Cyberpunk and biopunk

What is “biopunk,” and how does it compare with “cyberpunk”? Working from memory, I’ll begin by offering a tentative definition of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction (“sf,” abbreviated). When I think of a cyberpunk novel, I first think of film noir: shadows, gritty, colorless urban environments, rain, stoic, morally-ambiguous male protagonists and dissimulating femme fatales. Hardboiled detective fiction from the early twentieth-century also strongly finds its way into the mix. If you read a novel like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which is perhaps the archetypal cyberpunk novel, alongside The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, you can easily observe the stylistic similarities.

Hardboiled detective fiction and film noir, at least in the early twentieth-century tradition with which I’m familiar, are somewhat guilty of being masculinist and culturally-myopic. The barely-concealed racism, sexism, and homophobia in a novel like The Maltese Falcon is a prime example (as much as I enjoy the novel). Cyberpunk is somewhat guilty of repeating these tendencies to the extent that an author like Gibson seems to be uncritically borrowing some of the more undesirable elements of the hardboiled tradition. This is another topic, however.

Cyberpunk protagonists occupy the social fringes; hackers, drug addicts, poor people, members of bizarre subcultures, racial minorities, sexual deviants, etc.  Cyberpunk novels also usually contain some kind of all-present information network or virtual reality simulation. The typical cyberpunk plotline usually involves a conflict between hackers and corporations over some emergent information technology, such as an AI, molecular replicator, etc.

Biopunk shifts the emphasis from software to “wetware,” which is actually the title of a biopunk novel by Rudy Rucker. Whereas cyberpunk concerns itself perhaps primarily with informatics, biopunk imagines the implications of bioinformatics: genetic programming and biological computing.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story, “Pocketful of Dharma” contains an interesting biopunk image: a massive bioengineered tree called “Huojianzhu,” or, “The Living Architecture.” It occupies the center of future Chengdu. This biomechanical structure is being grown as a massive building for people to live in: “A vast biologic city, which other than its life support would then lie dormant as humanity walked its hollowed arteries, clambered through its veins and nailed memories to its skin in the rituals of habitation” (1).

Part of what I want to do this semester is examine Bacigalupi’s biopunk aesthetic. Questions include: How do biopunk texts help us imagine the “naturalcultural,” to borrow a phrase from Haraway, consequences of bioinformatics? Is Bacigalupi a “bioconservative,” to borrow a phrase from the transhumanist philosopher Bick Bostrom, or is his imaginative perspective on bioinformatics more complicated? In short, I am interested in how SF texts open up an imaginative space for us to contemplate future naturecultures, as well as to reflect on our current naturalcultural entanglements.