offers a critical history of the 'human' in SF. By examining a rangeof SF works from 1818 to the 1970s, it seeks to answer some key questions: Whatrole does technology play in defining what it means to be—or not to be—human?How do these writers understand the relationship between humanity and the restof nature? And how can we use SF to re-examine our ethical position towards thenon-human world and move to more egalitarian understandings of the humansubject?