"Day Million"

"Day Million" was written by Frederik Pohl in 1966. The short story starts off with a distinct style, the narrator addressing the reader, drawing the reader into the story and destroying our preconceptions about it. It is first told to the audience that this is a love story about a boy and a girl. However, it soon becomes clear that this is not  a conventional love story and that it is set very far into the future. The girl, Dora, is seven feet tall, has fur, and is genetically male. In this future we are told humanity is able to easily predict the aptitudes of unborn children. If  a child posses many female characteristics and will have an aptitude for being a female, they are simply made female before they are even born. This is why Dora is male and female, though it is unremarkable for this future society.      While going to practice her dancing Dora and Don run into each other. They promptly agree to be married on wednesday, and then go their separate ways. Don is a space traveler, and most noticeably a cyborg, his skin and many of his body parts made entirely of copper or the non organic. For the two's wedding they meet in an Encoding room where they exchange mathematical formulas and go their separate ways. The narrator once again addresses the reader, making fun of our ideas of marriage, while painting a picture of this futuristic world. It is revealed that the couple never again meet, sex is had through machines, and the mental feeling of each other is derived from mathematical formulas. The narrator one last time mocks the reader, telling the audience they would look equally as strange to these future dwellers or our barbaric ancestors.       "Day Million" is an example of a post-humanist and H+ future. On its most basic level we see the H+ goals of increasing humanities evolutionary functions through technology achieved. The residence of this future are advanced to the point that they would see us as brutish and savage, thus implying, besides physical changes, an increase in intelligence and moral capabilities. This increase, as it seems achieved through technology, is the basis of H+. The story also however constantly undermines the readers current day preconceptions of basic human physical qualities. The narrator of the story does this directly, often mocking the readers back ward way of thinking. Through this mechanism the entire story serves as a medium to show the relativeness of many human qualities. Gender, sex, and physical form are all deconstructed and shown to be crude and unnecessary parts of our developing species. By portraying a love story without these recognizable certainties, Pohl exposes the reader to a host of novums, necessitating the re-evaluation of what makes some one human, as well as forcing the reader to see modern human existence through a lens of cultural relativism from present to future. This re-evaluation of ourselves, leaves the reader stripped of preconceptions, and the most important human traits become the mental and emotional, which exist stronger in these future dwellers that it does in our more recognizably human society of today. With this in mind it becomes possible to look at technology through a new light, as a tool  for liberating ourselves from biological preconceptions of humanity. It is this outlook that makes  "Day Million" a truly post-humanist deconstruction of the physical, matched with H+ optimism on the perfectibility of the human mind and condition through technology.