Moral Enhancement and the Ethics of Living in Octavia E. Butler’s <i>Survivor</i>

Abstract This is a study of the formation of a transhumanist ethics that favors moral enhancement in Octavia E. Butler’s Survivor (1978). Though Butler publicly discredited the novel as her failed attempt at the widely popular space opera of the 1970s, it embodies nascent aspects of moral enhancement that coincides with the rise of posthumanism and related frameworks during the decade of the novel’s publication. This article will rely on the trope of rebirth to demonstrate the gradual creation of transhumanism in the Survivor universe, which is at best subsumed by questions of identity, Othering, agency, and more. By vouching for a transhumanist framework in the novel, this article suggests that ethical advancement of the human is one of the ways to ameliorate the human condition in Other worlds.