Biopunk Dystopias

Download or read book Biopunk Dystopias written by Lars Schmeink and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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. 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.

Download or read book Ship Breaker (National Book Award Finalist) written by Paolo Bacigalupi and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a dark future America devastated by the forces of climate change, this thrilling bestseller and National Book Finalist is a gritty, high-stakes adventure of a teenage boy faced with conflicting loyalties. In America's flooded Gulf Coast region, oil is scarce, but loyalty is scarcer. Grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts by crews of young people. Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota--and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or by chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life.... In this powerful novel, Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a fast-paced adventure set in the vivid and raw, uncertain future of his companion novels The Drowned Cities and Tool of War. "Suzanne Collins may have put dystopian literature on the YA map with The Hunger Games...but Bacigalupi is one of the genre's masters, employing inventively terrifying details in equally imaginative story lines." —Los Angeles Times A New York Times Bestseller A Michael L. Printz Award Winner A National Book Award Finalist A VOYA 2010 Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers Book A Rolling Stone 40 Best YA Novels Book Don’t miss the other books in the series: The Drowned Cities Tool of War

Download or read book Oryx and Crake written by Margaret Atwood and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize. Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter.

Download or read book Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caught as we are in a grave climate crisis that seems more irreversible with every passing year, our literary portrayals of the future often feature the dystopian collapse of the world as we know it. Science fiction explores how we got here, while pointing toward a more hopeful path forward. From an ecofeminist perspective, a core cause of our current ecological catastrophe is the patriarchal domination of nature, playing out in parallel with the oppression of women. As an alternative to dystopian futures that seem increasingly inevitable, ecofeminist science fiction helps us conjure utopias that promote environmental sustainability based on more egalitarian human relationships. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction explores the fictional worlds of such canonical novelists as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Joan Slonczewski, as well as those of lesser-known science fiction writers, as they collectively probe humanity’s greatest existential threats. Contributors from five continents provide compelling analyses of far future dystopias on Earth that are all too easy to imagine becoming reality if humankind’s current trajectory continues, as well as provocative insights into science fiction utopias set on idyllic planets orbiting distant stars, which offer liberatory alternatives that might someday be actualized in the real world. By examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond provides the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping create a foundation for a truly habitable world.

Download or read book Dystopia on Demand: Technology, Digital Culture, and the Metamodern Quest in Complex Serial Dystopias written by Laura Winter and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2024-01-29 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serial storytelling has the advantage of unlocking rather than simplifying the complexities of digital culture. With their worldbuilding potential, TV series open up new artistic horizons, particularly for the dystopian genre. Situated at the nexus of dystopia, complex TV, and a metamodern cultural logic, Dystopia on Demand: Technology, Digital Culture, and the Metamodern Quest in Complex Serial Dystopias offers readers novel insights into the dynamics of serial dystopias in the contemporary streaming landscape. Introducing the term 'complex serial dystopias' to describe series that allow audiences to engage with the dystopian premise from multiple angles, the book examines four Anglo-American series, including Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Westworld, and Kiss Me First. The in-depth analyses trace the variety of ways in which these series offer critical reflections on the human-technology entanglement in digital culture.

Download or read book Biofictions written by Lejla Kucukalic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-22 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biofictions introduces three novel concepts: ‘biofiction,’ ‘bioimagination,’ and ‘biodiscourse’ to talk about intersections of literary and visual texts and biotechnology. The book proposes a new interdisciplinary area of research that correlates processes of genetics and literature, based on two critical approaches. One, drawing parallels between the genetic codes, human language, formal (binary) language, and posthuman communication and the role of meaning and imagination in these forms of communication. Two, by defining ‘biofictions’ as a critical scientific-artistic concept and as a corpus of texts that engage ideas and developments in molecular biology. Syncretic connection between biotechnology and literature is especially evident in an open science movement and the literary artistic genre of biopunk, discussed across chapters. The study includes well-known contemporary texts, such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, that are recontextualized as biofiction; it offers a rereading of important but neglected novels such as Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration (1967); and it analyzes new visual texts such as the TV series Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell films. Based on these wide-ranging examples and new critical concepts, the book argues that coming up with possible alterations for the genetic code or intended traits for the organism is a discursive practice that brings into being bionarratives that are both organic and literary. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Download or read book Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction written by Annika Gonnermann and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction focuses on the relationship between literary dystopia, network power and neoliberalism, explaining why rebellion against a dystopian system is absent in so many contemporary dystopian novels. Also, this book helps readers understand modern power mechanisms and shows ways how to overcome them in our own daily lives.