I just finished reading Joe Lamantia’s excellent post Designing Post-Humanity: Everyware in the Far Future. I don’t have anything brilliant to add – just pointers to other stories that explore similar issues.

The most thoroughly realized examples of trans-human/post-human futurism are Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell. Cyberpunk forerunners like William Gibson relied on the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Shirow’s manga explores every gritty detail. Both stories deal with the social and legal issues of trans-humanism through crime-fighting female protagonists (it’s Japanese – ’nuff said). You can read them as manga or watch TV shows and movies.

In Appleseed, the protagonist is a human who works with a full-cyborg partner. The story follows her acclimation into the bizarre menagerie of robots, cyborgs and humans that live in a futuristic utopia. Appleseed deals primarily with the physical issues of trans-humans. Everyone in their society looks perfect – every guy is Fabio and every girl is a Playmate. Genetic engineering, pharma, and prosthetic parts have made disease and ugly things of the past. But criminals and military types push the opposite extreme with utilitarian artificial bodies that look more like tanks than people. For example, the protagonist’s full-cyborg partner, Briareos, sports an advanced sensor suite where his head ought to be. For additional protection, his robot body wears huge robot armor.

In GiTS, the protagonist is a full-cyborg who struggles to retain her humanity in the face of mind-hacks, new prosthetic bodies, and distributed consciousness. She treats her body like a tool, discarding or upgrading it as the situation requires. Her coworkers tease her stubborn attachment to the smaller female form when a larger male body would make her a more effective combatant. Her specialty, appropriately, is information warfare – particularly hacking human minds, called ghosts, during law enforcement operations. GiTS deals more with the psychological issues of trans-humans. One major theme is the mass contagion of mental viruses, which corrupt human will the way today’s computer viruses eat your homework. The result is reminiscent of mass hysteria.

Both stories deal primarily with crime, particularly the gray area between corporate espionage, national security and law enforcement. Today’s legal system struggles to regulate multi-national corporations that defy definition; in the future they will be confounded by trans-humans.

If you belong to Netflix, you can watch GiTS and Appleseed online or order disks. Warning – they are dubbed from Japanese and – despite excellent voice acting – delve into a level of minutae and obscure ‘plot’ nonsense that may make your Western mind hurt.