A New Currency of Pain and Desire

Sexual Violence, Death, and the Cyborg

by Ari Brin

As a movement, transhumanism is primarily concerned with methods of evading death. Coveted

since the birth of human civilization, immortality suddenly seems tantalizingly achievable through the
refining of cryonic preservation and the stated goals of organizations such as Humanity+. In science
fiction, the cyborgone who alters oneself beyond current definitions of human presents a
philosophy in which death is not so much defeated, but embraced and renegotiated. Death is no
longer the fear of the cyborg, as it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust
(Haraway, 1984), and the rich, subversive potentialities of death becomes apparent. In early works of
transhumanism, such as J.G. Ballards Crash (1973) and William Gibsons Neuromancer (1984), humans
who consent to the alteration of their bodies and minds may no longer fully own themselves. While
death is subverted, these texts and others underscore the cyborg body as disposable, repurposed for
external lusts and perverse explorations. It becomes clear that this immortality is filtered through
layers of sexual violence and death, as the cyborg reorients itself as beyond conventional sex and life.
What repercussions are there for this banalizing of the anomaly of death (Baudrillard, 1991) of the
cyborg? This essay argues that the fetishization of cyborg bodies as sexually available and the
banalization of posthuman death inevitably creates sites of violence around the cyborg.

I. The Fetishization of the Cyborg

In 2001, German man Armin Meiwes posted an advertisement on a website for cannibal
fetishists, searching for a willing male participant whom he planned to kill and consume. I am a
cannibal, a real cannibal, he wrote1. Meiwes met with several responders, allowing each one who
changed his mind to back out before the act was set to begin. In March 2001, a man named Bernd
Brandes finally consented to his own death and consumption on tape. After engaging in sexual
intercourse with Meiwes, Brandes ate part of his own penis before allowing Meiwes to end his life.
Monika Mueller and Konstanze Kutzbach explore the case of Armin Meiwes as a prime
example of how the extremely unaesthetic can both horrify and confuse our definitions of the
human. They condense the incidents disturbing nature to its denial of our need for comprehensible,
opposable moral forces.2 When the case was brought to light over a year later, it immediately drew
international public interest that encapsulated this mixture of horror and confusion. The presence of
videotaped consent, alongside the fact that cannibalism was not technically illegal under German
law, complicated the legal process and split public reaction3. Disgust that such a barbaric act could
occur in seemingly civilized times was the prevalent response on online discussions regarding the
incident. Yet Grimm Love, a mainstream 2007 film inspired by the incident, heavily emphasized the
romantic storyline between characters based on Bernd and Meiwes.4
Many scholars have suggested that the cyborg must not be interpreted only in terms of the
humans relationship to technology, but in terms of transgressive alterations to the humans

1
Davis, Roger. You Are What You Eat: Cannibalism, Autophagy and the Case of Armin Meiwes. Territories of
Evil. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.
2 Mueller, Monika. Kutzbach, Konstanze. The Abject of Desire : The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in

Contemporary Literature and Culture. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007.

3
BBC News. German cannibal tells of regret. BBC News Channel. 23 November 2003.
4 See Weisz, Martin. Grimm Love. Atlantic Streamline: 2006.
relationship to life. The cyborg, as outside the definition of a normal human, pushes the boundaries
not only in bodily modification but in subverting expected human behaviors and desires. In Donna
Haraways definition of the cyborg, a being resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and
perversity5, there is evidence for defining the cannibal as perhaps an example of pre-technological
cyborg, who by consuming the human rather than the lower animal, wishes to intimately merge itself
with something of equal technological standing as itself. Meiwess cannibalism additionally
represents a radical reorientation of mutilation and death along a spectrum of pleasure. The removal
of the penis, in particular, reflects J.G. Ballards early experiment in transhumanist literature, 1973s
Crash, which Jean Baudrillard proclaims a strategic reorganization of life beyond the perspective of
death. Death, wounds, mutilations are no longer metaphors for castrationit's exactly the reverse,
or even more than the reverse6. The Meiwes case, paired with the transgressive literature of the
cyborg, provides new ways of thinking about the acceptance of death and perversion in a culture
where previous boundaries of the human have been abandoned.
More hopeful texts posit the creation of cyborgs as an avenue of liberation. Donna
Haraways influential essay on the feminist possibilities of the cyborg suggests first acknowledging
women as already cyborg beings: products both of their biology and an evolved cultural identity, and
thus as those who stand to benefit most from a cyborg revolution. Certain novels posit the creation
of females into cyborgs as marking an end to the typical women roles of society, such as pregnancy,
motherhood, and sexual subservience to men. Cordwainer Smiths The Lady Who Sailed the Soul
(1960) and Anne McCaffreys The Ship Who Sang (1969) both feature handicapped women who
achieve career and romantic success only after their consciousnesses are separated from their bodies.
In these stories, the disassociation from ones flesh is seen as freedom from the abuses and
perversions that can result from belonging intimately to a fleshly body.
Yet the literature surrounding the cyborg has also provided theories of how the cyborg body
could be newly sexualized and fetishized in a hypermodern age. An early blueprint to this potential
can be found in J.G. Ballards 1973 novel Crash. Certainly even earlier novels hypothesized that a
modern, technologically-advanced age might drastically reorient human sexsuch as the removal of
the reproductive process in Brave New World or the removal of pleasure in Nineteen Eighty-Fourbut
Crash ranks among the most shocking depictions of fetishization ever put down in print. The novel
centers around a group of symphorophiliacs, or car-crash fetishists, who become obsessed with
rehearsing their own deaths as the ultimate merging of the human body with the automobile.
In Ballards novel, the human body has become an outdated model, one that yearns to be
upgraded. Narratively, Ballard has almost abandoned normative ways of describing the body, instead
filtering descriptions of sex and flesh through a perverse technological gaze, that in itself scrambles
definitions of perversity. Despite the violence and sexually explicit topics, the prose is lacking in
desire and curiously neutered7 with anatomically accurate descriptors and a diminished narratorial
presence. When the narrator, James, watches his mentor, Vaughan, have sex with a prostitute, he is
unable to interpret the act as pleasurable but through its post-human aspects. James describes the
sex 'reflected in the speedometer, the clock and the revolution counter... moderated by the surging

5 Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century. Socialist Review 80. 1985. pp. 65108.
6
Baudrillard, Jean. Two Essays: Simulacra and Science Fiction/Ballards Crash. Science Fiction Studies #55,
18:3, 1991
7
Baudrillard, 1991. More on the relationship between Crash and Baudrillards theories of hyperreality will be
discussed later.
needle of the speedometer' (p. 130). For the narrator, sexual excitement can no longer be achieved
through humans orientation to one another, but through a humans orientation to surrounding
technology.
Ballards novel was written over a decade before the invention of the cyberpunk genre, an
event that is usually marked by the publishing of William Gibsons Neuromancer in 1984. Yet in 1973,
Ballard clearly anticipated many aspects of the cyberpunk genre, which focuses on futures in which
humans have achieved greater intimacy with their surrounding technology. Yet Ballard chose to set
Crash in the present of Ballards own time of writing. To further ground the novel in a contemporary
setting, the narrators name, James Ballard, is a direct reflection of the authors. According to
Ballard, the obsession with the automobile portrayed in the novel reflects being a human in the
1970s, and the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological
aspects of our lives. (Ballard, 1971) Ballard keenly recognized that the automobile had been
consistently sexualized since the 1920s, wherein the car became a renowned site of discreet sexual
encounters8, to the publicizing of mechophiles, or machine-fetishists throughout the latter half of
the twentieth century.9
Whereas in Crash, the principal cyborg belongs to a small group of fetishists, in Neuromancer,
the act of merging ones body with technology has become commonplace; practically every character
in the novel has a deliberately modified body. Neuromancer centers around Case, a console cowboy
who lives for the thrill of direct neural connection to cyberspace. A major theme, as in Crash, is the
systematic outdating of the human body, and the potential for the cyborg to become an object of
fetishization.
Alienation from ones body is a key theme throughout Neuromancer. The pejorative terms
meat and flesh are used as identifiers for the remnants of a natural humanity still left beneath the
technology, metal, and other modifiers that consist the cyborg, deliberately distancing Case from the
body they represent. In the community of console cowboys, the elite stance involved a certain
relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat (p. 12). His sexual desire for his untimely love,
Linda Lee, features as somewhat repulsive to him, as he refigures them as not his desires, but those
of the alien meat. Yet the transition into this post-body consciousness is incomplete, as the
temptations of flesh still hold power. Case inconsistently describes Linda Lee in this technical
fashion. He struggles to keep her features reduced to a code (p. 15), switching back to more
traditional modes of sexuality.
New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouthThe
pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust
and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in
the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his back.
All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. (p. 17)
The inconsistency of diction reflect the warring factions of the biological versus the
technological within the cyborg. Like Crash, the characters of Neuromancer more yearn for
transformation than have entirely achieved it. When painful, repressed memories of Linda come
back, Case code-switches, seemingly conflicted between the highly technical language of cyberspace,
and the identifiers of a natural humanity. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of
knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat. (p.

8Ling, Peter. Sex and the Automobile. History Today; London. 39:11, 18-25, 1989.
9For a pop-study of this largely underground fetish, see Mark D. Griffiths Mechanophilia Exposed and
Explained. Psychology Today. Nov 17, 2016.
142) A similar conflict arises during his sexual encounter with an avatar of Linda, where flesh and
metal mix freely. The zipper hungHe broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the
walland then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message (p. 285). The use of old
message confirms the disdain of traditional sex as belonging to an earlier, outdated time.
This preference for the cyborg aspects of oneself was unique at the time (with the exception
of Crash), but has resurfaced in countless novels since, often as a satire of the alienation humans
experience through contact with modern technology. Iain M. Bankss The Algebraist is set around the
year 4034 AD, when humanity has been modified beyond current definitions of the species. When
travelling in space, humans may spend months, if not years, encased in shock gel which allows the
mind to function while the body remains cryogenically stable. When these characters emerge from
their casing, they are uncomfortably reminded of their awkward human form, and 'astonished at tiny
things like fingernails and the hairs on an arm...missing the richness of her in-pod, wired-up virtual
existence with the ability to dip in and out of entire high-definition sensoria of data...'10 Case
becomes alienated from his own human form the same way, as his body is made useless by his direct
neural connection to pleasure and adventure. When he disconnects, he is suddenly aware of each
tingling hair on his arms and chest (p. 14). When once, he gets a view of his own body through
Mollys eyes, he sees a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch... (p. 301). This
imagery proves the emergence of a new preference for the cyborg body over that of the increasingly
outdated, and disturbingly fleshy, human. To ask Ballard, the world of Neuromancer might constitute
the next step in the development of a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.11

II. The Banalization of Death

The fear of death has proved a unifying factor of humanity since the earliest days of
civilization12. Yet cases of consensual approaches to death appear to a striking degree throughout
religious history. Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha are celebrated for their seeming acceptance of
death, canonically the result of either fervent faith or mental fortitude. Arguably, several important
religious figures have achieved a posthuman status in religious literature, as saints and monks are
often described as having transcended the world of the human and its fleshly desires. Historically, an
important aspect of religion has been to provide a methodology for coping with death. The afterlife
is a space into which souls can be born again, filled with the disembodied consciousnesses of those
who have died. It is unavoidable that matrices in science fiction have recapitulated the spirit world
or afterlife, and even our contemporary internet is filled with haunting presences of the dead: we
visit their Facebook pages; we receive their pre-scheduled e-mails from beyond the grave. In an
examination of the place of religious transcendence in the modern age, Patrick Hopkins claims that
'technology lets us see religious ideals as literally realizable.'13
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the emerging theory of evolution began to
massively encourage scientific, rather than spiritual, enquiries into the definition and destiny of the
human. The strife caused within Christian communities resulted from the upset of the special place
humans were assumed to hold the universe, and the call for acceptance of 'the "animal account" of

10
Banks, Iain M. The Algebraist. London: Orbit, 2004. (p. 355)
11
Ballard, J.G. Crash. New York: Vintage, 1995 (p. 13)
12 In the earliest discovered work of human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the fear of death and quest for

immortality are principal themes.

13 Hopkins, Patrick D. Transcending the Animal: How Transhumanism and Religion Are and Are Not Alike.

Journal of Evolution and Technology 14:2, 2005.

being human (Hopkins 2005). This spiritual upset might very well have provided fuel for the
transhuman movement, as a vacancy opened for alternate methods of transcendence. Hava Tirosh-
Samuelson claims transhumanism is a direct descendant of ancient religious belief systems, writing
that the emergent movement is rife with religious motifs as scientists endow technology with
salvific power. She argues that the primary difference between religious structures and the
transhumanist movement is the method of achieving a transcendent state: whereas traditional
believers look to prayer, ritual, meditation, and moral discipline, the proponents of transhumanism
mobilize technology.14 Michael Hardin has also posited that postmodernism and contemporary
American culture are different from religions only in how they approach death as simulacra.15 Thus,
simply the method of renegotiating death has changed, as many parts of our modernity move away
from religion and towards technology as that which is salvific.
Technology might indeed provide a renewed way of looking at death, but unlike Christianity,
the primary transhuman goal (supported by organizations such as Humanity + and 2045 Initiative) is
not the creation of an ideal space for souls, but to extend the life of humans on Earth. Ideally,
everybody should have the right to choose when and how to die or not to die.16 Yet the utopic
visions of human immortality are contrasted by science fiction, which illuminates the potential
consequences of a world in which death is banalized by its absence or its desirability. Death is no
longer desirable because it is a passageway into perfection, or because it provides a finality to pain,
but because it symbolizes the ultimate transgression, the ultimate self untied at last from all
dependency, a man in space. (Haraway, 1984).
In Crash, the fetishization of the cyborg elements of the human paired with the steady
devaluing of the natural body have seemingly transformed death from a primary fear into a desirable
transgression: the final separation from the biological parts of the self. For the cyborgs in Crash,
technology is the deadly deconstruction of the bodyno longer a functional medium, but an
extension of death (Baudrillard, 1991). Prior to Vaughans actual death, which appears on the first
page of the novel, he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident.
The use of 'accident' above reveals an important point of the novel: that the performativity of death
may in fact be the new methodology that renegotiated the ancient fear of death. The performance of
death in Crash is deliberate, even pleasurable, whereas actual death is the accidental result.
Michael Hardin, in his essay Postmodernism's desire for simulated death, echoes
Baudrillard in arguing that reorienting death as simulacra [allows] one not to dealwith the reality
and finality of death17. Vaughans obsession with his camera as a tool for capturing the mutilated
and dead manages to preserves them indefinitely. Vaughans photo albums of car crash victims (pp.
13, 134), his fixation on celebrities and the images of plane crashes and other violence on Jamess
television (p. 37) allow death to be transformed from a finality into a site that can be revisited again
and again. Even when Vaughans death appears inevitable, James refuses this outdated definition,
saying I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car crash, but would in some way be re-born
through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass (pp. 209-10). Hardin posits that
this reformulation of death is not unique to Crash, but is an essential factor of postmodernism.

14 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith. Zygon; 47. 2012. pp. 710734.
15
Hardin, Michael. Postmodernism's desire for simulated death: Andy Warhol's car crashes , J. G. Ballard's
crash, and Don Delillo's white noise. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 13:1, 21-50, 2002.
16 Humanity+ Media. "Transhuman FAQ." H+magazine. 1999. http://hplusmagazine.com/transhumanist-faq/
17
Hardin, Michael, 2002.
 Mapping the body onto technology is what creates immortality, the simulacra, because it screens
the human onto the technological...transforming the human into object. The image of an icon on
film, the impression of a person on the hood of a car. (Hardin, 2002)
While the main characters in the novel give their consent to death in this manner, James and
Vaughan find it suitable to apply their definition of what the cyborg can be to all of humanity. Like
cyborg zealots, they implicate anyone who can possibly be seen as a cyborg (the celebrity, the car
crash victim, the mutilated) into their grand scheme of death and sexual violence. It is only when the
full finality of death is threatenedsuch as when Vaughan attempts to kill James's wife Catherine,
and later, James himselfthat the moral complexity of death is considered, and the frayed remnants
of animal life appear beneath the cyborgs shell. The cyborgs in Crash are incomplete, representing a
primitive step along the way to the posthuman, and there is no afterlife in which pleasure can
continue after death. The banalization of death, then, leads to nothing apart from death, and there is
only the illusion of transcendence. In this sense, the transhuman experience of the novel
recapitulates the religious angle of death-acceptance.
In Neuromancer, the very nature of death has been redefined. No longer is death the apex of
finality but viewed with renewed interest and desire for its ability to simulate full disassociation from
the body. The novel opens on a suicidal Case, who is driven towards death as the closest possible
experience to 'the bodiless exultation of cyberspace' (p. 12). Even after he regains the ability to
access cyberspace, Case is still seduced by the potentialities of death to free him from the pain of
existence and remembrance. One character comments to Case on the 'lengths you will go to in order
to accomplish your own destruction' (p. 278). In this violent, turbulent world, death is unavoidable;
nearly every character experiences death in some fashion, and for console cowboys, it is the
inevitable risk of cyberspace. The finality of death, however, has been completely renegotiated. The
consciousness of Cases dead mentor Dixie Flatline (named for the number of times he has survived
flatlining while jacked into a computer complex) is made immortal in cyberspace against his will.
Case's lover, Linda Lee, dies quite early on, yet is virtually resuscitated several times, and Case even
has sex with her after her physical death.
As becomes clear in the text, the potential for immortality opens up the potential for
violence to the newly-disposable body. Resuscitation after death is not akin to admittance into
heaven, and rather dangerously scrambles notions of identity and consent. The dead are not brought
back to life of their own free will, but by someone with the power to utilize the bodies of the dead
for self-serving purposes. The reincarnation of the cyborg has surfaced as a global economy of re-
used body parts. Early in the novel, Case acknowledges that while he might technically die, his
heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with new yen for the clinic
tanks (p. 14). In other cases, vacant bodies may be taken over by incorporeal intelligences, who
speak through dead mouths in a sinister form of identity theft. This occurs numerous times
throughout Neuromancer, as the A.I. Wintermute moves from one vacant body to another, using
familiar visages to effectively manipulate Case. The most tragic case is that of Case's inscrutable boss
Armitage, whom is discovers to be the hollowed-out shell of a man, previously mentally damaged
after a military operation-gone-wrong. Out of the shreds of his former personality, Wintermute
constructed a new personality that the A.I. is able to control entirely.
Beyond utilizing dead bodies as vessels and subjecting unwilling consciousnesses to
reincarnation, the female bodies in Neuromancer are endlessly recycled for sexual ends. The character
of Molly, a classical femme fatale of the cyberpunk generation with mirror-shaded eyes and nail
daggers, is especially poignant in this regard. Mollys modifications both make her dangerous to
men, but simultaneously desirable. Molly has consented to her modifications, which in turn have
eliminated her ability to consent to all that her body is used for. Without consent, her body is shown
publicly engaging in sex acts with a character, Riviera, who has the ability to cause holographic
hallucinations in others. During this simulated sex, its clear that Riviera fetishizes Molly for the
cyborg aspects of her body, correctly visualizing these features while wantonly distorting her flesh
(p. 168). Later, we learn that Molly has previously been a meat puppet in an industry of
unconscious women rented out as prostitutes. Molly describes the experience as renting the goods,
is all. You arent in, when its all happening (p. 177), yet as she becomes more heavily modded,
further distancing herself from the fleshly aspects of herself, worktime [starts] bleeding in, and she
begins to remember the nonconsensual sex acts that she is taking part in.
The sexual violence resulting from the fetishizing of technology and banalizing of death is
obvious even upon cursory glance in Crash, but it manifests differently than in Gibsons novel. After
Jamess first experience of a car crash, he begins to see everything as a machine. The violent event
that has partially merged his body with technology allows James to see in minute detail the
performativity in every aspect of society: the sexual affairs of his wife as ritualized mating, the
mock-grief after an accident as a mere stylization of a gesture (p. 32). Technology represents the
exciting and new in this tired theatre, as the only type of drama that appears unrehearsed (p. 19). In
the confused gestalt that constitutes the newly cyborg being, ideas of consent and human agency are
outdated. Humans are no longer of primary importance, nor primarily alive; technology is. During
an interaction with a nurse at the hospital, James wonders how he could bring her to life - by
ramming one of these massive steel plugs into a socket at the base of her spine? (p. 36). Only after
merging with technology can one be considered alive, in the newly modern sense, especially if this
results from very lack of consent inherent in car crash experiences. This lack of human agency in the
face of technology proves sexually exciting to those within Vaughans inner circle, such as in the
case of an instrument panel forced on to a drivers crotch (p. 12).
Postmodernist scholar Jean Baudrillard was especially intrigued by Crash as a perfect fictional
summary of his philosophies of simulacra and simulation. Ballards setting is an embrace of the
hyperreality of modernity, in which the world of human creation has superseded any semblance of a
natural, animal world. To Baudrillard, Crash embraces the hyperreality of both society and the
human body, fetishizing a body with neither organs nor organ pleasures, entirely dominated by gash
marks, excisions, and technical scarsall under the gleaming sign of a sexuality that is without
referentiality and without limits.18 Science fiction about the cyborg reveals future avenues for these
violent potentials, but perhaps is even more useful in showcasing how technology has already
penetrated our lives, leading us far from typical behavioral and sexual modes. The level of violence
in Crash or Neuromancer is not the experience of current users of technology. But in extrapolating on
the potential for violence to arise from contemporary trends of technology usage, these novels
expose humanity as already a cyborg entity: a product of both biology and technology.

18
Baudrillard, Jean. Two Essays: Simulacra and Science Fiction/Ballards Crash. Science Fiction Studies #55,
18:3, 1991
Works Cited:
Ballard, J.G. Crash. New York: Vintage, 1995. (Originally published 1973)

BBC News. German cannibal tells of regret. BBC News Channel. 23 November 2003.

Banks, Iain M. The Algebraist. London: Orbit, 2004.

Baudrillard, Jean. Two Essays: Simulacra and Science Fiction/Ballards Crash. Science Fiction Studies #55, 18:3, 1991

Davis, Roger. You Are What You Eat: Cannibalism, Autophagy and the Case of Armin Meiwes. Territories of Evil.
Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: Voyager/HarperCollins, 1995. (Originally published 1984)

Goldstein, Toby. J.G. Ballard: Visionary of the Apocalypse. Heavy Metal. April, 1982.

Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century. Socialist Review; 80. 1985. pp. 65108.

Hardin, Michael. Postmodernism's desire for simulated death: Andy Warhol's car crashes , J. G. Ballard's crash, and
Don DeLillos white noise. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 13:1, 21-50, 2002.

Hopkins, Patrick D. Transcending the Animal: How Transhumanism and Religion Are and Are Not Alike.
Journal of Evolution and Technology; 14:2. 2005. pp. 1328.

Humanity+ Media. "Transhuman FAQ." H+magazine, 1999. (http://hplusmagazine.com/transhumanist-faq/)

Ling, Peter. Sex and the Automobile. History Today; London. 39:11, 1989. pp. 18-25.

McCaffrey, Anne. The Ship Who Sang. New York: Ballantine, 1969.

Mueller, Monika. Kutzbach, Konstanze. The Abject of Desire : The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature
and Culture. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007.

Smith, Cordwainer. The Lady Who Sailed The Soul. The Best of Cordwainer Smith. New York: Ballantine, 1975. (Story
originally published 1960)

Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith. Zygon; 47. 2012. pp. 710734.