cyborging n.

Do you want to read a serious extrapolative novel, in which the future of Earth is driven by the rivalry between fading Japan and rising China for cultural domination; in which cyborging, brain transplants, and genetically-altered chimeras bring new wonders and new horrors to humanity; in which new machines and artificial intelligences blur the boundary between tool and user?

‘Another who dwells in this place appears to have the proper bloodline, yet has knitted himself to unliving metal and is therefore discounted.’ That had to be Tobit, ‘knitted’ to his prosthetic arm; the League disapproved of cyborging, and had obviously programmed the AI to disqualify anyone equipped with any augmentation.

His Orglons represented the obscene end-product of the unrestricted cyborging on which humankind had turned its back after some bad experiences in the twenty-first century: flesh and metal, neurons and silicon, blended into a soulless amalgam created long ago by a race that no longer knew or cared what its own original organic form might have been—if, indeed, that race could still be said to exist at all, after having merged its identity into that of its machines.

Longevity breakthroughs, new medicine, genetic engineering, cyborging, and AI.

Life on a planet other than the one on which it evolved, or simply living in space, would reasonably require cyborging (or else major changes in physiology and perhaps morphology).