Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

This is yet another attempt to answer the question, “Why Khan?” See the previous two entries in the Muses category for the whole story. Minor spoilers for X-Men United.

So far I’ve been knocking down evil straw men, but here’s a relatively good theory of the attractiveness of the bad guy: transhumanism. Transhumanism is the hope for a more-than-human future through genetic engineering, cybernetics, uploading human consciousness to computers, and other science-fictional fantasies. It has been said that those who believe uploading is in our future generally predict it will be here by their 70th birthday.

The theory is, if you want to be transhuman yourself you might begin to identify with the evil transhumans of fiction rather than the boring human characters. My favorite bad guys - Khan, the Borg, Magneto - are certainly transhuman, but that’s not my reason for liking them.

For one thing, I don’t believe in transhumanism that way. I like to write about transhuman characters, but I don’t want to be Borg. I don’t believe I’ll be uploaded on my 70th birthday. I don’t think genetic engineering is a good idea even though it’s all over my original fiction.

More importantly for the Why Khan? question, I don’t care for all the transhuman characters, just the cool evil ones. Scott bored me to tears in both X-Men movies, and Storm, Jean, and Xavier weren’t far behind on the snooze scale. I just saw the movie two hours ago, and I wouldn’t have remembered Xavier’s name if I hadn’t come across it just now in an online review. As we were walking out of the Fenway 13, I was calling him Picard so Veronica and company would know who I was talking about.

I had no difficulty remembering Magneto’s name. In fact, I scared Veronica with my thing for Magneto - she even forgot that I still owe her for the ticket. Ten dollars is a small price to pay for the line, You are a god among insects.

I don’t love Khan for his transhumanity per se.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2003 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Muses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.