Series set in Majority-Transhuman Futures

CarlManvers2019

CarlManvers2019

Writers Blocked Douchebag
I think you guys know how I dislike how even in Post-Scarcity Futures, human beings are more or less still biologically the same and live for only like 100-200 years and losing their tech easily makes it so they can barely survive and are extremely vulnerable to everyday and long past things

No extremely good immune system, no physiques capable of out enduring and fighting large animals, no enhanced intelligence and memory, no psychic powere etc

So any chance you guys got any series wherein the human race stopped maintaining its “genetic purity”

The Belisarius Saga by David Drake apparently has a future-backstory wherein the entirety of mankinds’ descendents have genetically or technologically modified themselves so much that they barely or no longer even resemble humans in appearance

The main antagonist has a problem with this and keeps derisively saying “THEY CALL THEM PEOPLE” and wants to make use of the Indian Caste System and obsession with “purity” to stop any future modifications and first destroy Rome

Because apparently Rome’s a place where ABILITY by the very end of the day can get you to more places than bloodline, the main antagonist is even pissed that Emperor Justinian has zero latin blood and is Thracian and his wife Empress Theodora while very intelligent and a great politician used to be a whore herself.

Whereas, in the Malwa Empire, yeah the main antagonist admits that the Malwa are full of idiots and incompetents BUT because she knows they prioritize “purity” over ability, she’s not throwing them away for the more competent and dangerous Rajputs

Changing for ability or necessity=EVIL
 
TyrantTriumphant said:
Well there's Eclipse Phase. That's a tabletop game about an almost entirely transhuman future. You can be anything from a robot spider to a giant parrot and still be human.
Click to expand...

Okay, what about books or manga?

I think BLAME has mostly cyborgs, androids and genetic mutations
 
While not generally as extreme as what's been mentioned so far, there is the Skolian Saga books by Catherine Asaro.

Some backstory: around 4000 BC and roughly 6000 years before the books start, unknown aliens kidnapped some humans from Earth and took them to a planet called Raylicon. The aliens then mysteriously vanished, leaving behind only three wrecked starships and their version of a library. The desperate humans used the library to learn genetic engineering, inversion (FTL) drives and other technologies which they eventually used to establish the interstellar Ruby Empire. However, the humans didn't understand the alien tech well enough to repair it when it started to fail and the Ruby Empire collapsed after only a few centuries, stranding all of their colonies. Thousands of years later Raylicon rediscovered spaceflight (although they lost some of the more advanced alien technologies) and reestablished contact with the surviving colonies. The civilization then split in two, becoming the Skolian Imperialate (the "good guys" of the setting, although their society has significant problems due to being highly militarized) and the much less pleasant Eubian Concord which is a slave empire ruled by the sadistic Aristos. The humans on Earth developed FTL on their own and began exploring, only to find out that most of the galaxy was already occupied by two immense human civilizations locked in a cold war that was about to go hot.

Okay, now to the point of the thread :) : before the collapse, the Ruby Empire learned genetic engineering and initially used it to deal with their lack of genetic diversity. Despite having terraforming tech, they also had a remarkable habit of modifying themselves to better survive on hostile planets. The colonists of one high-radiation, low-gravity world gave themselves metallic-looking golden skin to reflect radiation, extra eyelids to protect their eyes and increased size (the men are often seven feet tall). The people of another planet have modifications that don't make sense to modern Skolians and may have been accidental: they have purple hair and four-fingered hands that lack a thumb, but instead have a hinge down the center that lets them fold their hand around an object. Modern Skolians don't engineer themselves in this way but do fully accept the engineered descendants of the old colonies.

There are also "nonhuman" races that are actually humans who changed themselves so drastically that, combined with thousands of years of genetic drift, they could no longer interbreed with "traditional" humans. One such race in the story "Walk in Silence" lived on a mountainous planet, so they basically turned themselves into four-armed yetis.

Genetic engineering isn't really used to give people "super abilities", but technology exists which is pretty routinely used to do the same thing. Many elite soldiers have cybernetics called biomech which gives them two to three times the speed and strength of a normal human. Nanomeds are self-replicating nanomachines that are injected into a person and basically act as an improved immune system. People with high-quality nanomeds are essentially immune to disease, most poisons and in one book even shrug off a significant amount of radiation. They also greatly slow down the aging process; someone in their 60's will still have the health and physical appearance of a person in their 20's, and one character was able to live for just over three centuries.
 
Earth doesn't show up too often in the main books as most of them are focused on either the Skolians or the Eubians. The Allied Worlds of Earth do have diplomatic relations with both nations that change over the course of the series, but they generally distrust both sides and consider them overly aggressive.

Earth is more prominent in the novels Spherical Harmonic and Diamond Star, although the second one is rather odd - much of it is about a Skolian royal prince who's stuck on Earth and his rise in Earth's music industry. :confused:
 
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