77 Shadow Street: a fictional look at transhumanism's natural end

Dean Koontz understands the foundations of the transhumanist movement unlike any other popular fiction writer today.  His latest novel

The dark prospect of posthumanism was part of it that most excited the theorists and scientists: the augmentation of the brain with hundreds of millions of microcomputers made largely of carbon nanotubes, which would be distributed throughout our gray matter.  These tiny but powerful computers would interact with one another, with the brain, and potentially with every computer in the world through a wireless network, tremendously enhancing the individual's intelligence and knowledge.  The posthuman species, a combination of biological and machine intelligence, never aging, nearly immortal, still human in appearance, inspired scientists at MIT and at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and at hundreds of other universities, institutes, and corporations around the world.  They saw at last a possibly swiftt path to a human civilization with superhuman capabilities, the total submission of nature to humanity, the acquisition of godlike power, the looming end of nationalism and tribalism, and superstition, therefore the elimination of limits in all things.

Reading about the subject to research the novel, I was struck by how insane most people in this movement sound when they are writing about their dream future; insane not because I am too ignorant of science to understand them, but because they are so narrowly focused on the promise of physical immortality, that they can see only the promise of power that entrances them and nothing of the social, civilizational, and biological disaster that will make their dream a nightmare.