This chapter examines science fiction written during the heyday of the modern synthesis, from the early 1940s to the end of the Cold War, identifying two major phases in science fiction’s representation of the posthuman – one relying on eugenics, the other on genetic engineering. This history has an important bearing on science policy, for it exposes an unacknowledged kinship between science fiction and the policy scenarios developed by some prominent commentators on genetics. Both jeremiads against genetic enhancement and eager anticipations of a posthuman future rely on narrative conventions, world building, and rhetorical practices characteristic of literature, while masquerading as nonfiction. In literature, the formal conventions of fiction alert readers to the provisional nature of extrapolation and safeguard readers against taking possible futures as inevitable. Scientific jeremiads and anticipations, by contrast, warn against a future entailed by a fiction.

This essay examines key trends in war and posthumanism, from the early rise and recent revitalization of the idea of autonomous war machines, and the way the cyborg body acted metonymically for the unwilling soldier sent to Vietnam. The majority of military science fiction has backed away from the prospect of transhuman war, and even popular war franchises like Iron Man (comics and film) maintain that humans must and will be at the center of combat. The insistence on human agency in war flies directly in the face of US military policy, driven by the Revolution in Military Affairs. Just as war is being fought at ever greater removes by drones and autonomous weapons, popular military science fiction has retreated to representing wars whose technologies and strategies date from the mid-twentieth rather than mid-twenty-first century. Using fiction, film, and comic texts, this essay argues that maintaining human agency is crucial to the United States’s ongoing concept of itself as a frontier country advanced by determined pilgrims.