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"My Father, Dancing"
A debut collection of stories about fathers and daughters proves the author sovereign over a very small terrain.
By Adam Kirsch
[08/04/99]

Shelve it under unfiction
Requests for books on send, R and taxidermy were the easy questions during my first month at a bookstore info desk.
By Andrea Siegel
[08/03/99]

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"The Big Con"
Six decades after its original publication, an investigation of larceny stakes its claim as an American classic.
By Steve McQuiddy
[08/03/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Porn widow
My husband says his four-hour-a-night, $200-a-month porn habit isn't affecting our marriage. I beg to differ.
By Garrison Keillor
[08/03/99]

Book Bag
"This is it!"
The author of "The Blue Flower" picks five novels that rocked her world.
By Penelope Fitzgerald
[08/02/99]

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This summer's slew of VR-obsessed films like "The Matrix," "The Thirteenth Floor" and "eXistenZ" bring Moravec's vision back into public consciousness. Part expression of millennial anxiety, part market reaction to the public's fascination with cyberspace, these films open a window into the contemporary obsession with the post-human persona. To varying degrees, they celebrate a freedom from the banality of living in an ordinary body, portraying characters who are able to populate multiple times, shapes, realities.

In "Mind Children," Moravec hypothesized a future in which robot surgeons puree human brains and upload consciousness into computers and robot space travelers. This summer's films make the similar assumption that human consciousness can be transferred, without slippage, between different material forms.

Two recent books are less naive. N. Katherine Hayles' "How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics" and Anne Balsamo's "Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women" not only debate the technical feasibility of achieving Moravec's dream, but also question his motives for imagining such a future.

Hayles' book deftly traces three interlocking stories — how information lost its body, how the cyborg was created as technological artifact and cultural icon and how the human became "posthuman" — in scientific discourse, popular literature and cultural theory since World War II. Drawing from diverse sources (from Norbert Wiener to Jacques Derrida to Philip K. Dick), she speculates that our fascination with the post-human says more about how we conceive of the self than about any real developments in biology.

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