Jon Courtenay Grimwood

4. I noticed that you don't really speculate about the question what happens to a human being when he/she's augmented or wired up. Many authors seem to think that the augmentations eat off humanity little by little but you, on the contrary, seem to have a different approach. Take Ashraf Bey for example. His fox gives – like he himself puts it – him something of a sixth sense. It also seems that the fox works sometimes as a conscience (enhancer) for Ashraf. So it actually adds to his humanity than eats it off.

Well that's my interpretation. Have you any thoughts on that matter?

I’m not sure why being augmented would make us less human. Bearing in mind that someone from a thousand years ago probably wouldn’t understand the way we live. We’re already outside evolution. People now survive diseases that would have killed them not long ago. Babies are born and grow up that nature did not intend to live. And they survive though blood transfusions and operations and medical care and I’m one of them…  But those people from a thousand years ago would recognise our needs; because those have changed little. The need to love and sex and comfort and the capacity for violence and the retreat into dreams or drunkenness or drugs. So, does being augmented, make you less human? I think that depends on what one thinks being human is.

Someone uploaded onto a computer and downloaded into a different body, meat or artificial, now that would be hard to handle and would probably eat away at what we think of as humanity. But my characters are human. Albeit, mostly mildly post-human.