Dan Brown's Inferno Portrays Transhumanism in Positive Light

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD. (That is if you want to read Inferno of your own free will.)So I recently had the displeasure of reading Dan Brown's new novel, Inferno, because I heard it had transhumanist themes. Essentially, it was the same book as Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code except this time the backdrop was Florence, Venice and Istanbul instead of Rome. In characteristic Dan Brown style, the research was shoddy, the Catholic Church was the bad guy, and complex issues and philosophies were given the shallowest of treatments leaving the average reader believing in fiction set up as fact. As a result, I found this book beyond painful to read. Considering that I love to read just about anything, that is saying quite a bit.Where do I begin? First, Brown sets up a fictional problem, human overpopulation, and awkwardly places it in the middle of secret codes and Renaissance art, fiction and architecture. Of course, Robert Langdon is back to race all over European cities trying to stop something sinister. The sinister event is the release of a deadly virus engineered by transhumanist and brilliant biologist, Bertrand Zobrist. Zobrist sees himself as a martyr willing to do what others won't.  Zobrist insists that if the human population does not dramatically reduce NOW, our world will become just like Dante's fictional depiction of Hell in the infinitely better work The Divine Comedy. (Hence the title of the book, Inferno.) Both the "villain" Zobrist and the &q...
Source: Mary Meets Dolly - Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Transhumanism Source Type: blogs