If your closest familiarity with transhumanism is a vague awareness that it’s a secular religion whose uncritical technophilia and obsession with immortality occasionally provides Charlie Stross with the fuel for his angrier blog posts, then Pilsch’s Transhumanism is probably not an essential read for you.

Nor, one imagines, is it very likely to become an essential read for self-styled transhumanists, as it sends many of their sacred cows to the slaughter-house—and furthermore because, as Pilsch points out, it’s not a movement within which critical thinking and philosophical coherence hold much currency. But if you’ve been following the transhumanist story for a while, there’s some very interesting material in here: Pilsch has, in effect, performed the philosophical archaeology that transhumanists—the bulk of whom identify with the cold-equations rationality of scientism to the point of self-parody and pathology—have heretofore failed to do in a systematic or reflexive fashion.

While the book as a whole is a bit beyond the regular BSFA bailiwick, one chapter within it—an expansion of a paper published in Science Fiction Studies in 2014—is perhaps more germane to readers here. In this chapter (“Astounding Transhumanism! Evolutionary Supermen and the Golden Age of Science Fiction”, pp63-102), Pilsch undertakes a re-examination of the boosterish techno-utopianism of the Gernsback era and the psionic-superbeing evangelism of the Campbell period, as well as an exploration of the “fan utopias” contemporaneous with said periods of science fictional production. It may be that this is old news to anyone who has dug into the deep history of fan interaction (as I have not) but the quite literally cultish antics of some early fandom groups—replete with intentional communities, and with metanarratives of persecuted outsiderdom and nigh-messianic specialness—make quite a story, to hear Pilsch tell it.

Pilsch positions these utopian urges of early fandom(s) as a vindication of the power of science fiction to provide the visionary impetus for political action toward the realisation of utopian goals, and to act as a channel or vector through which diluted versions of those visions (or futures) might become culturally mainstreamed to the point of seeming banal; the acceptability of transhumanism, with all its iffy skiffy logic and Slannish sense of specialness, is a case in point. Looping back to Francis Fukuyama’s famed public diss of transhumanism, with which Pilsch opens the chapter, he concludes that “Fukuyama is right, but for the wrong reasons: transhumanism is science fiction, and science fiction is to be taken very seriously indeed.”

On the matter of taking science fiction seriously, Pilsch and I are very much in agreement. But on the matter of transhumanism, well—I’m reluctant to criticise the structure of a rhetorician’s argument but, nonetheless, the framing of his project does some otherwise fine work no favours at all. If he had stuck to unearthing transhumanism’s more mystical, poetic and Dionysian antecedents and presenting them as an entirely alternative paradigm—the road not taken, if you like—this book would have sat more easily with me (and, I’d wager, with many others). But in attempting to rehabilitate the transhumanism brand identity, he perhaps underestimated its well-established toxicity. As he admits in his introduction, Pilsch treats transhumanism as a rhetoric, but declines to treat transhumanists as rhetoricians (p11); this is a noble philosophical strategy. But it means that he overlooks the more pragmatic and unpleasant political baggage that has been hitched to the transhumanist wagon over the years: in his admiration for foundational transhumanist Max More’s philosophical chops, Pilsch seems unwilling to consider that More in particular might be exactly the Sophist he declines to treat him as, or that transhumanism’s historical closeness to eugenicists and cryptofascist crackpots might be more than coincidence.

A recent blog post by Pilsch, in which he expresses a certain amount of shock at the rise of what he calls “dark transhumanism” during 2017, would appear to vindicate my reading. For what he calls “dark” transhumanism is not a new phenomenon, but rather the discarding of a mask that was only ever worn lightly, and only in the most obviously public forums. For example, a thorough reading of the essays archived on More’s own website would have revealed his more mundane political goals for transhumanism (in which the first thing to be transcended is not mortality, but corporate regulatory frameworks). And I’m genuinely surprised that one could research a book on transhumanist philosophy in the last few years without encountering Steve Fuller’s increasingly unsubtle dog-whistle attempts to rehabilitate eugenics and “racial science” in order to outline a transhumanist destiny based on “genetic capital”. (That said, I could forgive someone for finding them and struggling to read them—Fuller represents the transhumanist apogee of execrable ideas delivered in execrable writing.)

As such, I conclude that Pilsch is wrong for the right reasons; his intentions are obviously good, but perhaps to a fault. It’s not as if he doesn’t have the tools and the talent to hand: he even cites Richard Lanham’s description of homo rhetoricus as a being “not committed to any position other than winning”, for whom “[s]eriousness is a trap that stands in the way of getting things done” (p97), but somehow avoids asking whether a man like More, philosophising from atop the technoutopian Ponzi scheme that is the cryonics industry, might be just such a creature. To return again to Fukuyama, transhumanism is science fiction, and science fiction is to be taken very seriously indeed—not least because, as Charlie Stross likes to remind people, its practitioners tell lies for a living.