Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois (Editor), Poul Anderson (Contributor), Ted Chiang (Contributor)

Mind-expanding explorations of the future of the human form

Our bodies and minds are malleable, and only the imagination is the limit to the possible improvements. From genetics to artificial enhancements, humanity will alter the course of its own evolution. Included here are more than twenty stories from the most imaginative writers in the field, including:

Poul Anderson * James Blish * Eric Brown * Ted Chiang * Tony Daniel * Samuel R. Delany * Greg Egan * Joe Haldeman * Geoffrey A. Landis * Paul McAuley * Ian MacLeod * David Marusek * Tom Purdom * Robert Reed * Joanna Russ * Robert Silverberg * Brian Stableford * Bruce Sterling * Charles Stross * Michael Swanwick * Liz Williams * Gene Wolfe * Roger Zelazny


Contents
ix • Preface (Supermen) • essay by uncredited
1 • The Chapter Ends • [Psychotechnic League] • (1954) • novelette by Poul Anderson
18 • Watershed • [Pantropy] • (1955) • shortstory by James Blish
26 • Slow Tuesday Night • (1965) • shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
32 • Aye, and Gomorrah • (1967) • shortstory by Samuel R. Delany (aka Aye, and Gomorrah . . .)
41 • Nobody's Home • (1972) • shortstory by Joanna Russ
54 • The Hero as Werwolf • (1975) • shortstory by Gene Wolfe
66 • Halfjack • (1979) • shortstory by Roger Zelazny
71 • Dancer's in the Time-Flux • shortstory by Robert Silverberg (aka Dancers in the Time-Flux 1983 )
85 • Spook • (1983) • shortstory by Bruce Sterling
97 • Understand • (1991) • novelette by Ted Chiang
125 • None So Blind • (1994) • shortstory by Joe Haldeman
133 • Mortimer Gray's History of Death • (1995) • novella by Brian Stableford (aka Mortimer Gray's "History of Death")
181 • Brother Perfect • [Sister Alice] • (1995) • novella by Robert Reed
223 • A Child of the Dead • (1997) • shortstory by Liz Williams
229 • Nevermore • (1997) • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod
247 • The Wisdom of Old Earth • (1997) • shortstory by Michael Swanwick
255 • TOAST: A Con Report • (1998) • shortstory by Charles Stross
267 • The Gardens of Saturn • (1998) • novelette by Paul J. McAuley
296 • Grist • (1998) • novella by Tony Daniel
342 • Fossil Games • (1999) • novelette by Tom Purdom
373 • The Wedding Album • [Cathy] • (1999) • novella by David Marusek
413 • Steps Along the Way • (1999) • shortstory by Eric Brown
421 • Border Guards • (1999) • novelette by Greg Egan
442 • Epilogue (Supermen) • essay by uncredited
444 • Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct • (1999) • shortstory by Bruce Sterling (aka A.D. 2380: Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct 2001 )
446 • A History of the Human and Post-Human Species • (2000) • shortstory by Geoffrey A. Landis
449 • The Great Goodbye • (2000) • shortstory by Robert Charles Wilson

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies

450 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2002

About the author

Gardner Raymond Dozois was an American science fiction author and editor. He was editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004. He won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, both as an editor and a writer of short fiction.
Wikipedia entry: Gardner Dozois

http://us.macmillan.com/author/gardne...

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone fairly familiar with science-fiction and its preoccupation with the human and more-than-human, I found this collection rather dull. Some of the ideas presented in these stories must have been shockers at the time they were published, but I found them pretty predictable. If, however, you are new to science fiction or not familiar with earlier (1950-2000) authors, this would be a good introduction to a central theme and its major contributors.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories that focuses on one of my current favorite sf genres, transhumanism (or posthumanism, the Singularity, whatever you want to call it). The stories are generally by well-known authors, and because they are arranged chronologically by publication date, they demonstrate the development of posthuman fiction in the last five decades. Most of the stories are quite enjoyable, although a couple are stinkers. I found the following works particularly interesting: "Mortimer Grey's History of Death" by Brain Stableford, "The Wedding Album" by David Marusek, and "Border Guards" by Greg Egan.

[Little Timmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

My standard for rating a short story collection is that the number of bad stories balance out with the number of good stories , with the average stories filling out the bulk of the book. This one, to me, had more bad that good stories in it and not alot of average. Try it out if you are looking for a different collection of SiFi but for me it's a not recommended

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would we ordinary, garden-variety human beings like the Posthuman Future if we were somehow suddenly catapulted into it? Or would we find it a terrifying, hostile, and incomprehensible place, a place we were no more equipped to understand and deal with successfully than an Australopithecus would be equipped to deal with Times Square? Are human beings, as we understand the term, as the term has been understood for thousand upon thousands of years, on the way out? Doomed to extinction, or at the very least to enforced obsolescence in some future equivalent of a game reserve or a zoo? Certainly the prospect for "normal" humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories, with author after author postulating the inevitability of a constantly widening gap between the human and the posthuman condition... with the humans left ever father behind, unable to cope. (Preface, pp. xii-xiii)

Editor Gardner Dozois provides a rough sketch of a "superhuman" posthumanity in his outline of the criteria used in selecting these stories. Science fiction, once dominated by stories of space conquest and interstellar adventure, had by the early 1970s begun to yield to the fundamentally unsettling discoveries of modern cosmologists and space researchers. Solar system changed into galaxy, which in turn had gave way to galactic clusters, galactic superclusters, and ultimately to a universe of such analogy-defying proportions that the space conquest fantasies of the 1950s came to be regarded as impossible. So SF writers and some scientists began to develop new scenarios and strategies for space colonization; after all, if the crux of the problem is a dearth of nearby earthlike planets, then two possible solutions are to make planets earthlike (i.e., terraforming) or to change the nature of human beings and adapt them to a wide variety of habitats. It is this latter notion, changing the very nature of what it has meant thus far to be a human being, that is the subject of this collection.

But it is not just any change of what it means to be human. Dozois invokes various filters in his anthology: the stories contained don't deal with "accidental" posthumanity brought about through mutation or post-apocalyptic scenarios, nor do they deal with posthumans who are angels, machines, or gods in disguise (it is SF after all and not fantasy), nor do they deal with virtual realities and downloaded posthuman consciousness. In this collection, all the posthuman situations are the direct result of deliberate change, often for the purposes of space colonization and conquest, and occur primarily in the "meat" world, as opposed to that of disembodied cyberspace.

Alas the stories in this collection did not, for the most part, live up to the promise of Dozois' introduction. While many of the tales were quite good in terms of craft, not many very meaningful or memorable. Too often I found myself shaking my head at the glibness of the authors and at how far they hadn't come from the Wild West, Manifest Destiny, cowboys in space mentality that characterized much of so-called Golden Age SF. A few stories do stand out, though, and so merit special mention.

- In "The Chapter Ends," by Poul Anderson, the Earth has become a rustic backwater that has been traded to an alien civilization in a cosmic territorial exchange. The posthuman descendents of Earth, who have absolutely no connection to this obscure planet in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, move the few thousand remaining human beings off of the homeworld. They leave behind one Wendell Berry-esque holdout who realizes what it like to be the last person on earth--after the last flight out has gone.

- "Aye, and Gomorrah," by Samuel R. Delany, is the sort of sexy science fiction I'd expect from Phillip Jose Farmer. The story centers on spacers, "modified" posthumans whose exotic asexuality makes them the target of fetishists called frelks.

- "Understand," by Ted Chiang, features a patient who is resuscitated from a vegetative state through the use of an experimental new synthetic hormone. Of course, the vegetable becomes an uber-genius, escapes from the hospital as a fugitive from CIA, begins meddling in the affairs of humanity in pursuit of his posthuman aesthetic agenda, and finally discovers another pharmaceutically engendered uber-genius out to save the world.

- "None So Blind" finds Joe Haldeman (one of my favorite authors) telling a love story of sorts about an odd couple whose love begets an experimental surgery that turns regular folks into geniuses. And all they need to do is give up their eyes.

- "Border Guards," by Greg Egan (another author I like), poses a good challenge to the Wendell Berrys and Bill McKibbenses of the world with their argument that death gives our lives meaning and dignity. Egan asks the simple question, "is that true?" If we could find a way to get rid of death once and for all, would it be fair to our children not to do so?

- "A History of the Human and Post-Human Species," by Geoffrey A. Landis, was my favorite story, I think. It is found in the epilogue, and constitutes a "scientific" abstract covering all the speciation and evolution, engineered and naturally selected, that facing the human race in the next few million years. Intelligent species arise after humans, but none achieve spaceflight, and in a final twist reminiscent of Dougal Dixon's Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future , posthuman descendants of Terrestrial colonists on Mars return to Earth in the far future, with no memory of their original connection.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. This is a book that I could buy and reread (in this case I borrowed it from the library), which is not something I can say about most short story collections. Usually when I read a short story collection, I love one or two, enjoy several, tolerate several, and skim/dislike one or two. In this collection, I love several, enjoyed most with only one or two being stinkers. I do, however, have a soft spot for trans-humanistic tales, so I might be approaching this with a little bias. In my opinion, most of the short stories in this collection were excellent imaginings of what humans could be far into the future.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up at a Borders Books, I think, near Seattle in 2006, when I had just moved my family there for a job. I hadn't read science fiction in a while, and this completely rekindled my enthusiasm for the genre. Just today, I found my slightly musty copy in a cardboard box while doing a bit of spring cleaning. History since 2006 has born out that at least one of the contributors, Ted Chiang, is a top notch author with stories worthy of the attention of Hollywood for highbrow cinema treatment, i.e., Arrival. I love these stories with their common theme of humanity bootstrapping itself to some new stage of existence, with different and usually broader boundaries than our biology currently dictates. As our society continues to open up in fits and starts to more inclusive definitions of personhood, i.e., cross-racial, post-racial, LQBTQ, intersectional, etc., my thoughts over the years have returned again and again to this collection of stories.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading science fiction since the 1960s. One can get locked into favorite authors over time, occasionally trying something new. Short stories are a great way to try the work of a lot of authors and find some new writers to explore and make favorites. This collection offered some good and some great stories. I believe I have found a few new writers to explore.

[Timon Karnezos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it. Great collection of essays about well...read the title. I would say that I enjoyed about 15 of them very much and the rest were still passable.

[Walt O'Hara]

Bought this at Balticon 44. Mostly because of the subject matter and the fact that Gardner Dozois is an excellent anthology editor.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of sci-fi short stories all dealing with the theme of the posthuman future. Very cool and interesting stuff.