“Interlinked”: Hybridity and Demarcation of/Between Human and Artificial in Contemporary U.S. Science Fiction

Abstract

The paper considers Poul Anderson’s novelette “Call Me Joe” (1957) and the movie Avatar (2009) as the choice of hybridity and post/transhumanism in the case of a hero’s disability. On the contrary, the author shows the ambiguity of God game for humans on the example of Philip Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the movies Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and the TV series Westworld (2016–2020) that are focused on the differences between the human and the artificial and warn against admiration for post/transhumanism. The androids are the metaphor for Others, but their images evolve during the last fifty years, from the metaphor of dehumanization in Dick’s novel to the metaphor of the enslaved classes in the more recent works, and mirror our qualities and follow the human history and religion. Thus, the greater the hybridity of human and artificial is, the more important is a distinction between them for our survival as a kind. The author proves that empathy, suffering, mortality, memory, dreams, faith (mythology), creativity, freedom, free will, storytelling, self-sacrifice, etc., make us human.