BODY ENHANCEMENT AND CARNAL PLEASURES IN SCIENCE FICTION
Keywords:
human body, leisure, science fiction, anthropologyAbstract
Future society and future man are related one to another in science fiction – and notably in sci-fi literature – based on the premises that society better than this one we are living in must be either modeled to meet the demands of the man of a future superior to us, or his byproduct. The superiority of the future man concerns human biology, physiology, neurology etc. – it concerns human body. Better society on the other hand means better life, suggesting mostly: no need to work for life or such need reduced to minimum; diminishing or abolishing threats to human physical existence; living social and cultural life in accord to individual whims, and without any concern for the community. Society like that should be regarded to as the leisure society, which makes point of various body enhancements the greatest possible adaptation to the leisure way of life, and that means orientation towards oneself and one’s own pleasures, which in turns are depicted as numerous carnal pleasures. The aim of this paper is to display how relating social evolution to the biological one in science fiction is in fact kind of a parody of the evolution in nature and in human society, implying that man is material being, and the body in itself, which is the reason why fictive social and cultural contexts are constructed in sci-fi in order to portray ideas of the ultimate human wellbeing as the wellbeing of human body.
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