having the qualities or characteristics of transhumans
When a Frenchman proudly informs you that he is ‘pere de famille’ (the father of a family), he means that he owns a son or a daughter. With undivided sway the newcomer rules, not the nursery (nurseries being unknown in France), but the entire household. He is regarded as a quite transhuman entity, a phenomenon, a small divinity whose humour under no circumstances whatever is to be crossed.]
When you return to my office, you’ll be much more deeply aware of the meaning of this unique and wonderful moment in human and transhuman history.
There were the saucer people: superb specimens of transhuman life, muscular, magnificent, with expressions of ineffable wisdom.
But we must remind ourselves how this challenges the writer. The storyteller must interpret the transhuman condition to humans. He must convince the tired wage earner, relaxing with a beer and baseball, or watching Mary Hartman’s friend drown in a bowl of chicken soup, that superhumans are interesting and sympatico.
‘Chanson Perpetuelle’, from a work in progress by Thomas M. Disch is one of these. It is used to lead off this transhuman future anthology; a bit of a mistake since you hate for this tale to end.
They will resemble their parents except in some not so subtle respects. They will be hermaphrodites and lack human hormonal responses. They will be logical, not emotional. They will move differently; they will think differently. They will be transhuman.
These guys are freaks, Professor! You could rain transhuman treasure on them and they’d call it spit!
Time for a major overhaul, one that would take the human animal to a new level, to a more fitting, trans human condition.
The other [i.e., mythic writing or magical realism] is an exploration of elements taken as expressing, and therefore as implicitly symbolizing, certain deep-lying aspects of human and transhuman existence.
They believe the Techno-Rapture will happen on or about February 13th, 2013, with waves of nanoassemblers spreading across the planet and rewiring the carbon-unit brains in one rapturous orgy of transhuman uploading, a veritable Drexlerian rhapsody in blue goo.
If the relationship between man and artifact is simultaneously both chaotic and prosaic, the vision of technology infinitely extended—the trans-human era—is a steady-state universe where the unbelievable is taken as a given.
He’s still explaining to her how he’s laying the foundations for the transhuman explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with him.
antedating 1967
R. Silverberg 'Those Who Watch'
Last modified 2021-04-09 11:27:29
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entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries
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