Jon Bialecki at Public Books:
Anthropology has trouble with the future. So it is curious that, all of a sudden, there is a burst of anthropological monographs on one of the most future-facing social movements there is. At roughly the same moment (here measured by the inexact and rather broad standards of academic publishing), two books have come out about transhumanism and transhumanists.1
Even if the term “transhumanism” is unfamiliar to you, you still probably know of this phenomenon. This is because, thanks to Silicon Valley and science fiction, transhumanists are becoming ubiquitous. Transhumanists are those either working on or advocating for technologies that potentially would so radically alter our lives that we would essentially transcend our humanity. This is stuff like cryonics: the freezing of the dead—though most cryonicists would not use the term “dead,” preferring to think of them more as patients in an extremely precarious condition—so that, in a future moment, they can be resuscitated and cured.
more here.