Conditionally Human

In Conditionally Human, Walter M. Miller, Jr. turns a future of genetic engineering, population control, and manufactured companions into a searching question about what makes a life human. The story is set in a society where engineered humanoid beings can be designed to satisfy emotional needs that ordinary social law and biological limits have left unmet. These creations are useful, affectionate, dependent, and officially less than human-but Miller's fiction presses hard on that official distinction, asking whether personhood can be withheld by decree once love, suffering, loyalty, and moral responsibility enter the room.

First published in the early 1950s and later collected in Miller's 1962 volume Conditionally Human, the title story belongs to the thoughtful, ethically charged strain of postwar science fiction that made Miller one of the field's most serious writers. Project Gutenberg describes the novella as a story about synthetic humanoid creatures known as neutroids, created in a future shaped by population control and genetic engineering, and centred on the moral dilemmas surrounding creation, affection, and the value placed on life. For readers of classic science fiction, bioethical SF, social science fiction, dystopian futures, artificial life stories, and the author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, Conditionally Human is a compact but powerful work about the terrible ease with which societies define some beings as disposable. Explore other exciting Positronic Books devoted to classic science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.