Another type of robot-related SF is stories of cyborgs. The cyberpunk movement (we'll look more deeply into cypberpunk in module 7) became especially fascinated with the idea of the cyborg, and bioscience more generally.

The cyborg, or "cybernetic organism" is a human who incorporates artificial parts--generally enhancements. Some of you may remember (if you're old enough) The Six Million Dollar Man and Woman from 1970's TV (based loosely on Martin Caidin's novel Cyborg). This was a pretty bad TV series (especially when they met up with Bigfoot), but it was evidence of the growing interest in the questions and problems people had with artificial enhancement of human beings. The idea of superstrength or megacomputing power in a human body is appealing, but the question of whether a person so enhanced is still a person is troubling. And the attendant questions for us of what it means to be human are even more complicated. Some people worry, and some SF expresses that worry, that we're moving toward a world where people become so connected to, and so dependent on technology, that they lose some of their essential humanity .

Bioscience more generally, the results of recent research into DNA replication, the human genome, cloning, and genetic engineering, is an area in which SF has been uncannily prophetic, and one which many of us find most deeply troubling. An artificial being made of flesh and blood and bones and skin, but still artificial, is even more troubling than is a metal and plastic device (The Wizard of Oz says, "A clinking, clattering, collection of caliginous junk").

When science fiction stories deal with bioscience and cyborgs, our struggles with the definition of human beings, and our place and role in this universe, become even more tangled and emotional.

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