The boundary between science fiction and fact is often at issue in contemporary debates over the posthuman. Genetic enhancement and longevity research provoke fervent debate between those who favor such research and others who think it is wrong to tamper with fundamental aspects of the human. Each side thinks that distinguishing realistic possibilities from wild speculations is a priority. Comically, though, each side uses the epithet science fiction as a way of trivializing the positions of the other, while proclaiming that the research they cite is on the verge of transforming human nature and that the future scenarios they describe are plausible and impending. This article brings the bio-ethical debate about posthumanism into contact with a massive, culturally significant body of writing on the topic, popular science fiction from the midtwentieth through the twenty-first centuries. The nightmares of science fiction haunt the bioethical imagination, exerting a pervasive but unexamined influence on its analyses. But the failure of bioethicists to examine the images, metaphors, and storylines of the science fiction that they so frequently invoke distorts their findings and recommendations.
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