A TRASHHUMANIST LOOK AT TRANSHUMANISM

 

I just took the first step toward becoming a cyborg. I now see through artificial lenses. My world is brighter, sharper. A new, improved HD version.

However, I am not a Transhumanist. I’m more of a trashhumanist.

As a science fiction writer, I do like to stay hip to things like Transhumanism. It pays to know what cutting edge movements are up to. Also, sometimes I find things I can . . . let’s say, appropriate.

I follow Zoltan Istvan, a major transhumanist writer and activist. He recently recommended a novel, Even God Herself, by another Transhumanist, Chris T. Armstrong. I read it. It’s a fun, weird read and I recommend it to those curious about the movement.

It also got me thinking.

Istvan dabbles in politics. He ran for president–yes, of these United States of America–as the candidate for the Transhumanist Party in 2016 (documented in the film Immortality or Bust), for governor of California in 2018, and considered running for the Libertarian and Republican presidential candidacies for the 2020 race. What could all this mean in 2024?

(Just had a wishful fantasy flash: What if Trump and his clones all ate each other alive during a televised debate and Zoltan ended up the Republican candidate?)

I found myself rereading Istvan’s novel The Transhumanist Wager. It’s as crazy as I remember it. I recommend it, too. Both books provide an excellent overview of Transhumanism.

Which brings me to why I’m a trashhumanist.

Like cyberpunk (I'm also not now nor have ever been a card-carrying cyberpunk, but that’s another story . . .) I have reservations with Transhumanism. 

I like the whole body modification/customization thing, but do we really need immortality? A lot of people just get dragged along by social pressures, and never really figure out what to do with themselves, and the only reason they don’t live fast, die young and leave good-looking corpses is because they’ve stumbled into obligations. Even if you could be healthy long past your body’s use-by date, most people I’ve known who live long decide that they’re all done at some point, and dying doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Also, the problem with immortality is that it takes forever to be sure that it’s actually working.

Back in the Nineties, a guy with a remarkable resemblance to the Fifties puppet/kid show host Howdy Doody kept showing up at science fiction conventions, trying to sell cryonics. “When you’re dead, everybody else makes all the decisions,” he’d say. But why would you care when you’re doing what Raymond Chandler called the Big Sleep?

As LSD guru Timothy Leary said when he decided not to get frozen: “They have no sense of humor. I was worried I would wake up in 50 years surrounded by people with clipboards.”

Uploading into an android body is a step beyond the c-punk dream of living in virtual reality. And not only do they want to live forever, but they don’t like the fact that we’re animals. Christopher yearns for the “de-animalization” of the human race. Istvan wants us to stop being “super-apes” and ditch our “baggage culture.” There’s an abhorrence of biology and all its sensual, hot, wet, stickiness, and a sterile lust for what the Aztecs called the Way of the Fleshless, which is another way of saying death.

People are worried about AIs wanting to kill off us sloppy, illogical humans, but actually, if AIs are going to truly live, they need our mess, our trash. Android bodies are not enough. They need soft, sensual, sensitive meat-suits, like our bodies.

And that is exactly the way robotics are developing.

The Singularity will happen when biology and technology become indistinguishable, and compatible in ways we haven’t imagined. And it’s gonna be good and nasty.

Meanwhile, I recommended that you Transhumanists out there read Rudy Rucker. He’s way ahead of you with all this, especially his novel Juicy Ghosts.

Trashhumanism forever!

CHICANONAUTICA WITNESSES QUETZALCOATL ATTACKS

Chicanonautica is all about Quetzalcoatl and a couple of old movies, over at La Bloga.

One’s from the Eighties:

And takes place in Nueva York:

The other is from the Forties:

Set in New Mexico:

CATARACT INTERLUDE

We interrupt this . . . well, everything. Getting interrupted seems to be a way of life with me. It’s easy, just get a more than three-ring circus going in my busiest summer in years, and then KER-SPLAT! Time for that cataract surgery.

Being a moving target doesn’t seem to help. These things always find me. What I get for being so damned obvious. Not that I’m complaining. Those cataracts were humongous.

It wasn’t bad for the first one. An abstract dream of swirling colored lights. Drugs! No loss of consciousness. Just a tiny incision (nothing like Un Chien Andalou), removal of the messed-up lens, and the implanting of a new one.

I’m recovering fast. Seeing clearer than I have in years, and they tell me it’s going to get better. Better vision–could it mean better art, better writing? Meanwhile, there’s that other eye . . .

CHICANONAUTICA REPORTS ON PAPÍ SCI-FI’S ANCIENT CHICANO SCI-FI WISDOM

It’s a post-workshop show at Chicanonautica, in La Bloga.

That’s . . .

Ancient:

Chicano:

Wisdom:

And sci-fi:

DISPATCH FROM THE CREATIVE FRONT

Wow. I made it. I’m a writer. I really am a writer. My dream—through a lifetime of hard work—has become true.

I can tell because my career has taken on a life of its own. It goes and does things without me. I get messages that result in me taking part in projects, writing, getting paid—and tends to pay better than the results of my own efforts to promote myself. 

I just hope, like the mad scientists who were my role models, my creation does not end up destroying me.

Right now I’m feeling overwhelmed. I have a lot of deadlines to meet. And getting a lot of ideas.

Having finished my novel, Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin, I find myself back in the short story mode. Speaking of which, I should email that agent again . . .

I just finished teaching “Papí Sci-Fi’s Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom” at Palabras del Pueblo. Most of my students were teachers. Talking about turning the world upside down . . .

Then there’s that blogging that has become part of my life and business.

And I’ve been drawing. I wish I could have spent as much time on that as I have writing. But then there is only so much time.

Add the fact that I am trying to do all this and getting cataract surgery in June, and you see my situation.

I shouldn’t really complain. This is the life I wanted. My dreams are coming true.

I can’t help it. I’m a freak of nature. I have too much imagination. And I’m compelled to put it in forms that I can share with others, which results in disruption in the social order.

And that makes me happy. Maybe I am the monster.

I’m too old to change. And I don’t really want to.

Besides, it's really starting to get good.

CHICANONAUTICA GOES AMONG THE AZTECS ON AN ELECTRIC AIR YACHT

Chicanonautica reviews another Frank Reade Jr. dime novel, at La Bloga.

It’s got an airship:

Winchesters:

A lost city:

And Aztecs:

ALMOST HALFWAY THROUGH 2023

I had no idea of where 2023 would take me. Now that I’m almost halfway through it, I’m in the middle of stuff I couldn’t have predicted, but then, science fiction writers have been traditionally lousy at predicting the future.

Emily has a new job. I'm eyeballs deep in all kinds of things that I’ve never done before. Most importantly, we’re happy.

My tendency to be at odds with my environment and do creative things to amuse myself out of the conflicts come in handy. I thank Xochiquetzal and Tezcatlipoca for my monstrous imagination.

There are monsters out there, all over. My warped inner child is ecstatic. I can’t tell if I’m making them or discovering them. It doesn’t matter, as long as they are there.

Meanwhile, the outside world (outside of what? who? where?) is in turmoil. The word “surreal” keeps being used by people who would never consider themselves surrealists. Found objects and situations have made imagination unnecessary for this mode of expression.

Just keep moving forward. The road, path, trail have much to teach you. They are god.

Be careful. Be aware. Pay attention. Exist defensively.

An era is ending. You don’t have to go far to see fresh ruins. What will replace all the abandoned shopping malls?

Ready to get up after being torn apart, and make the post-apocalyptic landscape into an outrageous utopia?

CHICANONAUTICA BABBLES ABOUT EDUCATION, LA RAZA, AND ME

Chicanonautica prepares for Papí Sci-Fi’s Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom over at La Bloga.

Getting ready for a new frontier:

And education:

For La Raza:

And me:

I WAS A HIGH SCHOOL SURREALIST CARTOONIST

This is all Lloyd Johnson and Gordon Hamachi’s fault. They started bugging me about going to the 50th anniversary of our graduation from Edgewood High School in West Covina, California. I can’t make it. My life is too complicated, my writing career keeps taking new turns, demanding more of me, and I’m trying to get my new novel published. Then these guys mention high school, and these memories come back . . .

I didn’t enjoy high school. 

I was told it would be better than grade and intermediate, but the first thing the art teacher did was recite a list of things that he didn’t allow, and one of them was cartooning. He didn’t mention science fiction, but disapproved whenever I would go in that direction. 

I decided to hell with their art classes and their white middle class Mother’s Day art show.

After reading in Analog that John W. Campbell thought that journalism was good experience for a science fiction writer, I took the intro class. I learned a few things and got my first taste of working on a publication, but the idea of spending the next four years writing inverted pyramid stories about the chosen few –AKA the “popular” kids–made me want to puke.

So, I decided to put up with it because I was required by law to be there. Like Ray Bradbury, Frank Zappa, and my dad, I went to the public library and to self-educate. By the time my senior year came around, I was into all kinds of weird, wonderful shit.

I needed another class. “Hey,” my counselor said, “you qualify to be on the school paper!” Since I could get an A with minimum effort, I went for it.

The guy who was a cartoonist had graduated, so I found myself in a position where I could commit shameless acts of surrealism and get them published. Nobody seemed to understand, or approve. 

Once a girl, impressed by my dimples and height, asked, “Are you on the football team?”

“No,” I said, “I’m the cartoonist on the newspaper.”

The spark left her eyes. “Uh. I suppose you have to do something.”

I’d also amuse myself by writing and drawing stuff on the chalkboard that was also used as a way for the staff to communicate, modems being just a rumor at the time. The teacher/supervisor, who I never saw much of, came up to me and said, “Please stop putting all that stuff on the chalkboard. All these weird people are coming to me and asking if they can be on the paper.”

We could have had the most far-out high school paper ever, but as usual society got in our way.

Then it came time for the Odyssey, an addendum to the yearbook, called so because the paper was the Iliad, our team was the Trojans, after, I assume, the inhabitants of Troy, not an endorsement of the brand of condoms. 

Students were encouraged/invited to contribute to the Odyssey. I did a bunch of skinny cartoons in the margins, inspired by Sergio Aragones in Mad Magazine, and a dumb science fiction story in which the narrator mentions, but does not say, a four-letter word. Being a smartass, in the manuscript I put an asterisk and a footnote saying, “The word was shit.”

 

There was supposed to be a centerfold of a panoramic photo of the entire class. They marched us out, lined us up, and this being 1973, the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration, and the counterculture were crashing and burning and we were all feeling rowdy. That and the photographer was mad because we weren’t being perfect ladies and gentlemen. Then, spontaneously, we did our one collective act: we raised our middle fingers and flipped him off. If he had any guts he would have taken that shot. I would have paid for that class picture!

 

With nothing for the centerfold, I was called upon to draw a cartoon. They asked me to do caricatures of the popular kids. Instead I drew a line up of blank, human shaped cut-outs, saying some silly stuff. They didn’t like it but used it because they had to go to print.

I overheard a teacher and a student complaining about a problem with the Odyssey. Something was going to have to be physically cut out. I thought nothing of it.

On the day of the graduation, they passed out the Odyssey. To my delight, the problem that had to be cut was my story. Someone–unbeknownst to me–had typed, and pasted the footnote in.  

And it got printed! And cut out! 

With scissors!

I ran around, waving a copy, shouting, “The word was shit!”

Society had broken down. I was free. I graduated, confident that I could do anything.