The Next Human: What Science Fiction Reveals About Our Evolutionary Destiny

Doris Pulliamdunn is a writer and independent scholar whose work sits at the intersection of speculative fiction, evolutionary biology, and the philosophy of technology. She holds a master's degree in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, where her research focused on the role of narrative in scientific modeling and public understanding of evolution. Her writing has appeared in Aeon, The Paris Review, Wired, and Nature, among other publications, and she is a contributing editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books, where she covers science fiction and the history of ideas.

Pulliamdunn's first book, The Next Human: What Science Fiction Reveals About Our Evolutionary Destiny, grew out of a decade-long lecture series she developed and taught at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and the Greystone Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue about science and society. The course, titled "Evolving Imaginations," brought together scientists, writers, artists, and the public to explore how speculative narratives shape our understanding of what it means to be human. The book has been praised for its accessible treatment of complex ideas and its refusal to flatten the moral complexity of human enhancement into easy optimism or easy pessimism.

Before turning to full-time writing and scholarship, Pulliamdunn worked as a science editor for a major trade publishing house, where she acquired and developed books in the fields of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and technology ethics. She has served on the advisory board of the Center for the Study of Human Futures and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and two remarkably opinionated cats.