Trans/posthumanist themes in American science fiction novels

Our world goes through a constant change due to technological and scientific progress. Whether such transition bears pleasant possibilities or constitutes a step toward an undesirable future is a question which occupies many thinkers' minds. The transhuman, in the transhumanist context, is defined as human evolving into the posthuman via technological and scientific innovations expanding his/her physical and mental capabilities. Posthuman, on the other hand, is the final phase of this transition, an entity that reaches "beyond human" in every sense by relating to his environment in a more perceptive and receptive way. Transhumanists, on the optimistic side, see technology as a tool which will help humans transcend their biological limits. On the other side, as an important field to discuss about the interaction of technology, science and humans, science fiction reflects dystopian perspectives on the co-evolution of the human and the machine. The best examples to such pessimistic perspective is portrayed in "cyberpunk," a sub-genre of science fiction which is mostly concerned with a dystopian near future in terms of technological advancements, exploring realms of the unknown through unpleasant interactions between man and technology. I focus on two novels in my study: Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which discusses the dichotomies between human/android and organic/artificial, and William Gibson's Neuromancer in which the author raises questions about material/virtual reality, mind/body, organic/artificial through different interaction patterns between humans and artificial or semi-artificial entities. My aim is to read science fiction through two colliding perspectives: pessimistic and optimistic. To do that, in this thesis, taking the transhumanist and posthumanist discourses as a basis, I aspire to analyze the apocalyptic perspective in science fiction, focusing on cyberpunk narratives and contrasting these dystopian portrayals to the optimistic stance offered by transhumanist thinkers.