Term paper free writing 3

In his short story “The Calorie Man,” and “Yellow Card Man,” as well as his novel The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi depicts a world ravaged by bioengineered plagues. I want to suggest that the informational manipulation of the biosphere, as imagined in these texts, represents a crucial element of the biopunk aesthetic as it might be distinguished from Neuromancer. This is a much more profound speculative invention than anything I’ve encountered so far in another collection of biopunk SF shorts, Ribofunk.

In Gibson’s novel All Tomorrow’s Parties, the plot involves a nano-assembler that basically functions as a conduit between the material and digital worlds, and the subsequent collapse of (or challenge to) boundaries and distinctions. The AI Rei Toi can take on material embodiment. This example is interesting because Gibson DOES do interesting things with materiality, information, and virtuality, but not necessarily in the “biopunk” mode of Bacigalupi.

What I’m particularly interested in in Bacigalupi are the latent sexual politics of his representations of advanced bioinformatic manipulation of nature and the human. In the story, “Fluted Girl,” two biotechnologically-augmented sisters have their bones replaced by fluted musical devices. This allows them to “play” one another by mouthing pieces inserted into their bodies. They perform an elaborate dance for fetishists interested in the performative and sexual possibilities opened up by biotechnology. What concerns me with this image is that it figures the “cyborg” as incestuous and perverted. Haraway offers the cyborg as a perversion of Nature-based ontology, but I’m not sure if that’s Bacigalupi’s aim. The story leaves us with a sense of violation, degeneracy, and even “decadence.” Oscar Wilde offers an interesting quotation: “Classicism is the subordination of the parts to the whole; decadence is the subordination of the whole to the parts.” A question becomes, does Bacigalupi provide a speculative window into bioinformatic advance that moves beyond or complicates the rhetoric of organic wholeness?

In “Pop Squad,” a hardboiled, noir, cyberpunk pastiche, a detective is tasked with “popping” illegally-born children – literally shooting them in the head. In fact, the graphic nature of the descriptions of infant cranial and brain matter evokes the rhetoric of anti-abortion activists. “Pop Squad” depicts a society in which radical life-extension technology has created the need to ban new births. However, mothers, driven by an essential maternal impulse, continue to have children despite the risk to their lives and the lives of their babies. They live in squalid conditions, isolated from society in order to raise their young. Thus, in Bacigalupi’s short fiction the posthuman stands in opposition, it appears, to modes of heterosexual reproduction. I would also argue that the intense pathos that marks this challenge represents a heteronormative tendency in Bacigalupi’s fiction. An essential, reproductive sexuality and human nature opposes itself to a cyborg that is figured as degenerative and sexually-deviant.

This theme is repeated in his short story, “Pump Six,” in which humans have difficulty conceiving because of fertility-reducing environmental contaminants. In fact, a race of hermaphroditic subhumans has emerged as a result of toxic mutation. A central pump station that keeps the city’s sewers functional fails, and the company that designed and can repair the equipment has long since vanished. A desperate technician tries to find engineering expertise in order to repair the pump and save the city at a nearby university, only to find that the institution has almost entirely degenerated; he finds only an armed woman guarding an abandoned library. Like the degenerate hermaphroditic subhumans, the college students he encounters seem more concerned with recreational sex than their academics.

The posthuman cyborg is figured through representations of deviant and non-reproductive sex, but in a way that implies incest, pollution, and degeneracy. In Bacigalupi, the cyborg never seems valorized; the possibilities for pleasure it offers, to borrow from Haraway, seem foreclosed. In this sense, Bacigalupi’s handling of bioinformatics advance differs markedly from an author such as Marge Piercy in her postcyberpunk novel “He, She, and It,” which challenges and disrupts heteronormative and organic conceptions of embodiment, gender, and sex.