Cyborg

Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus is, to say the least, ambiguous about the benefits of cyborgisation. But that is not how most people see it. The most popular examples of the idea are from film and television, specifically from films like Robocop and from television programmes like The Six Million Dollar Man. This last was based on Martin Caidin’s novel, Cyborg, and it suggests that the biotechnology used to rebuild Steve Austin after a near-fatal crash effectively turns him into a superman. Like Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix, novels like Cyborg bring posthuman fiction close to superhero fiction, but with fewer caveats. Prosthetic limbs in real life might be a fairly poor substitute for the real thing, but in fiction they give us unbelievable strength and speed. Cameras and radio transmitters can be integrated into the body, other devices might make us immune to injury. To make us posthuman is to make us superior in every way. Why it’s on the list: Quite simply, Cyborg and its television offshoot made everyone aware of one form of posthumanity.