TY - BOOK ID - 58459705 TI - Biopunk dystopias PY - 2016 VL - 56 SN - 9781781383322 1781383324 9781781383766 1781383766 9781786944115 1786944111 PB - Liverpool Liverpool University Press DB - UniCat KW - Science fiction. KW - Biotechnology in literature. KW - Science fiction KW - History and criticism. KW - Science KW - Science stories KW - Fiction KW - Future, The, in literature KW - Literature KW - Science Fiction KW - Dystopia KW - Genetic engineering KW - Humanism KW - Late modernity KW - Posthuman KW - Posthumanism KW - Utopia KW - genetic engineering in popular culture KW - dystopian science fiction KW - Liquid modernity KW - biopunk KW - science-fictionality UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:58459705 AB - '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. 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. 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". The proposed book analyzes this alteration as directors, creators, authors, and artists from the field of science fiction extrapolate it from current trends. ER -