Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schmeink, Lars

Titel

Biopunk dystopias : genetic engineering, society and science fiction

Ort / Verlag

Oxford : Liverpool University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

• JSTOR - Open Access E-Books (ZDB-39-JOA)

  Kostenfrei

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity -- The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal -- Science, Family and the Monstrous Progeny -- Individuality, Choice, and Genetic Manipulation -- The Utopian, the Dystopian, and the Heroic Deeds of One -- 9/11 and the Wasted Lives of Posthuman Zombies
• '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. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet