Robots, Clones and Clockwork Men: The Post-Human Perplex in Early Twentieth-Century Literature and Science

摘要

AbstractAbstractRecent commentators have located the origins of the so-called 'Post-Human era' in the literature, painting and sculpture of the early twentieth-century Modernist avant-garde. The 'post-human' expresses a powerful cultural conception, however far it falls short of scientific precision. This paper looks at both science fiction and science non-fiction from the early 1920s in the light of the alleged distinction between the human and the post-human. In the year 1923, Karel Čapek's play R. U. R. gave the English language the word robot, E. V. Odle published what has been called the first cyborg novel, H. G. Wells portrayed a utopian future in Men Like Gods, and J. B. S. Haldane inaugurated the 'To-day and To-morrow' series which marks the beginning of the discipline of futurology. Haldane's Daedalus and the novel it influenced, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, foresee a future of cloned individuals who are at least neo-human if not exactly post-human. Like Wells's utopians, these products of genetic engineering are felt to be culturally and politically, rather than biologically, alien. For Wells and, especially, Haldane, humanity is still far from fulfilling its potential, and the scientific quest for knowledge symbolized by the mythical Greek hero stands out as a timeless constant linking the past to a barely imaginable future. The role of biotechnology in human history demonstrates our extraordinary capacity to absorb and neutralize what at first seems to be monstrous, indecent and unnatural.