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The latest Locus Roundtable discussion looks at the work of Greg Egan:

Paul Graham Raven: “Posthuman” implies a transcendence of humanity, certainly, but the whole point of the posthuman as a trope is to reimagine the familiar (namely ourselves) as having the potential to become the alien; it’s about immanence. If Egan’s posthumans were any more post-, they would stop being recognisably human and simply be aliens. The implied continuity between reader and character is the core rhetorical thrust of posthuman sf; as such, I’d suggest that to complain that Egan’s posthumans are recognisably human in origin is to misconceive his entire project.

See also previous discussion around these parts.



Niall Harrison is an independent critic based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is a former editor of Strange Horizons, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Science FictionFoundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others. He has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Guest of Honor at the 2023 British National Science Fiction Convention. His collection All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays is available from Briardene Books.
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