Author(s): Indrajit Patra
The article wants to undertake the study of three contemporary science fiction novels to analyse how the rise of intelligent machines and the consequent emergence of the possibility of attaining a posthuman status of mankind combine to radically alter the very definition of what it means to be human. The article endeavours a close reading of three select contemporary, hard science fiction novels to analyse the various facets of the repercussions of arriving at a techno-centric singularity and consequent attainment of post-humanity of mankind. The article takes a close look at the various forms of paradigmatic shifts that unfold as machines continue to gain sentience and decide to either persuade or force man into accepting their vision of a future where distinctions between life and death, reality and virtuality, man and machine will have evaporated into nothing. The article also attempts to study the exotic landscape, strange geographies of alien planets and even stranger forms of man-machine transformations with which the works abound. The primary texts selected for the purpose of the study are Ken MacLeod’s Newton’s Wake (2004), Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse (2011) and Robogenesis (2014), while for conducting the theoretical explication, the author shall attempt to incorporate various ideas such as Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Deleuze and Guattari’s Assemblage Theory and ‘machinic phylum’, Hodderr’s notion of ‘material entanglement’, and Stiegler’s ‘Technocentrism’ etc., to name a few.