Cyborg

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, meaning a creature that combines artificial and natural systems within one body. The label was first used in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, who wrote about the benefits of self-governing human-machine systems for surviving in space. Five years later, D. S. Halacy's book Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman opened with talk of a new frontier that bridged not only outer space but the inner space between mind and matter.

In its plainest modern reading, a cyborg is simply an organism whose abilities are extended by technology, though that framing skims over the deeper idea of feedback between body and machine. In fiction the concept blends living tissue with synthetic parts and keeps circling the line between person and device, raising questions of free will, morality, and empathy. Such stories tend to voice a human unease about leaning too heavily on technology, above all in warfare and in ways that seem to erode free choice, and they often grant their cyborgs powers beyond any ordinary person, with military versions built around integrated weapons.

Fictional cyborgs range from the openly mechanical, such as the Cybermen of Doctor Who and the Borg of Star Trek, to figures barely separable from ordinary humans, like the human Cylons of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. One of the best-known screen examples came from the 1970s series The Six Million Dollar Man. Away from fiction, real cyborgs are more often people who turn to cybernetic aids to repair or push past physical and mental limits, and while the term usually brings mammals to mind, any sort of organism can qualify.