"When I die, I'm leaving my body to Science Fiction."
-- traditional graffiti
We break so easily, under the lightest of strains. Our senses perceive so little, and once destroyed, we have no idea how to restore those senses to full functioning order.
And we are such short-lived machines, too, so weak and helpless at the start of our existence, requiring many years learning about our environment and only a short span of useful time before senescence and expiration.
This might explain why much of science fiction has been about the machinery of exploration, the shells which keep the environments around us while propelling our bodies through the void, rather than the bodies of the explorers themselves.
Physician, Heal Thyself - Medical Science Fiction
Our immune systems can barely fight off a routine infection such as a common rhinovirus, and exposed to a truly virulent Earth-native organism such as Ebola or Yersinia, human beings erupt in a variety of amusing symptoms and drop like flies. Consider how unprepared human bodies are for an organism which originated on a world outside our own solar system and thus one that never evolved beside us - or a plague brought along by a traveller from a parallel dimension, or even a time traveller, bringing along a germ which has not evolved yet.
Medical science fiction is not about the germs themselves, but about the humans who wield the technology and come up with the ideas to cure the germs. Stories such as "Plague From Space" and "The Andromeda Strain" centered around this race-against-time concept, and the late author James White wrote an entire setting, "Sector General," which inspired such TV series as Babylon 5 and Crusade, and of course directly inspired the Mercy Heights setting of the British graphic magazine 2000AD.
The use of germ warfare, and its aftermath in the form of a scorched-earth poisoned world inhabited only by soldiers in life-support suits and genetic infantrymen engineered for immunity to chemical and biological warfare, is the theme behind the setting of the 2000AD series Rogue Trooper, whose here - the eponymous runaway Genetic Infantryman - is himself a piece of technology.
Another example of biological technology, and the consequences of its use, is the short story "To Pay The Piper" in the James Blish anthology Galactic Cluster, positing a future world where humans have been driven deep underground for good because wave after wave of genetically-engineered plagues unleashed during a global war have turned the biosphere into an uninhabitable, suppurating plague pit.
Med Tech
The marvellous medical technologies developed for science fiction, spawned from the minds of their authors, include such tools as -
Hyposprays - Needle-less injectors designed to force the delivery of a dose of a drug through the pores of the skin. Unlike sf, not designed to be injected through clothing.
Feinbergers - Miraculous medical devices attached to medical tricorders, designed to operate wirelessly, capable of picking up on a subject's heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, respiration and other life signs, once within a few centimetres' range of a living body.
Biobeds - The same kind of thing, but much bigger. Can perform all the functions of NMR and CAT scans, but without having to lock the patient into a big metal doughnut and having to keep all ferrous metals out of the room while the device is scanning.
Drugs
Pretty much everything the human body needs to keep it going, from stims to vitamin shots, from saline IV drips to antibiotics, won't really change that much once humanity reaches the stars - at least, in the pages of science fiction.
SF in the 20th century has crucially benefited from the myriad of scientific discoveries made during the centuries which preceded it. From the function of the heart and blood vessels, to the function of the major organs - lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, pancreas and so on - to the lymphatic system, and its many vital roles from maintaining fluid balance to its role in the human immune system and hormone transportation network - and to our nervous system, and its sensory and regulatory roles - the human body and its many different functions has been, more or less, mapped out right down to the DNA in our cells and the human genome.
Body Modification
The ultimate expression of marvellous technologies, of course, is the fusion of man and machine, yielding cybernetic organisms - cyborgs - with appearances both subtle and gross.
Science fiction has embraced the cyborg - the term created by the late Martin Caidin, on which the cult TV series The Six Million Dollar Man is based - with a passion, both as an expression of individuality against crushing conformity in the form of many cyberpunk stories to a grim moral warning against the loss of one's identity and even individuality as posed by such science fiction threats as Doctor Who's Cybermen invented by Dr Kit Pedler, Star Trek's Borg Collective and the concept of androids utterly indistinguishable from human which forms the central concept behind Phillip K Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," later filmed as Blade Runner, and the modern reboot of the 1970s TV series Battlestar Galactica, where the Cylon threat was internal, rather than the external metal warriors faced by the Colonials during the original Glen A Larson 1970s serial.
Technological body modifications have pervaded science fiction for a considerable time. Larry Niven's story "Death By Ecstasy" and later "The Ringworld Engineers" featured the addiction called wireheading - the threading of a current-bearing wire through the brain's pleasure centres and their attachment to a device called a droud, to provide unlimited nirvana at the touch of a button. Larry Niven's Known Space Future History also incorporated the chilling concept of organ laws, where even the most petty crimes were punishable by death followed by rapid organ harvesting.
William Gibson's now somewhat dated future history Neuromancer posited the idea of the human mind being wired directly into the internet and perceiving the datasphere as a Tron-like maze of colourful geometric shapes, where servers existed as blocks of data to be hacked with software that resembled digger wasps, burrowing into the soft fabric of the firewalls, the sites being protected internally by Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, ICE, which looked like contagious clouds of pixellation like a distorted digital TV signal and which could induce seizures remotely, like a bad Japanese cartoon.
Other cyberpunk authors took concepts such as these and ran with them, coming up with short stories such as John Shirley's "Wolves of The Plateau," featuring the fusion of mind and machine into a gestalt entity, free from the constraints of mundanity ... but that is a topic for a future blog entry.
Alien Realm
The most famous example of "human body as alien realm" in science fiction is, of course, Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage. In that seminal SF novel, a team of scientists are literally miniaturised to the size of viruses and sent in a submarine to a cranial blood clot to perform radical internal brain surgery on a critically-injured world leader. Nowadays, advances in medicine would probably permit surgeons to use tools unheard-of back then to perform this procedure, without the risk of the submarine Proteus deminiaturising inside the diplomat's head. Nonetheless, this was a good, long look by a science fiction author at a realm which, to his peers, presented an inaccessible mystery.
Summary
Science fiction's quest to bring the worlds Out There down into the human realm of existence, giving us encounters with aliens, journeys through the stars and visits to distant worlds, really concentrated on an external universe, and few people have ever focused on the mysteries going on within the human body to the extent of a science fiction author going over the functions of, say, a light sabre, a sonic screwdriver or a warp drive.
We know more about how the Tardis' time column works to propel The Doctor's vessel through time and space than we do about our own livers and kidneys; and we are more versed in the functioning of a warp drive and dilithium crystals than we are in what our lymphatic systems are supposed to do.
The workings of the healthy human body, it would seem, still provide a great mystery to science fiction authors that is more or less as inaccessible to them as the stars are to the rest of us.
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