Future Superhuman: Our Transhuman Lives in a Make-or-Break Century Elise Bohan (2022) 368pp., $AUS30 paperback, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, ISBN: 9781742236759

‘The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’ is a line from Alexander Pope’s influential 1717 poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, perhaps better known nowadays as the title of the 2004 film starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, in which two former lovers try to erase each other’s memories from their minds. While the power of Pope’s imagery occludes its exact meaning, the poetic pretext of a twelfth-century doomed romance between a nun and a philosopher – a relationship that was intellectual and erotic in equal measures – might be understood as one that will be re-enacted in generations to come, which will at least partially exonerate the original Eloisa and Abelard from whatever bad thoughts might have informed their actions. The intuition behind the ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’ is that latecomers are likely to take a morally ‘consequentialist’ attitude to their predecessors, not merely because the intentions informing original agents will have become harder to decipher, but more importantly because the actions themselves will appear attractive in the light of later events, which encourage the latecomers to supply their own motives as they perform actions similar to those of the original agents. As a matter of fact, this is how romance morphed into Romanticism over the course of the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, the process was encapsulated as nostalgia. While familiarity may breed contempt, distance makes the heart grow fonder (Fuller, 2006).