Narrating the Posthuman: Science Fiction and the Ethics of "Artificial" Narrators

Abstract: At least since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, science fiction has explored how the modern experimental sciences destabilize our notions of the human. Like many sci-fi novels written today, Frankenstein posed significant ethical and ontological questions: Is intelligent life created “artificially” by humans, human? If so, what constitutes our essential humanity? Does the category of the “human” serve a useful purpose any longer? What are the ethical implications of deconstructing traditional notions of the human, or extending the category to lifeforms beyond homo sapiens? As we adapt to a moment in which yesterday’s fantasies, such as artificial intelligence, have become our reality, addressing these issues in earnest has become imperative. This paper will investigate how science fiction explores the status of the human by narrating the experiences of “artificial” beings—beings whose human status is called into question. Drawing on Shelley’s Frankenstein, Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, I will reflect on how narration has been used both to confirm a narrow sense of what makes us human, and to question it. Although these texts only offer us hypotheticals, they engage a basic question of narrative bioethics: are we human, and thus deserving of special ethical regard, when we can narrate our experience of self? Or is the capacity to narrate, to tell a story of self, a problematic condition for granting human status?