Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology (review)

There is a paradox at the heart of the popular response to technology. On one hand, the growth of technology is seen as a sign of human progress. Indeed, societies are routinely ranked according to the level of their technological achievements. On the other hand, the popular arts—science fiction novels, films, TV shows, video games—depict technology as a threat to human welfare and existence. The central theme of Daniel Dinello's book is the popular, negative response to technology.

In his first chapter, Dinello deals with twenty-first-century techno-utopians who have turned technology into a religion: technologism. Technologism is in the hands of techno-priests who envision a future posthuman world where humans merge with machines to produce cyborgs, or disappear altogether as machines gain supremacy over the human race.

Chapter 2 provides the background of twenty-first-century techno-myths. Here we meet the utopian schemes of Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon; Dr. Frankenstein's monstrous creation; the golem, an animated clay figure from Jewish folklore; Karel Cˇapek's worker-robots in R.U.R.; and the seductive robot Maria of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis. Dinello argues that these varied "icons, myths, and mystical themes" (p. 10) play a dual role. They support technologism while providing resistance to its power. Subsequent chapters explore technophobic impulses directed at novel developments in technology. Norbert Weiner's cybernetics promised a coming age of robots but it also generated a number of hostile responses. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote Player Piano, Isaac Asimov formulated his three laws of robotic behavior, and the movie Forbidden Planet introduced the mad scientist Dr. Morbius and a benign robot named Robby. Robby, in turn, inspired science fiction novelists and filmmakers to create a new race of robots, many of them sinister, human-hating devices.

Computers followed quickly on the heels of out-of-control or malevolent robots. Electronic computers posed a greater danger because they rapidly evolved into ever smaller and more intelligent machines. Ponderous robots gave way to androids, making it difficult to distinguish between humans and machines, friends and mechanical/electronic foes. Whereas traditional technology challenged human mechanical power, computers raised the specter of artificial intelligence and questioned the nature and limits of the mind. Supercomputers dominated the plots of the 1966 novel Colossus and the 1970 film The Forbin Project. At about the same time, science fiction author Philip K. Dick asked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick's novel served as the background for the influential 1982 film Blade Runner, set in 2019. This modern classic combined an android revolt story with a depiction of a city overwhelmed by the toxic waste products of commercial technology.

Dinello turns to the biological aspects of technophobia in the second part of his work. This is the realm of cyborgs, cyberculture, and much more. NASA first proposed cyborgs, or cybernetic organisms, for survival in the harsh environment of outer space. Cyborgs rapidly mutated in fact and fiction from space science to military uses in the guise of The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Darth Vader, The Terminator, and RoboCop. Donna Haraway, in her 1985 "Manifesto for Cyborgs," embraced the cyborg as a species of feminized technology, but its menacing role persisted in popular culture.

Chapter 6 considers the internet and virtual reality, cyberspace technologies originally created to serve militaristic goals. Cyberspace soon provided the dystopian settings for William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), and the highly popular Matrix films. The concept of cyberspace promised a technological paradise, a new age of unprecedented information exchange. As seen through the lens of science fiction, however, humans were simply machines trapped in the inescapable, digital cage.

In the final chapters, biotechnology comes to the forefront. It is represented by genetic modification and cloning, the engineering of human flesh predicted long ago in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Nanotechnology reduces biotechnological horrors to a...