[ExI] transhumanism in fiction

[BillK]

On 6/21/10, Damien Broderick  wrote:
> More Egan:
>
>  "Do transhuman characters with god-like powers alienate readers? Are they
> too far removed from human emotions and frailties that we experience in
> modern society?
>
>  The frailty of our bodies is an enormously important part of our current
> reality — and I very much doubt that anyone will ever be literally immortal
> — but I don't think there's anything all that strange or alienating about
> the prospect of having, say, a far more robust body, or back-up copies of
> your mind. These are just ways of enabling us to do the kind of constructive
> things we're doing right now, with fewer unwelcome interruptions. If you
> asked someone who'd moved from a country with endemic violence, women dying
> in childbirth, high infant mortality, and no effective treatment for dozens
> of infectious diseases to a place where all of those problems had been
> solved whether they felt alienated by the loss of their precious human
> frailty, they'd just laugh."
>
>


I think from the POV of authors that H+ makes life much more difficult.

Just about every novel or film before about 1990 seems a waste of time
to the younger generation.
They stare in puzzlement at every plot crisis moment and say 'Why
doesn't she use her mobile phone to get help?'
Every 'lost' occasion brings 'Doesn't the GPS in her phone work?'
When the actors don't know something important to the plot - 'Why
don't they Google it?'   The young just lose patience with all this
seeming nonsense.

If you add in superhuman intelligence, superhuman bodies, etc. it
becomes really difficult to find crisis points that interest current
humans. (That's why the authors usually keep some humans around, so
they can have their interesting problems........)   ;)


BillK