Supermen
Tales of the Posthuman Future
Gardner Dozois
ST. MARTIN'S GRIFFIN
Preface
The fact that the other planets of our solar system were not likely abodes for life was becoming obvious even by the early middle of the twentieth century to anyone who kept up with science— which usually includes science-fiction writers. As the century progressed and space probes actually began to visit other planets to collect hard data, it became harder and harder for SF writers (those who respected what was "known to be known" about the physical universe by scientists, anyway) to get away with stories set on a fictional Mars or Venus with Earthlike conditions, unlike previous generations of writers who could fill the Solar System with oxygen-breathing, English-speaking humanoid natives for their heroes to have sword fights with and/or fall in love with. Who knew any better? Certainly not the general public, probably not even the science-fiction-reading general public.
By the late sixties and early seventies though, space probes had "proved" that the solar system was nothing but an "uninteresting" collection of balls of rock and ice, or hellholes of deadly heat and pressure with atmospheres of poisonous gas. No available abodes for life, or at least for anything resembling Terran life. No sword-swinging, six-armed green warriors. No beautiful egg-laying princesses in flowing diaphanous gowns. Little room, in fact, for any story line that didn't feature the characters lumbering around in space suits for the entire arc of the plot.
So where were the SF writers going to set the "realistic" tales of space exploration and colonization that had become increasingly popular since the fifties, ushered in by "new" generations of SF writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, and a dozen others?
Although some writers immediately whisked themselves and their stories away to other solar systems or even to other Galaxies, far outside the writ of embarrassing and hampering Fact where they could set up whatever worlds they chose, to many writers (especially those with a "hard-science" bent, who were the very types to want to write a "realistic space story" in the first place), this was cheating— as the now more-widely-understood limitations of Einsteinian relativity seemed to say that Faster Than Light travel was impossible, and that therefore interstellar travel itself (let alone far-flung interstellar empires) would be difficult-to-impossible, to achieve.
If humans couldn't live on the available worlds in the Solar System, and you couldn't leave the Solar System to find more salubrious real estate else where, then what were you going to do if you were a writer who wanted to write about the exploration and colonization of alien worlds?
Increasingly, as the last decades of the century unwound, SF writers (those who didn't ignore the whole problem and create a magic Faster Than Light drive, anyway) turned to one of two strategies.
Science-fiction writer James Blish described those two strategies rather succinctly: You can change the planet to accommodate the colonists, or the colonists to accommodate the planet.
The first of these methods, changing the planet to provide more Earthlike conditions for the colonists, creating new, inhabitable worlds out of old, uninhabitable worlds by science and technology, has become known in the genre as "terraforming," and it was the territory explored in the previous anthology in this sequence, Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming, previously released by St. Martin's Griffin.
The second method, redesigning humans so that they are able to survive on alien planets under alien conditions, has become known as "pantropy" (a word coined by Blish himself), and it is the territory explored (along with other deliberate, engineered changes to the human form and nature) in the anthology that you hold in your hands, Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future.
*
One of the characteristics of genre is that ideas about a given topic evolve as the years progress, and one writer builds upon the work that another has done. "Consensus futures" form, as writers come to de facto agreements as to what a certain aspect of the future will be like, if only by having their own thinking on the subject influenced by the ideas set forth in other work; especially attractive or persuasive "memes" can race across the genre in only a couple of years, transforming everything in their path, like Kurt Vonnegut's "Ice-Nine," so that suddenly everyone is writing about O'Neill colonies, or nanotech, or Virtual Reality… only to erode again as the old paradigms and the old assumptions are questioned by new ideas that make new alternatives possible… so that a new consensus future forms. And so on, ad infinitum. This kind of literary evolution can happen with dazzling speed, with sometimes two or three paradigm-shifts in ideas about the future jostling each other in the span of a single decade.
The "pantropy" story has evolved as well, in the more than forty years that have passed since Blish coined the term. At first, in most stories, only relatively minor changes in the basic human form were made, just enough, say, to enable humans to survive in the thin-air and low-oxygen (as it was perceived then) environment of Mars (the culmination of this kind of "pantropy" story is probably Fred Pohl's Man Plus). Gradually, the changes became more radical, with the technicians in something like A. E. Van Vogt's The Silkie creating whole space-living races who shared almost nothing in common with the basic human stock from which they were conjured from. At some point, the concept began to broaden-out from the idea of creating new forms of humans for a specific practical purpose, adapting them to survive in a specific alien environment, to stories wherein new forms of humans were created just because we could create them. Where the reins of evolution are taken over by humans, who then consciously direct it, using science and technology to radically alter the basic form and function of the human animal, deliberately creating "supermen" —or, at least, our evolutionary successors.
At first, these changes were brought about by surgery or other brute-force technological methods, but, as the century progressed, and speculation about the oncoming Biological Revolution proliferated, this sort of story increasingly merged with the "genetic engineering" story (almost all of Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality" stories could be fit into this category, for instance), and, later, even began to employ nanotechnology as well as an enabling device in the creation of its superhumans: cyberpunk attitudes— brought into the field in the eighties by writers such as Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and others— about the weakness of the ties between human identity and the human body itself, especially the idea of "downloading" the intelligence and personality of a human into a computer or an artificial-body-environment of some sort, would also have a major influence on the superman story… by this time already beginning to be referred to here and there as the "Posthuman" story.
This kind of story kicked into high gear in the mid nineties as writers such as Greg Egan, Brian Stableford, Michael Swanwick, Robert Reed, Paul J. McAuley, and a number of others began to devote a large part of their considerable output to it, and it has continued to proliferate— and perhaps even to pick up speed— as we continue on into the new century ahead. To date, in the short-fiction arena, Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction are the markets that have devoted the most attention to explorations of what we might call (we'd better, actually, since it's the subtitle!) the Posthuman Future— but it spreads farther all the time, and I strongly suspect that examination of the idea of posthumanity, with all its complex and sometimes contradictory implications for both good and ill, is going to be (in fact, already is) one of the major thematic concerns of science fiction in the first part of the twenty-first century. Other than the authors included in this anthology, and those already mentioned, the posthuman future has also been expl
ored (or is being explored), to one degree or another, by writers as various as Greg Bear, Iain Banks, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, Gwyneth Jones, Colin Greenland, Richard Wadholm, Ian McDonald, Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, A. A. Attanasio, Peter F. Hamilton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alastair Reynolds, Geoff Ryman, Kage Baker, John Varley, Brian W. Aldiss, Kate Wilhelm, Stephen Dedman, Phillip C. Jennings, R. Garcia y Robertson… and in the multidimensional, infinitely expandable version of this anthology, I'd use stories by all of these authors, and a dozen more besides.
Back here in the real world, however, the space available was sharply limited. Of course, as always, some stories I would have liked to use had to be omitted because the reprint rights were encumbered in some way, or because they'd been reprinted too many times recently (like Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain") or because they were just too long (like Walter Jon Williams's "Elegy for Angels and Dogs") to fit into even a long book like this one with all the other long stories I wanted to use— but even with all those stories out of the running (and even discarding all those stories that suck— or, at least, that I didn't like), there were still a lot of stories left to consider. The superman theme is one of the most popular in genre history, and has generated hundreds of stories over the last fifty years, ranging from the rawest of juvenile power-fantasies to profound and sophisticated work such as Theodore Sturgeon's "Baby Is Three." More winnowing-screens were clearly called for.
The most obvious winnowing-screen, and the most useful, was to eliminate stories wherein the posthumans were produced by accident, as part of the aftermath of atomic war, or by the blind, random forces of evolution; I wanted stories where the creation of posthumnans was deliberate, a willed act, something accomplished through the use of science and technology. Although it cost me good stories from everybody from Kuttner to Van Vogt to Sturgeon, this winnowing-screen also eliminated at a blow hundreds (if not thousands— there must be hundreds from the fifties alone, when such stories were one of the most common tropes in the genre) of stories about "mutants" —usually mutants produced by the effect of radiation on human DNA— as well as stories about people who spontaneously develop psi talents (telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and a host of other "wild talents"), either because of the effects of radiation (or some other contaminant) in the environment, or just because they represent "the next step" in the process of human evolution, whose day has come (it also eliminated the more comic-bookish sort of story where someone is given superhuman powers by being bitten by a radioactive spider, or falling into a vat of toxic waste— although they were never really serious contenders in the first place).
The next winnowing-screen was that I didn't want any stories where the superman turned out to be really an alien in hiding among us, or an android, or a robot. (Or an angel, or a demon, or a wizard, or a witch— I didn't want any fantasy stories about people with magical powers; this was going to be a science-fiction anthology, by God! …and any superhuman powers exhibited would have to have some kind of reasonably plausible scientific rationale.)
I also decided that stories about people who have themselves "downloaded" into computers or remote-controlled artificial "bodies" of some sort, or who are "copied" in a discorporate state into Virtual Reality worlds— although such stories could reasonably be said to be about people living a posthuman existence, and so potentially includable— were not really what I was after here: being off at a slight tangent to what I was looking for; stories of individuals living into the posthuman future in their own flesh— or what remained of it, anyway— after the incomprehensibly advanced science and technology of that future was done with them.
Even with all these winnowing-screens in place, there were still too many stories I would have liked to use to use them all, forcing me into some of the toughest choices I can recall in my entire career as an anthologist. There's a lot of good material of similar sorts out there to be found, once you're through with this book.
*
Would we ordinary, garden-variety human beings like the Posthuman Future if we were somehow suddenly catapulted into it? Or would we find it a ter rifying, hostile, and incomprehensible place, a place we were no more equipped to understand and deal with successfully than an Australopithecus would be equipped to deal with Times Square? Are human beings, as we understand the term, as the term has been understood for thousands upon thousands of years, on the way out? Doomed to extinction, or at least to enforced obsolescence in some future equivalent of a game reserve or a zoo? Certainly the prospect for "normal" humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories, with author after author postulating the inevitability of a constantly widening gap between the human and the posthuman condition… with the humans left ever farther behind, unable to cope.
Of course, today's authors can't really give us the view from a posthuman intelligence, any more than an Australopithecus could have written a story seen through the eyes of a contemporary twenty-first-century human. The stories, after all, are being written by people on this side of the posthuman gulf— and no matter how ingenious the speculations they contain, no matter how lavish and radical the imaginations of the authors, they remain of necessity limited by being the human perspective of what posthumanity might be like. To those individuals who actually live through the Vingean Singularity and on into the world of posthumanity, let alone to those produced in generations to come, it may all seem quite different. Already there are stories by writers such as Stableford, Sterling, Ryman, Marusek, and others that hint that the Posthuman Future won't be such a bad place after all— or won't seem so to us after we get there, anyway… which may not be nearly as far away as you think.
Maybe someday, in the unknown and unknowable future, a real Posthuman Entity will come across this book, and riffle through it, and laugh, or at least smile with wistful nostalgia, at how naive and limited and constrained our ideas were of what posthumanity would be like, all of us stuck back here in the murk of the benighted and backward twenty-first century, of how far off the mark our speculations were, muse about how we could never have come even close to predicting what really happened.…
And, with luck, and if things move fast enough, maybe that Posthuman Entity will even be you, transformed past all recognition.
The Chapter Ends
POUL ANDERSON
One of the best-known writers in science fiction, Poul Anderson made his first sale in 1947, while he was still in college, and in the course of his subsequent career has published almost a hundred books (in several different fields: as Anderson has written historical novels, fantasies, and mysteries, in addition to SF), sold hundreds of short pieces to every conceivable market, and won seven Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and the Tolkein Memorial Award for Life Achievement.
Anderson had trained to be a scientist, taking a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota, but the writing life proved to be more seductive, and he never did get around to working in his original field of choice. Instead, the sales mounted steadily, until by the late fifties and early sixties, he may have been one of the most prolific writers in the genre.
In spite of his high output of fiction, he somehow managed to maintain an amazingly high standard of literary quality as well, and by the early mid-sixties was also on his way to becoming one of the most honored and respected writers in the SF genre. At one point during this period— in addition to nonrelated work and lesser series such as the "Hoka" stories he was writing in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson— Anderson was running three of the most popular and prestigious series in science fiction all at the same time: the "Technic History" series detailing the exploits of the wily trader Nicholas Van Rijn (which includes novels such as The Man Who Counts, The Trouble Twisters, Satan's World, Mirkheim, The People of the Wind, and collections such as Trader to the Stars and The Earth Book of Storm-gate); the extremely popular series relating the adventures of interstellar secret agent Dominic Flandry, probably the most successful attempt to cross SF with the spy thriller, next to Jack Vance
's "Demon Princes" novels (the Flandry series includes novels such as A Circus of Hells, The Rebel Worlds, The Day of Their Return, Flandry of Terra, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, A Stone in Heaven, and The Game of Empire, and collections such as Agent of the Terran Empire); and, my own personal favorite, a series that took us along on assignment with the agents of the Time Patrol (including the collections The Guardians of Time, Time Patrolman, The Shield of Time, and The Time Patrol).
When you add to this amazing collection of memorable titles the impact of the best of Anderson's non-series novels— works such as Brain Wave, Three Hearts and Three lions, The Night Face, The Enemy Stars, and The High Crusade, all of which were being published in addition to the series books— it becomes clear that Anderson dominated the late fifties and the pre-New Wave sixties in a way that only Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke could rival. And, like them, he remained an active and dominant figure right through the seventies, eighties, and nineties.
Here's a compelling look into the far future, at a moment when the race is beginning to split into human and posthuman camps. Even in this early story— published in 1953— it's clear that the gulf can only widen… often with tragic results.
Anderson's other books (among many others) include: The Broken Sword, Tau Zero, A Midsummer Tempest, Orion Shall Rise, The Boat of a Million Years, Harvest of Stars, The Fleet of Stars, Starfarers, and Operation Luna. His short work has been collected in The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, Fantasy, The Unicorn Trade (with Karen Anderson), Past Times, The Best of Poul Anderson, Explorations, and, most recently, the retrospective collection All One Universe. His most recent book is a new novel, Genesis— on bestseller lists at the beginning of the oughts as well. Until his death on July 31, 2001, Anderson lived in Orinda, California, with his wife (and fellow writer), Karen.
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future Page 1
