EVEN GOD HERSELF

In Armstrong’s SF novel, a cutting-edge neuroscientist promotes the migration of human consciousness to digital technology, despite opposition from conspiracy theorists and the possibility of alien intervention.

The author, a science writer who previously published At Any Cost: A Guide to The Transhumanist Wager and the Ideas of Zoltan Istvan(2021), envisions a near-future in which a celebrity scientist, Swati Mohan Shinneman, is at the forefront of the transhumanist movement. It involves the dream of transferring consciousness into advanced robot bodies or into computer memory to exist as pure, sentient data, offering potential immortality. Swati is a charismatic, upbeat, attractive, brilliant Indian woman in a life-partnership with Juliet, a trans woman; together with their associates at the Institute for Applied Cybernetics, they start a program to turn Swati into “SynthSwati,” a mind uploaded into a synthetic body. However, they face opposition from LuddAnon, an anti-transhumanism group. Swati, taking the high road, offers defectors from the cultish LuddAnon sanctuary and brain-rehabilitation. Her colleagues also create ludicrous, fake LuddAnon online posts accusing space aliens of being behind the transhumanist wave, in order to discredit the naysayers. Swati, who has a brain implant that allows her to go online into the Omnistream (the next-generation web), encounters a mass of information there that reveals that all human minds are secretly, unknowingly linked in a sort of super-consciousness—the design of powerful extraterrestrial entities who seeded Earth with life 3.5 billion years ago. The ETs are still extant, and their emissary arrives in the form of Aminata, a genetically engineered, immortal Ghanaian woman who has secretly guided and mentored many of Earth’s geniuses, including Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and Pierre and Marie Curie. Meanwhile, Swati confronts the LuddAnons and tries to convince the public to ascend to the next level of evolution. 

Armstrong’s narrative, which largely consists of dialogue, is mostly staged around multimedia presentations, press events, and vast mass-audience demos; as such, it feels less like a fictional story and more like a transcription of an epic infomercial for transhumanism—one in which the giddy, science-struck characters usher in an epochal leap ahead for the human species. Many soliloquies explain to gathered listeners (and readers) that being transferred to a machine body is not a pulp-SF nightmare but a joyful, voluntary shedding of murderous aggression, greed, competition, jealousy, self-hatred, religion, and other causes of human suffering. Hive-mind cyborgs won’t attempt to take over the world, according to this scheme, simply because their values will be logically attuned to the betterment of society. All of this is largely couched in disarming prose in which profundity alternates with flip pop-culture references, cheery colloquialisms (“See ya lata, mashed potata”), puns, and citations of great thinkers from the Rev. Martin Luther King and SF master Arthur C. Clarke to satirical novelist Douglas Adams and martial-arts legend Bruce Lee. Readers may also note that Swati and her fellow forward-thinkers are almost all women; the one major male character is the leader of LuddAnon. Naturally, such enmity doesn’t stand a chance.

Celebratory, speculative SF that brims with positive transhumanistic reassurance.