Abstract

“Cybernetic organism,” or cyborg, is one of science fiction‟s numerous oppositional terms, like “virtual reality” or “artificial intell igence.” As these phrases become less fantastic and more conversational, the tension between their oppositions frequently goes unnoticed. By contrast, the tension between sf, where the cyborg is most familiar, and reality has never been more noticeable. Sf has prophesised many technoscientific developments, including the escalator, the credit card and the video call. On the extreme end is the atomic bomb, a wild invention in H. G. Wells‟s The World Set Free 1 that inspired scientific inquiry. But where does the cyborg, as trope and mega-text, iconography and perhaps social reality, fit in? The term “cyborg” was first used to describe a “hypothetical figure physically adapted for survival in space.” Like space travel, the cyborg was once an exercise in imaginative energy, yet it would seem that it is located both conceptually and, increasingly, ontologically, somewhere in between the escalator and the atomic bomb; between progress and annihilation, the commonplace upshot and irrevocable destruction. It either assists our bodies, or evacuates us from them. As the cyborg occupies the shifting space between reality and sf, its presence becomes equally typified by an interrelated binary opposition that can be expanded upon using the two definitions offered above: the opposition between the physical and the cerebral. Sue Short finds the cyborg‟s precondition to be the technological augmentation of a human body. Though definitions have a habit of excluding more than they include, the Webster‟s definition is elusive. Here the cyborg is not delineated by the hypothetical, and while “bionic” places an emphasis on physicality, “human being” is as broad as one could wish, and opens up avenues for the technologising of the cerebral. Both definitions here rest upon questions about humanity and technology inclusive of a precondition: the co-presence of the organic human body and technology. Yet the Webster‟s definition asks a new question, the answer to which may overturn this precondition as it takes a more vital role in contemporary reality: when our cerebral interactions with technology are more sophisticated, commonplace and indicative of widespread technophilia, does the technologised body still have a role to play in our conceptions of the cyborg? Moreover, what do we make of sf texts in which the physical aspects of the cyborg trope are at their most familiar?