Tomorrow’s Kin: Intergenerational Solidarity after The

Abstract

One of the issues that emerges with regard to radical human enhancement is the destruction of the intergenerational connections. It is variously envisioned in science fiction, and we can speak of many possible plateaus on which the human continuity, which entails solidarity, can be contested. Contemporary young adult dystopias, such as Shusterman’s Unwind Dystology (2007-15) and The Arc of a Scythe (2016-) cycles, Beckett’s Genesis (2010), Patterson’s Maximum Ride (2005-15) or Wells’s Partials (2009-14), very often conjoin the intergenerational issues typical of juvenile fiction with bioethical concerns in the posthuman and transhuman world. I look at the speculative futures of intergenerational solidarity from the point of view of the biological continuity, the subjective continuity and postgenerationality in an immortal society. In the majority of cases it may be observed how the child-adultdichotomy, with the superimposed adult normativity prejudice, threatens the coexistence of trans- and posthumans with their “parents,” leading to the redefinition of altruism in the wake of the homicidal ALife apocalypse. The relatively broad spectrum of the cases and perspectives I have selected yields a fairly comprehensive picture of contemporary projections of intergenerational solidarity “after the genome” (Herrick 2013).

Keywords

• young adult
• posthumanism
• science-fiction
• solidarity
• bioethics