ABSTRACT
Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus is one of the first works of cyberpunk fiction to consciously explore the biological, psychological, social, and ethical implications of posthumanism, as it projects five centuries into the future the history of two posthuman factions, the Shapers and the Mechanists, ideologically divided by their different evolutionary choices. Through the analysis of the short stories “Swarm,” “Spider Rose,” “Cicada Queen,” “Sunken Gardens,” “Twenty Evocations,” and the novella Schismatrix, this chapter discusses Sterling’s nuanced depiction of posthumanism in the light of current critical debates around this multifarious concept. Specifically, lined up along liberal and dystopic tendencies, Sterling’s posthumanism proposes a fascinating mixture between technoromantic utopia and a nihilist cybergothic dystopia, two tendencies which are propelled into the future by Sterling’s particular understanding of biological evolution as inspired by his readings of Ilya Prigogine. In the end, Schismatrix Plus presents us with a posthumanism that entails the subversion of current humanist ideals, becoming a realist rendering of contemporary human behavior, where individualism, alienation, and opportunism dominate the individual’s actions rather than communal ethics.
