BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (18)

By: Joshua Glenn
December 18, 2025

University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW‘s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). In 2022, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about science fiction. Via the series BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, the title of which references Francis Bacon’s philosophy, HILOBROW is pleased to share a lightly edited version of their exchange with our readers. Also see Josh and Mark’s previous exchange 49th PARALLEL.

HOMO SUPERIOR

18th November, 2022
BOSTON

So glad you’re home at last. Now comes the least glamorous but perhaps most enervating part of any adventure: the painful return to everyday life.

Thank you for responding to my persistent query about watching yourself watching movies. As an ironist who is forever watching himself, and sometimes watching himself watch himself too, I find this stuff fascinating.

“A whole bunch of vague references to mid-century style, postmodern use of materials, a slick semi-familiar nostalgia for the future” — yes, this kinda-fun, kinda-eerie pomo referentialism is the sort of thing that tickles and disturbs me about Midjourney. We take for granted an inevitable and necessary connection between signifiers and signifieds. (If we didn’t do so, we wouldn’t be able to function — we’d be like Adam on the morning of his creation, to quote again from Huxley’s Doors of Perception, mentioned earlier in our exchange, floored by “the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”) Yet in using Midjourney, I feel at times like I’m taking mescaline with Huxley: the signifiers reveal themselves to be moored only by sentimental habit. AIs are creepy, to me, because they are not susceptible to such sentiments.

You both begin and end your latest note with reflections on the superman. (1) The superman (like ST:TNG’s Data, or an AI) is a superior being who should not waste time wishing he were human, all-too-human, but should instead revel in his or her liberation from the constraints of mere humanity. (2) The superman is a life-hacker supreme, an escape-artist who is hyper-aware of everyday life’s restrictions and limitations (I mentioned earlier Fredric Jameson’s point that sf, at its best, can break us free from the enchantment of the quotidian), and finds ways to break free. I like your suggestion that the Nietzschean ubermensch is like an accomplished life hacker or talented athlete within a very constrained field. Yes, that’s my takeaway from reading Nietzsche: it’s about overcoming obstacles, particularly sentimental conventions that we inherit from family and society.

To begin with the second insight first, life-hacks may seem like minor “escapes” — but then one thinks of Philip K. Dick’s 1970 open letter to those readers who disliked his unglamorous, anti-heroic protagonists. In his novels, he asserts, “this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength.” (Which makes it particularly egregious that PKD movie adaptations tend to feature omnicompetent action men portrayed by the likes of Schwarzenegger, Cruise, et al. At least Harrison Ford’s Deckard, in Blade Runner, gets his ass handed to him most of the time.) As you know well from the appendix to our latest collaboration, The Adventurer’s Glossary, I conceive of adventure fiction (sf included) as escapist in the sense that these stories identify one or another “invisible prison” (another PKD concept) and then thrill us with an account of how someone — often a “minor man” or woman — becomes aware of that prison and breaks out. Nietzsche says somewhere that the superman is someone who “kicks over the boundary stones” — an archaic metaphor for fleeing an invisible prison.

As for your first insight, I realize that this is more or less the topic addressed in your Politics of Posthumanism — which I have purchased but not yet read. (Its cover is mecha-tastic!) Can humans coexist with in- or non-human entities that are superior, in key respects to humans? Or is a struggle for superiority inevitable? Your book is concerned with biological life vs. nonhuman conscious entities — AIs — that brilliant programmers are attempting to summon into being even as I write this, and you trace the coexistence debate back to Karel Čapek, the Radium Age sf littérateur whom we’ve already discussed. The superman, though, is even uncannier than robots or AIs, since he or she is biologically human while simultaneously more than human: an ubermensch, to use Nietzsche’s term; or homo superior, to use Olaf Stapledon’s Radium Age sf coinage.

UK proto-sf writers during the 1900–1935 period in which I’m interested gave us superman characters like Victor Stott, in J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), Humpty, in Stapledon’s Last Men in London (1932), and in a more comical vein, Professor Challenger in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), et al. These and other creators of fictional supermen seem to have been inspired in part by Bergson’s Creative Evolution, a much-discussed 1907 work of metaphysics (arguing that there must be an original common impulse which explains the creation of all living species — the élan vital — as well as a principle of divergence and differentiation, which together explain why life evolves in the direction of a greater capacity for action and freedom); in part by Lamarckian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve; and in part by Nietzsche’s philosophy, then just reaching the Anglophone world. Because they revalue our human, all-too-human values, even as they may work to save humankind from itself, Victor, Humpty, Challenger, and other Radium Age superman (e.g., Odd John, De Soto, Hugo Danner, Pollard) demonstrate the acuity of Zarathustra’s prediction that “Just as the ape to man is a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment, man shall be just that to [the superman].”

FWIW, there is often phrenological “evidence” offered in these stories: “His body looked small and undeveloped, it is true,” we read of Beresford’s Victor, “but this was partly an illusion produced by the abnormal size of the head.” Of Humpty, meanwhile, we learn that “His thick neck and immense, almost bald head was very repulsive to the normal eye.” (His cruel nickname, of course, is a giveaway.) And when Malone, narrator of The Lost World, first meets Challenger, he marvels that the professor’s “head was enormous,” in fact “the largest I have ever seen upon a human being.”

In The Poison Belt, the sequel to The Lost World, Malone reports that Challenger regards the lesser mortals around him with a “benignant smile of condescending encouragement.” Although they are not malignant, exactly, neither are these guys benevolent. Which is uncanny! Malignant Lex Luthor vs. benevolent Superman we can comprehend, but not these betwixt-and-between figures. Which goes back to what I’ve been saying about how sf’s so-called Golden Age represents a sanding-down of Radium Age sf’s weirdness — which helps sf break through, but also “de-fangs” it.

One last thought: Pop culture has in recent years rediscovered the superman who understands that you’ve gotta be cruel to be kind. I’m thinking of the villains of the Kingsmen movies, say: Poppy Adams, who wants to end drug addiction (by eradicating all drug users), or Richmond Jackson, who wants to stop climate change (via genocide). And of course Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt, in Watchmen, who wants to end war. When you talk about “transhumanism depredations, which can look like neo-liberal eugenics,” I’m guessing this is the sort of thing to which you refer(?).

PS: We’re now approaching our 20k word limit for this epistolary adventure. Shall we wrap it up? If so, I’m eager to hear any final words of wisdom….

Josh

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ALSO SEE: Josh’s BEST 250 ADVENTURES of the 20th CENTURY list | Mark on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | Mark and Josh’s exchange 49th PARALLEL.

BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (18)

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