[ExI] transhumanism in fiction

[Damien Broderick]

More Egan:

Virtual Worlds and Imagined Futures - Greg Egan
An interview with David Conyers, from Albedo One Magazine

"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."

http://www.gregegan.net/INTERVIEWS/Interviews.html