Good transhumanist fiction?

"Understand," by Ted Chiang (circa 1990):

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm

I've also heard that the enhanced character in the film Limitless turns out well instead of the usual cliches where he either becomes evil, goes insane or winds up dumber than before. I haven't seen that film yet, however.

I'll only list the items I consider 5/5 stars, and would be willing to reread or rewatch as many times as I feel like (and have done so for many), all dealing with transhumanist themes, self-improvement, or the challenges thereof.

Books:

• Heart of the Comet, by David Brin and Gregory Benford. A story about the first humans who attempt to create a living society on a comet, encountering alien life forms, genetic self-modification, cloning, advanced robotics, AI, and uploads.
• Armor, by John Steakley. A war story on foreign planets about a man who encounters intense pressures yet overcomes through mental transformation into someone who can handle it all, and more.
• Aristoi, by Walter Jon Williams. A story about advanced humans dealing with multi-tiered society, near-gods at one end and unaltered humans at the other, and how they interact with each other.
• After Life, by Simon Funk, free online. An exploration of the consequences of greater than human intelligence on human society as it progresses from the first upload to galactic civilization.
• Dune, by Frank Herbert. A story about a very different society on far-off planets dealing with the philosophical and mental effects of a substance which alters reality in interesting ways.
• Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds. A hard sci-fi look at human offspring, the separate formats they might take, and challenges they might encounter once they begin spreading throughout the galaxy.
• Marooned in Realtime, by Vernor Vinge. A mystery novel about a small group who survived the Singularity, not knowing what happened to the rest of humanity, and having a range of technology and cultures from different time frames thanks to an impenetrable stasis field.
• Neuromancer, by William Gibson. A sci-fi story which created the genre of cyberpunk, examining AI, body modification through technology, and greater than human intelligence.
• I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov. One of the foundational (heh) novels regarding AI and how it might interact with humans, with many possible flaws and benefits.

Movies:

• Colossus: The Forbin Project. A story about the first computer to gain intelligence, and how recursive self-improvement might play out.
• Limitless. Follows the exploits of a man who finds a drug which improves his thought and motivation to superhuman levels, and what a normal person might accomplish with such a powerful benefit.
• Dark City. An eccentric movie wondering what it means to be human, how different memories and pasts affect our present, and how the ability to reshape reality might play out.
• Interview with the Vampire. A discourse on potential problems of long life and how it can be difficult to hold on to what it means to be human once you're truly different.
• Groundhog Day. My favorite movie of all time, and likely the category winner for self-improvement. A humorous, sad, and poignant look at how one person might change after living decades or even centuries in a single city, going through the same day time and again, and how they might find happiness.

Back in the late 1990's the A&E Channel ran a series titled The Unexplained. Most episodes dealt with woo like ghosts, flying saucers and bigfoot. But one episode explored "human transformations." It portrayed a guy who had become totally obsessed with the Star Trek universe and wanted to try to live in it as much as possible. So he rebuilt the interior of his house to resemble the sets from The Next Generation, wore reproduction Trek costumes, attended the conventions and pretty much adopted the stereotypical Trekkie loser lifestyle. As I recall, the show says that his wife wound up leaving him. (Apparently a Trek obsession can have the effect of lowering a man's status.)

But that episode also profiled Cindy Jackson, who grew up as a plain-looking farm girl in Ohio yet aspired to try to look like her Barbie doll, and to try to live like a real-life Barbie. So when she came of age, she moved to London (and why wouldn't Barbie live in London instead of a small town in Ohio?) and made a living there somehow as a rock musician. (That raises questions about the UK's immigration laws. Can you get permission to live in the UK as an irregularly employed bohemian?) When her father died, she inherited some money and spent it on cosmetic procedures. She then capitalized on her improved appearance to move into more fashionable British social circles (I suspect as a kind of escort or courtesan, but the show didn't say), somehow made more money, had more work done and eventually used her experiences with this branch of medicine to start a consulting business for other women who want cosmetic procedures:

http://www.cindyjackson.com/

Both of these individuals seem to have emotional problems they probably could have dealt with in more constructive ways. But I came away from watching that episode respecting Cindy a lot more than the Trekkie. You wouldn't think so at first, but Cindy articulated feasible goals starting from an imaginary premise, then took practical steps to get from here to there. The Trekkie, by contrast, couldn't get a job on a Federation starship no matter what he did. At best he could have pursued an education and training in a STEM field and gotten a job related to aerospace. Otherwise he had nowhere to go outside of the fantasy life he borrowed from Gene Roddenberry.

Perhaps we can make a distinction between Cindy Jackson-like transhumanist goals and Trekkie-like transhumanist goals, where the former fall into the realm of current practicality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

The comic book is superb and contains significant examination of some transhumanist issues, with especially good description of Dr. Manhattan's value drift. The movie is a very suitable substitute IMO, due to largely sticking to the comic and an awesome visual effects and soundtrack.

Besides transhumanism other favorite LW issues are in play, e.g. utilitarianism vs. deontology and free will.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress.

Some more: "The Gentle Seduction" by Mark Steigler is definitely pro-tranhumanism. It avoids one of the hard questions (portraying one transhuman is hard enough, portraying a transhuman society is much harder) by making the main character pretty much solitary.

"No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore is marginal-- a woman who's been badly burned has a whole body replacement (I'm not sure whether her brain is replaced), and I take the end of the story to be "she's not human any more, but it might be worth it".

The latter is an edge case in another way, too-- does the transhumanist start from an average or better human baseline, or is the improvement start with a desire to make up for a deficiency?

Non-choice transhumanism: Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. The human race had been in a region of the galaxy which suppressed certain electro-magnetic effects. Species normally evolve to average IQs of 100-- that's good enough. As a result of the earth moving out of the suppressor field, people and animals quickly become four or five times as smart. This is presented as a good thing.

Replay, by Ken Grimwood - A man dies and then gets to relive his life, again and again. It's sometimes cited as the inspiration for the movie Groundhog Day, which has already been mentioned. This is one of my all-time favorite novels, definitely worth reading.

Also check out Peter F. Hamilton. He writes space opera, some of the most explicitly and matter-of-factly transhuman series that I've seen. His books explore immortality as well as biological and technological upgrades. I would recommend the Commonwealth Saga/Void Trilogy over the Night's Dawn trilogy, but both series are good.

Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, another space opera, reveals some transhumanist themes as the series progresses through the branch of humanity called Ousters.

I don't think there's a lot of fiction about appearance makeovers for men [...] It wouldn't surprise me if The Count of Monte Cristo (frequently referenced with TSMD) has one.

Not so much, if I'm reading it right. The Count persona is definitely striking, dresses very well, and has exceptional social competence, all of which Dantes lacked -- but he's also a lot older and I don't recall him getting a lot of comments on physical beauty. It's implied that he looks off-puttingly pale and intense, actually -- there's a running joke about him being a vampire. (One of his in-story nicknames, dropped in a lot of adaptations, is "Lord Ruthven)".)

I cannot believe nobody has recommended David Zindell yet! His work is a masterpiece of transhumanist fiction.

His Requiem for Homo Sapiens series is preceded by a short story Shanidar, you should read it first to get a taste of what's next. If you want more, then the next four books are:

• Neverness
• The Broken God (My personal favorite)
• The Wild (IMHO the worst of the series, but Nikolos Daru Ede is just lovable)
• War in Heaven

I'll second After Life, it's very short but definitely one of my favorite pieces of h+ fiction. The work of Cordwainer Smith (He only wrote a novel and a few short stories) could also be considered transhumanist fiction, as it includes genetically-engineered super-furries.

Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon, is also a very, very good (And rather depressing) novel about an uplifted dog. In the short story deparment, my personal favorite (Even better than Shanidar) is Fermi's Urbex Paradox, a real must-read about a posthuman who travels around the galaxy investigating the remains of civilizations and provides an answer for the Fermi Paradox. Crystal Nights, by Greg Egan, is also good.

Full list

I have a soft spot for Haldeman: The Long Habit of Living and The Forever Peace both feature interesting H+ twists. I've reread both several times.

TLHoL has a male appearance makeover, which includes the following dialogue:

"You want a new dick?"

"What?"

"Blade, dork, penis. One-eyed trouser mouse. It's as individual as the face. You can imagine circumstances where a man might want it disguised." Deadpan. "Give me a first. Say you want it shortened."

Superhero comics?

Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix and Holy Fire both have the protagonist breaking out of the traditional human life narrative as they grow older and get neater augmentation tech. Schismatrix is earlier and space operatic. Holy Fire is 90s post-cyberpunk and is more about biotech and radical life extension.

I read both 10+ years ago, so my memories are a bit hazy by now. Then I went and read Zeitgeist and haven't touched a Bruce Sterling book since.

Schild's Ladder, by Greg Egan

Shaw's Back to Methuselah is one of the most pro-transhumanist pieces of fiction I can think of. People can live much longer if they set their minds to it, and they lose interest in the repetitive behaviors that people generally think of as normal. This is presented as a good thing.

Stapledon's Last and First Men and Last and First Men in London presents the human race's self improvement as a good thing, but unfortunately it's ground down by entropy.

In that long-ago decade of the 1980's, Saul Kent and Mike Darwin in two separate reviews make the case that Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo has a transhumanist message:

http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8506.txt

Basically the film explores the idea of what you would do if you had the opportunity to instantiate your dream, like the character played by Mia Farrow in the film. Would you really want to abandon this world, if given the chance, and enter one where people substantially more attractive and functional than us live, and where they don't grow old or suffer from poverty or die? (Notice the resemblance to the assumptions made by the cryonics argument.)

Luminosity, Radiance and Flashes by Alicorn.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is very good fiction, but is only contingently pro-transhumanist. The choices of the player can make the protagonist (who is involuntarily made into a transhuman by his employer following a catastrophic "workplace accident") appear more or less friendly to different factions (some of which are "pro-human", transhumanist, or neutral).

Existence by David Brin lists several possible failure modes for transhumanist societies, focusing on one particularly tricky failure mode as the main plot device. It is not entirely obvious at first what the failure mode is and whether one exists at all. I enjoyed the story a great deal.

Help me, Less Wrong, you're my only hope !

A very long time ago, I'd read a transhumanist story somewhere on the Internet, and now I can't find it. Which is a shame, because it was quite enjoyable. Can someone else help me track it down ?

WARNING: possible spoilers below, for a work of fiction whose name I do not know, so these are spoilers of the worst kind.

The story begins with the invention of a crude form of mind uploading (one's body must still be alive for one's mind to function). The researcher whose mind is uploaded into a simulation ends up spending a much larger period of subjective time there than he expected, because the simulation allows him to think much faster.

The technology is improved upon and perfected, and the subjective time acceleration increases by orders of magnitude. People end up spending more and more time online, as their physical bodies lie at home, hooked up to IVs. Many scientific advances are made during this time, including strong nano; these advances are immediately utilized to increase the efficiency of mental processing nodes even further.

Unfortunately, the mini-society of these uploads pulls ahead too fast and too dramatically. They are noticed by various organizations and agencies, then ruthlessly hunted down and captured; as it turns out, being able to think incredibly quickly is not much of an asset when one's body lies immobile, embedded in a world of hostile humans.

Final spoiler warning !

The story -- what little I remember of it -- concludes with the accelerated humans uploading their minds into fully independent nodes, then launching themselves on a mini-spaceprobe, away from Earth.

This fits better with the title of the post than the body text, but I recently read and really enjoyed The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. It's probably the most plausible vision of the future I've ever seen in science fiction, if you ignore the possibility of uFAI and the possibility that aliens will decide to wipe us out without a second thought because we don't eat babies.

It's set in a world where many (most?) people have been uploaded, and those who haven't typically use other transhuman tech. The protagonist, though, starts out trying very hard to reject all of that (while making a couple exceptions), but over the course of the story ends up using quite a bit of transhuman tech out of necessity and finally coming to accept it.

Fallout: New Vegas has points where you can improve yourself with cybernetic implants and there are various Super Mutants and Ghouls (humans altered via radiation or mutatgenic viruses) along with robots or brains in jars. Though any transhumanism takes a backseat to the post-apocolyptic setting.

Fallout Equestria is a crossover fanfiction between the Fallout universe and My Little Pony: Friendship is magic. Likewise, thoughts of transhumanism is rather incidental to the post-apocalyptic setting but the protagonist does undergo some changes that result in a prolonged lifespan near the end of the story.

Though for stories where transumanism is more the focus... I can think of Wil McCarthys books, The Collapsium and The Wellstone. These stories take place in a setting where programmable matter and nano-tech fabricators called fax machines have radically altered the world. In particular, the fax machines can copy any object, including the human body and mind, and create copies of it or alter them to remove injuries, disease, or the effects of aging.

The Collapsium series take on immortality via the fax machines is interesting in that pretty much everyone seems to understand that the machine destroys the origional when the object is scanned (which technically means that everyone who goes through a fax dies) but since the fax can transmit the persons data and rebuild them on the other end... even curing all their injuries, making them better in some way, or even making multiple copies who can later be re-integrated into a single person with all their individual memories, then the technology is seen as too useful to really avoid.

As such, people in this society have taken on the term 'immorbid', they can die or suffer grievous injuries, but the technology exists to quickly 'repair' them, or just create an exact copy of that person from a backup. There was one case (I think) where a character fell off the side of a ship and was lost into the depths of space... but they had his backup on file so they just printed out a copy of him and all was considered well. Another time it was revealed that a villain had been hacking into the fax network and making copies of various people (ie, someone would use the network to go from point A to point B, the villain intercepted the signal and created a second copy at point C in his lair while another copy appeared at B thinking it all went as normal) he'd then torture or modify them in ways... including making copies of himself to interrogate or abuse.

Its a rather interesting and slightly morbid take on transhumanism and mind uploading but I found it rather a nice read.

Does the James Bond genre promote a transhumanist message? You could interpret this essay as arguing yes, in that Bond does many things which you can learn to do in real life which make you more capable than most people, starting with the fact that he went to real places instead of science-fictional places. Like Bond, you can condition yourself physically, learn martial arts, develop proficiency in the use of firearms, study foreign languages, dress well, drive cool cars, play baccarat and so forth. I don't know the part about hooking up with beautiful women you've just met in luxury hotels, however. Apparently you can't even try to pick up ordinary women at atheist conventions, despite all the christian propaganda about atheists' promiscuity, without causing unedifying scandals and the creation of new atheist factions like Atheism+.

Why James Bond Fans Are Better Than Sci-Fi Geeks

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/09/13/why-james-bond-fans-are-better-than-sci-fi-geeks/?singlepage=true