ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one prime candidate for first science fiction novel, speculated about human creation of a human, or at least humanlike, creature, setting the stage for myriad other imaginings of nonhuman, semihuman, transhuman, and posthuman forms of existence. With these constructions, science fiction raises religiously significant questions about the nature of humanness itself. What does it mean to be human when boundaries with a range of alternatives are blurry? What responsibilities rest on human creators toward their creations? On the creations toward their creators? Stories of sentient robots and androids, projections of self-aware Artificial Intelligence, cyberpunk explorations of uploaded and other forms of consciousness, as well as tales of physical and genetic alteration introduce issues of embodiment and disembodiment, of evolving consciousness and identity, and of the definitions of being alive and, by extension, being dead. Additional religious considerations emerge in overlaps with questions about the possibility of life after death and about the nature of a human essence that might be called a soul.
