VIRTUAL FUTURES

Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture, and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc, and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the rise of post-human pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the post-human, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, the post-human is described by others in the collection as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology.