Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction

'''Schmeink, Lars. Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction.''' Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2016. In the series Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies. "An Open Access edition of this work is available on the OAPEN Library."

From the publisher's web page Description the book, linked at note 1 above. Biopunk Dystopias contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. The analysis deals with dystopian science fiction artifacts of different media from the year 2000 onwards that project a posthuman intervention into contemporary socio-political discourse based in liquid modernity in the cultural formation of biopunk.

See for the idea of the posthuman and for biotech generally as a permeable interface between the organic and the technological.

RDE, finishing 1Sep19