Term paper free writing 2

I recently finished Pump Six and Other Short Stories, a collection of SF shorts by author Paolo Bacigalupi. If we can call Bacigalupi a “biopunk,” it’s because he’s crafting speculative worlds that engage the cultural and ecological impact of advanced bioinformatics. In Neuromancer, we encounter “cyberspace,” a computer-generated virtual space that threatens to render traditional space obsolete: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Put a different way, in Gibson’s novel cyberspace challenges the ontological primacy of a pre- or non-digital reality, i.e., what Case terms the “meatworld.”

In Neuromancer, transnational corporations appear to have almost entirely supplanted nations as the primary global political actors. These entities struggle not over land, material resources, or even markets, per se, but information.  Perhaps another way to think about it might be access to information. Corporations use “ice” (protection software) to guard their internal data and company secrets. In an economy that appears to be fueled by rapid technological development, corporations are fiercely protective of proprietary information: software, schematics, novel digital entertainment technologies, etc. Flow, blockage, penetration, infection, and prophylaxis: these are the dynamics through which these agents negotiate relations of power. In fact, we learn in the novel that Operation “Screaming Fist,” an attempt to launch some sort of covert mission into the USSR that occurs around the same time that cyberspace emerges, fails spectacularly when the team is infected by a computer virus. Thus, the invaders are defeated by infection, and earlier modes of shaping, and enacting power, on geopolitical space appear to be outmoded.  

Biology and bioinformatics certainly play a role in Neuromancer; the novel contains many examples where biology and information merge, such as cosmetic genetic engineering. But the primary arena in which the action appears to happen is cyberspace – that’s where everything is at stake. Information flows out of cyberspace into the meatworld: “data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.” Technology fuses with the body in the form of the trodes that Case uses to interface with the matrix, the slots that people use to plug in software into their brains, the designer alterations that people make to their bodies. What I’m trying to get at is there’s a nascent “biopunk” element in Gibson, but his aesthetic concern is in some sense destabilizing, or playing with, the traditional oppositions between the real, the embodied, and the virtual. There’s even a very specific instance in which Gibson associates the “spiral” of DNA with the body, with reproductive sex, with desire – the body and the biological are in some sense opposed to or resist informatics. The Flatline perhaps most poignantly represents this tension. In cyberpunk the emphasis is on advanced information technology, and while Neuromancer explores several instances of bioinformatic advance, the novel’s aesthetization of the cyberspace/meatworld binary limits its engagement with bioinformatics.

A biopunk novel like The Windup Girl changes this formula I think in a profound way. Whereas the biosphere in Gibson’s novel, the biological world, occupies a peripheral role, usually referenced for its decay or its obsolescence, the biosphere in Bacigalupi’s novel is at the center. It has been radically transformed by bioinformatic catastrophes.