In his recent cultural history of the genre, Roger Luckhurst astutely describes the project of science fiction as ‘speculation on the diverse results of the conjuncture of technology and subjectivity’ (222). In the past two decades or so, Anglo-American sf has undertaken this kind of speculative project in the most literal of ways – the concretization of metaphor being a particularly favoured sf strategy – whether exploring the impact of technoculture on the human subject as such in its many cyborg stories or attempting to trace the ontological features of our artificial progeny in stories about robots and other forms of artificial intelligences. Since the mid-1980s in particular, especially in response to the cyberpunk phenomenon, sf has almost obsessively (re)imagined the post-human subject at a variety of ‘conjunctures’ with the technological.

But the post-human has a history, and so I will focus this discussion on pre-cyberpunk science fiction in order to examine some of sf's earlier literalizations of our increasingly intimate relations with/in the cultures of technology. In part I want to draw attention to the complex interplay between pre-cyberpunk fiction and some of sf's more recent representations of the post-human. In part I want to acknowledge the historical influence of earlier sf, especially queer/feminist sf, on cyberpunk and later science fictions about the subjects of technoculture. We can only ever know ‘sex’ in so far as it is implied in and expressed through the performances of gender, argues Judith Butler, so that, as she concludes, ‘“sex” becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy’. Sometimes, as I will argue in turn, it also becomes something like a science fiction, as fantasies of sex/gender become literalized in the discursive constructions of sf narratives.