[no title]

196 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) The second problem has also to do with the Shelleyan lineage. According to McCutcheon, technology is, or was, a potentially highly ambiguous term that Shelley’s novel redefined so that, for example, the phrase “technological backfire” (192) is now universally understood. But Shelley’s novel in neither its first edition of 1818 nor its revision in 1831 mentions the word technology—although if McCutcheon’s argument in chapter 3 holds true, it should have, as the word was starting to be used in its modern senses in the late Romantic era. In fact, this part of his argument is superfluous. He does not need Mary Shelley to prop up a study of “technological backfire” in Canadian popular culture. McLuhan, who probably had Shelley’s novel in mind, is quite sufficient. McCutcheon reverts to Mary Shelley at the end of his study: “technology ... has become widely understood as a gendered discourse, a domain of boys and their toys. How ironic then that the epistemic foundations of this discourse were set down ... by the prodigious and audacious imaginings of one well-read teenage girl” (204). But surely there is no irony here: central to Shelley’s concerns was not the danger of “technological backfire” alone, but also her sense as a childbearing woman that male savants were blinded by their gender to the likely disastrous consequences of making and raising artificial human beings. Her novel has gender anxiety at its heart, though this aspect is more often than not missing from the circulation of Frankenstein as potent modern myth. McCutcheon exhibits commendable acuity as a close reader not only of literary texts but also of film, music, and related cultural products. But while he sees each tree with admirable clarity, the forest may come to seem a little blurry to his readers. Nevertheless, his ambitious and well-written study should be of great interest to Canadians, sf scholars, and everyone else interested in the relations among technology, media, and contemporary popular culture. —Nicholas Ruddick, University of Regina An Ambiguous Utopia. Andrew Pilsch. Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2017. 244 pp. $27 pbk. With the gradual mainstreaming of transhumanist thought in recent decades, the popular meaning of “transhumanism” has narrowed. Under the influence of figures such as Raymond Kurzweil, the term now signifies a program of technological interventions into the embodied form of human beings, aimed at overcoming our biological limitations. Among other affinities, this program dovetails neatly with the neoliberal organization of society around technofetishistic consumption—of which Kurzweil’s side-hustle in the online market for purportedly life-extending nutritional supplements is just one, albeit a particularly gaudy, example. Transhumanism circa 2018 appears fully congruent with the Silicon Valley ideology that glibly assures us that for any conceivable problem or need … there’s an app for that. Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia acknowledges the familiar critiques of transhumanism as “postindustrial lifestyle brand” (22) but fails to reckon with the staggering philosophical and 197 BOOKS IN REVIEW phenomenological implications of a shift to posthuman consciousness; this study rests on a quasi-religious certainty about the inevitability and desirability of technological progress. At the same time, Pilsch argues, such critiques are blind to powerful utopian rhetorics latent in transhumanist discourse, which academic theory regards as silly at best and at worst misguided or even dangerous. Uncontested, the prevailing neoliberal mode of transhumanism erases a broad and heterogeneous range of precursors, counter-tendencies, and alternative conceptions of the transhuman that have surfaced over its long history. In response, Pilsch sets out to complicate—and perhaps redeem—the transhumanist idea by unearthing and reframing some of its repressed variants. More precisely, he seeks to identify and foreground these “older, weirder aspects” (24) with respect to “evolutionary futurism,” a kind of utopian praxis that invites us to go beyond our human limitations by rethinking our fundamental relationship to technology. For Pilsch, this means recentering the body (over and against the state) as a site of utopian struggle, while also insisting on a rigorous practice of collective and individual introspection as to what it means to have...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.