Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living

by Richard M. Doyle

A dizzying tour of the ways technologies, both real and imagined, can transform humanity

The mind of the machine, the body suspended in time, organs exchanged, thought computed, genes manipulated, DNA samples abducted by aliens: the terrain between science and speculation, fraught with the possibility of technological and perhaps even evolutionary transformations, is the territory Richard Doyle explores in Wetwares. In a manner at once sober and playful, Doyle maps potentials for human transformation by new ecologies of information in the early twenty-first century.

Wetwares ranges over recent research in artificial life, cloning, cryonics, computer science, organ transplantation, and alien abduction. Moving between actual technical practices, serious speculative technology, and science fiction, Doyle shows us emerging scientific paradigms where “life” becomes more a matter of information than of inner vitality—in short, becomes “wetwares” for DNA and computer networks. Viewing technologies of immortality—from cryonics to artificial life—as disciplines for welcoming a thoroughly other future, a future of neither capital, god, human, nor organism, the book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Richard Matthew Doyle is associate professor of rhetoric and science studies in the Department of English at Penn State University. He is the author of On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (1997).