Wow. Every year that I go to GeekGirlCon I come away with my cheeks sore from grinning so damn much. What a fun and unusual convention! Loads of women who’re into all kinds of different fandoms, tons of little kids of whatever gender running around enjoying the show, bunches of cool science and gaming exhibits…just loads of good stuff, and an incredibly inviting and encouraging atmosphere!

I was only in one panel this year: Transhumanism in Comics and Fiction. What does fiction tell us about humanity’s self-guided evolution? I shared the stage with a passel of great local authors, too:

• Raven Oak, author of the entertaining (and recommended) novella Class-M Exile, and the grim and gritty Boahim fantasy series
• Jesikah Sundin, whose work I don’t know much of but whose eco-punk Biodome Chronicles I look forward to diggin’ into
• G.G. Silverman, who writes in a diversity of styles, but I’ll give you one title to suck you in: Vegan Teenage Zombie Huntress

It was a wonderful panel. The audience had a few questions that were better than the ones we came up with for the panel! GeekGirlCon audiences are frickin’ smart people, which adds tremendously to the fun. Like the gal who said, “Okay, so why is Soylent (TM) body-hacking when SlimFast isn’t?” She mentioned a whole host of things women have done or been forced to do to modify their bodies (footbinding, floating rib removal) as a way to ask why transhumanism has such a male “bent” to it. Hadn’t even occurred to me before.

I love transhumanism, but I’m an optimist who believes very deeply in self-improvement and that ‘perfect’ is a verb, not an adjective. We should have a video of the full panel, which I’ll link to as soon as it’s up, but for now, I wanted to point out some stories and settings I love with strong transhumanist themes. Some are obvious, but several are more obscure.

• The Culture series, by Ian Banks. A post-scarcity society in a universe where not everybody else has such freedoms, and the conflicts that arise as a result.
• Venus Plus X, by Theodore Sturgeon. A man from 1960 is scooped through time into a future where a single-gendered race has replaced homo sapiens. A book that sounds like the 50s, published in 1960, and that still resonates tremendously today.
• Two Faces of Tomorrow, by James P. Hogan. When a vast computer network spontaneously manifests intelligence, scientists set up a daring experiment to figure out how A.I. can fit into the world. Also look for the manga version, with magnificent art by Yukinobu Hoshino.
• Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman. Not actually related to The Forever War (which deserves it own bullet, really), a story that takes drone-strike combat to an extreme, where ‘soldierboy’ mecha that harness the intelligence of a squad of trained soldiers fight dirty, ugly brushfire battles.
• The Imperial Radch series, by Ann Leckie, A human body and a single brain are all that’s left of the great warship Justice of Toren, which used to host hundreds of ‘ancillary’ bodies driven by a powerful core A.I. A remarkable story worth reading for many reasons, but very relevant here for its amazing examination of transhuman and post-human themes.
• Ghost in the Shell, by Masamune Shirow. A future where cybernetics are advanced enough that full-body replacement is fairly common, and people’s brains can literally be compromised by hackers. It’s a manga, an animated film, and an anime TV series. I enjoy all three, but I think the Stand Alone Complex animated series is the most accessible and covers the broadest ground.
• Appleseed, by Masamune Shirow. The world we know dies in a series of small wars and ugly events. A shining city called Olympus, built around A.I. and engineered human beings, rises from the ashes, but can’t succeed without people willing to get their hands dirty. This is a classic. I recommend the manga over the movies, but that’s personal preference. It’s rougher and more raw than Ghost in the Shell, but magnificent. And Briareos is the best cyborg ever.
• The Expanse series, by James S. A. Corey. Humans spread over the whole solar system. There’s Earth, a crumbling, overpopulated world full of people on a lifetime dole; Mars, a can-do culture dedicated to creating a garden planet and defending themselves; and the Belters, a breed of humans who jumped (or had been pushed) out into the low-grav spaces between planets. There’s less hardcore modding and tweaking in these books, up to a point, but they’re very credible. Plus, they’re enormously fun to read. I recommend the SyFy series, too, though it’s definitely different.

There are so many great stories out there, even if I pick just this one topic. Cordwainer Smith. Olaf Stapledon. I have to stop somewhere, but you don’t. Go to your library. Keep exploring.