The invention of the computer, claimed by Dyson in 1994 as Haldane’s biggest oversight and ‘the most potent agent of social change during the last fifty years’ (58), began roughly around the same time as genetics did in the late 1940s with ‘John von Neumann, the mathematician who consciously pushed mankind into the era of computers,’ dreaming of artificial intelligences and self-reproducing automata ( Dyson 59).
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Parallel to the biological research that started with Watson and Crick in 1953, another scientific development had come to full fruition by the 1980s, one that would overshadow genetic engineering at least for a while: information and communication technology. I do not wish to engage in a discussion on the quality of sf, but here refer only to the scope of much biological sf with a hereditary/evolutionary background as being akin to the space opera tradition ( Parker, chapter 3 Herbe 56). As David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer explain in their introduction to The Space Opera Renaissance, the term ‘space opera’ has shifted in meaning from Bob Tucker’s original pejorative dismissal of it as ‘hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn’ (cited in Hartwell and Cramer 10) to become a nostalgic and even praiseworthy term that today usually refers to ambitious sf speculations. Determined by evolutionary and hereditary approaches, much early biological sf necessarily took a long-term and large-scale approach to human development that today we might consider to be part of the space opera subgenre, which is ‘set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds’ ( Hartwell and Cramer 17). In the case of biological sf, I have explained in the last chapter that developments in technoscientific progress have engendered different and changed perspectives of fictional explorations of the genetic since the end of the nineteenth century. Analyzing the collective desires and fears that determine such conceptions grounds us in the present and the social realities from which the science-fictional imagination starts. As such, sf is a direct interaction with contemporary culture that lies at the nexus of technological, scientific, critical, and social thought in that it determines what we conceive of as possible in and for our future.
As Csicsery-Ronay points out: sf ‘is not a genre of aesthetic entertainment only, but a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future’ ( Seven Beauties 4). In an attempt to define what he means by science-fictionality, Csicsery-Ronay argues that it is linked to two ‘forms of hesitation, a pair of gaps’ ( Seven Beauties 3): Firstly, the historical dimension of possibility – are we at this point in our technoscientific progress able to actually do this? Is this possible? And secondly, the ethical dimension of consequence – if we do this, what would the repercussions be and how would things change in accordance? Would it be good or bad to do this? Both dimensions are part of science-fictionality and determine the extent to which we think about the future as historical process. In reviewing the utopian imagination, the chapter concludes the theoretical frame, in which to read contemporary biopunk culture. Liquid modernity, as critical dystopian present, consequently demands to be understood as warning about current tendencies in society, as criticism and even more importantly as an education of society in regards to its own needs and desires. Further, the chapter establishes the sociological frame, positing contemporary society as formed by 'liquid modernity.' The chapter elaborates the dissolution of social institutions and the shifting of focus from public debate onto private life-choices, the global dimension of current political issues and, in contrast, the individualization of solutions to those issues.
Then, biopunk will be situated as a creative intervention into posthuman discourses by elaborating the origin and use of the 'posthuman,' anchoring it in discussions differentiating between transhumanism and critical posthumanism as two oppositional theoretical positions. Starting from the premise of science fiction as a cultural mode that is ideally suited to negotiate technoscience and its influence of socio-political structures, the chapter introduces and defines the cultural formation of 'biopunk' from its pre-cursor cyberpunk. Chapter 2 provides an inventory of the theoretical strains pertinent to the discussion and elaborates the concepts introduced.