This book will be an attempt at a cognitive mapping of the transition from late capitalism to biocapitalism. It is a Marxian critique of science fiction, capitalism, psychoanalysis; an interdisciplinary work that aims to go to the heart of new currents in critical thought, science, technology, literature and cinema. It will do so by examining two science fiction subgenres, the established subgenre of cyberpunk and the emerging subgenre of biopunk.

Science fiction is a critical perspective from which to critique the mutations of capitalism. Mark Bould writes that science fiction distinguishes itself from other genres by offering a ‘snapshot of the structures of capital’ (2009: 4). Here, Bould follows Darko Suvin's extraordinarily influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) and Carl Freedman's Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), both of which argue for the necessity of a dialectic between estrangement and cognition, without which the text qualifies neither as science fiction nor as Marxian. As Freedman summarises it, estrangement ‘refers to the creation of an alternative fictional world that […] performs an estranging critical interrogation […] The critical character of the interrogation is guaranteed by the operation of cognition, which […] account[s] rationally for [the] imagined world’ (2000: 16–17). Against these prescriptive definitions, Bould writes that ‘there is no necessary relationship between Marxism and [science fiction] – although there has always been a close one’ (2009: 17). Dialectics are at the core of this book, but it is not its intention to verify the presence of this dialectic between estrangement and cognition. Rather, it will follow Fredric Jameson, who famously described cyberpunk as the ‘supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself’, ‘fully as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself’ (1996: 419 n. 1, 38). The consensus amongst science fiction scholars is that the cyberpunk movement has come to an end. Biocapitalism is the frontline of capitalism today, promising to enrich and prolong our lives whilst threatening to extend capitalism's capacity to command our hearts and minds. This book will show that biopunk is emerging as the literary and cinematic expression of biocapitalism.

More narrowly, this book will be a critical intervention into the becoming-Deleuzian of science fiction (henceforth SF) of which there are two main components.