The proposed book analyzes this alteration as directors, creators, authors, and artists from the field of science fiction extrapolate it from current trends. As Rosi Braidotti argues, "there is a posthuman agreement that contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today" (40). 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.
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. 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 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. A survey of selected eco- and biotechnological dystopias or sf-ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) to Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover (1981), Marge Piercy's The Body of Glass (1991) and Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl (2002)-is followed by an in-depth model analysis of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). The paper then traces the productive interchange between science and literature and the emergence of an increasingly (bio)technology-centred utopian/dystopian discourse that explores as key motif the link between the imagined intersection or interface of the human self (identity) and the machine/(bio)technological other/alterity, celebrating the future advent of post-humans and cautioning against such an impending doom. The article provides an overview of how literary and scientific imagination have been entangled and how views of the imagination’s intermediation between the material (body) and the immaterial (mind) have changed over the course of the centuries.
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