17 - Critical Posthumanism: Twilight of the Species or a New Dawn?

Summary

SCIENCE FICTION HAS long anticipated a future after the Anthropocene, whether that involves augmented humans, cyborgs, artificial intelligences, new species, or something else. In the anglophone world, we have key texts like H. G. Wells's The Man of the Year Million (1893), Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), Dan Simmon's The Hyperion Cantos (1989–97), and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003). As Stefan Herbrechter has argued, SF often seems to suggest that a “posthuman era” is inevitable, since it assumes that by using technology (biotechnology and digitalization) humanity will somehow overcome its current state and become something radically different. A “critical” posthuman approach acknowledges the challenges to what we consider human characteristics (e.g., consciousness, emotion, language, intelligence, morality, humor, and mortality). At the same time, it avoids naïve technophilia as well as apocalyptic gloom and it seeks to define what aspects of humanness need to be protected.

Dietmar Dath is one of the most prolific writers of German SF with five novels in the last ten years: Die Abschaffung der Arten (2008, The Abolition of Species, 2018), Pulsarnacht (2012), Venus Siegt (2016), Der Schnitt durch die Sonne (2017), and Neptunation (2019). In spite of winning the Kurd Laßwitz prize twice, he is not a “typical” SF writer; nor, however, does he belong to the “mainstream.” Best described as a nondogmatic Marxist cultural critic, Dath is well aware that his way of writing SF is not exactly crowd-pleasing:

Science fiction is the genre in which the twentieth century has learned to treat the political and scientific questions of the age as aesthetic ones, in a popular form. I like that, and try to do the same, only in a less popular manner. Whether this is successful will be decided in the new century.

Nevertheless, with Die Abschaffung der Arten, a fictional continuation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), Dath has managed to garner both critical acclaim and produce a bestseller. The book starts with a quotation from Nietzsche:

Error has turned animals into humans; might truth be capable of turning the human being into an animal again?