Book Review

Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era

by Christopher Dewdney
HarperCollins, Toronto
CAN $20.00

Reviewed by John Thurston, Ph.D.

During a walk downtown one evening, you pause to stand outside a theatre to look at a crowd of well-dressed people milling at the entrance. A sleek black vehicle pulls up, and out of it steps a tall, angular woman. … Her genetically engineered skin is bioluminescent; it literally glows in the dark. Shimmering gold and amber ripples pulsate faintly, slipping in eddies and waves that run along her neck and arms. Briefly, she turns to look at you, and, when she does, the setting sun catches her eyes for an instant. Her irises are bright gold, and her pupils are elliptical, like a cat's. Over her right shoulder hovers something that looks like a large insect. It darts over to you and hangs motionless in front of your face, its wings humming. You realize it is a small mechanical dragonfly. It is scanning and recording your features for the woman's security files.

Christopher Dewdney used to be one of the strangest poets writing, widely respected by other poets and acknowledged to have a unique voice. The above scene is like a prose translation of a scene from one of his earlier books, which were dense, obscure, evocative and full of scenarios that once would have seemed more appropriate to speculative fiction than to poetry. Much of Dewdney remains in the above passage, except the most important part — his poetic voice.

I have been a fan of Dewdney's for many years, but am beginning to fear that the voice that used to send shocks of often bemused delight through me has gradually been replaced by a more prosaic and less interesting voice that could belong to any number of other writers. His first book of prose, The Immaculate Perception (1986), came at what now seems like the height of his poetic power and was virtually indistinguishable in its voice and themes from his poetry. By the beginning of the nineties, however, his poetry had begun to lose some of its flavour and The Secular Grail (1993), his second book of prose, seemed less sharply different from what anyone else would produce.

In Last Flesh, Dewdney has openly declared his brotherhood with the writers that he has begun to resemble: futurists and technology gurus like Freeman Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte and Canada's Derrick De Kerckhove, who is the head of the McLuhan Institute of Technology where Dewdney is now a fellow. Nonetheless, enough of Dewdney's mind and voice have remained his own that Last Flesh still satisfies in a manner that cannot be found elsewhere.

The introduction to the book places it squarely in line with those writers who have made a career feeding the growing public appetite for works that try to plumb the social and philosophical significance of the contemporary advance of technology — especially computer technology. The transhuman era is that period of transition between what was once assumed to be a stable human condition and the post-human condition, when technology will allow us to take control of evolution, meld with our machines, and eventually upload our consciousness into a digital infrastructure: "What will happen during the transhuman era is that mind and matter will blend" (p. 5, author's emphasis). In this statement, Dewdney summarizes the overriding thesis of his book, using the future perfect tense of futurism that is so annoying to a sceptic.

Fortunately, Dewdney is not one to let an overriding thesis get in the way of his insights. He has never been a systematic thinker, arguing a complex and overarching thesis through a sequence of syllogistic steps. Rather, he creates a field of thought in which individual insights can be developed without too much explicit reference to each other. Many examples of his peculiar take on the world still shine through in this book.

Last Flesh has 13 chapters on such diverse subjects as media culture, teledemocracy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and transhuman psychology. The chapters could appear in almost any order without harming the design of the book. Speculation on the media is grouped towards the front of the book, on computers around the middle, and on sociology towards the end; but again, these groupings fall within fields rather than in any sequential argument.

It does not seem accidental, however, that "Logo Sapiens: Language and Literature," a chapter in which Dewdney returns to terrain that has fascinated him for many years, is placed in the exact centre of the book. In earlier forays into this territory, his guides were linguists and psychologists who had little public caché and whom he soon abandoned to explore his own sense of how language works. This chapter revisits this ground: "Language is hard-wired into our brains; it is … part of us that is both old and strange. Our species has co-evolved with language, though the evolution of language sometimes seems to have its own agenda" (p. 71). But Dewdney begins this chapter by citing Marshall McLuhan, one of the digital era's most fashionable speculators on language, and uses McLuhan to try to tie his own ideas about language into the ideas of others about computers.

Many of Dewdney's ideas about language and computing are fascinating, particularly his ideas about how computers may become co-authors that allow writers greater freedom to express their own creativity. He displays the results of one of his own experiments, in which he fed his own work into a software program with "author-syntax recognition features" and had the program recombine it. The example he produces is interesting, but disproves his argument: it seems like Dewdney's writing, but it doesn't repay the trust and close attention that his own writing does. It's all surface, with no meaning lurking beneath.