[key texts] Transhuman Space

For me, Transhuman Space is a key text – a book that’s had a wholly disproportionate impact on the shape of my life. An RPG setting published to critical acclaim in 2002, it stood as a plausible vision of where humanity might be at the turn of the twenty-second century:

“It’s the year 2100. Humans have colonized the solar system. China and America struggle for control of Mars. The Royal Navy patrols the asteroid belt. Nanotechnology has transformed life on Earth forever, and gene-enhanced humans share the world with artificial intelligences and robotic cybershells. Our solar system has become a setting as exciting and alien as any interstellar empire. Pirate spaceships hijacking black holes . . . sentient computers and artificial “bioroids” demanding human rights . . . nanotechnology and mind control . . . Transhuman Space is cutting-edge science fiction adventure that begins where cyberpunk ends.”

Stumbling across a copy in my local bookshop as a wide-eyed 16-year old, Transhuman Space was my first encounter with the ideas of transhumanism, morphological freedom and ubiquitous computing.

It blew my tiny teenage mind.

What did you get for your money? A plausible timeline for the next hundred years; headline pieces on the exploration of space & transformation of humanity; a gazetteer of the solar system; an encyclopedia of technologies, memes, and influential organisations; suggestions as to the kind of characters who might inhabit this future; a bibliography of suggested reading; and – tacked on the end – 32 pages of rules (GURPS Lite).

For me, the heart of the book was in the short bursts of fiction which opened each chapter; the character quotations and throwaway facts which gave the setting such a powerful sense of scale and complexity. While there wasn’t an opportunity to run a game in the Transhuman Space setting while at sixth form (our group’s attentions firmly distracted by tales of Lovecraftian horror), I tracked down a bunch of the supplements – thumbing their pages until the bindings dissolved.

I still have the soft-covers of High Frontier, Fifth Wave, Broken Dreams, and Toxic Memes. The last two had been penned by Jamais Cascio, which put me onto his more “serious” consulting work in scenario design and futures studies. Before, I couldn’t have imagined that this existed as a distinct subject, let alone someone’s job. Indirectly, Transhuman Space had provided a blueprint for adulthood (“Futurist / Sci-Fi Author”)  and a highly effective way to confuse and alienate career advisors (“You want to be a what?”).

This was my gateway to the work of Stross, McDonald, Doctorow, Sterling and Gibson. It gave me Ghost in the Shell, got me behind-the-scenes on Superstruct, and was the first step on the road to the Masters degree in Digital Media that I’ll be starting later this month.

Oh, and I did get to plot and run two mini-campaigns in the Transhuman Space universe:

• Running for a couple of weeks in summer 2005, Orbital focused on the attempts of a Spanish business heiress to keep up with payments on her spacecraft loan with the income from collecting space junk and running errands for building contractors in LEO. Simultaneously, she has to deal with the increasingly erratic “ghost” of a lovesick Indian aerospace engineer – who committed suicide by “uploading” his personality into her vehicle’s mainframe. The two of them got caught up in the attempts of a shadowy business conglomerate to clear squatters from a potentially lucrative piece of orbital real estate by “arranging” for its collision with a fake Indian telecommunications satellite.

• Still Waters (2007-08) involved a group of community-funded “public eyes” (citizen journalists / bloggers) operating out of Duluth, who get caught up in the media frenzy over the town’s first murder in over a decade – a decapitated investigative journalist, washed up on the shore of Lake Superior. Aided and abetted by an incomplete (and intensely paranoid) rendering of the victim’s consciousness, our team are forced to confront the fact that, not only did the journalist suspect that something like this might happen, but that the data trail (surveillance footage, digital logs, etc.) seems have been tampered with by the authorities.

Both seemed to gather layers of detail and additional complexity at a dizzying speed, collapsing under the weight of planning and obligations of real life. And for those of you who are interested, a selection of other Transhuman Space story premises can be found in the various editions of Personnel Files, each of which is available in digital form for the price of a pint. They’re good inspiration for all you sci-fi types, if nowt else.