As has been discussed in the last chapter, biopunk is firmly rooted in a variety of socio-political discourses, from globalization to posthumanism to technoscience. With its heritage in cyberpunk, itself a subgenre of science fiction and a cousin (closely related) to the utopian/dystopian tradition, it seems only sensible to begin an analysis of biopunk with the ‘original’ medium from which the formation was born: literature. Within the cultural formation, literary works represent a strong connection not only to the sf genre tradition, but to biological sf, to dystopian critique, and to social commentary. The contemporary public interest in genetics and the posthuman can be noticed not just within the core of the genre, with its hard sf ecocriticism and vivid extrapolations of hybrid posthumanity, but also at the fuzzier edges, where delegates of the high cultural elite pick up on its themes and issues. In this chapter, I will thus provide posthumanist readings of two recent literary works that extrapolate from a liquid modern present, exploring its dystopian dimension and leading towards a posthuman future as critical utopian alternatives. I have chosen two authors and their works that could be argued to assume peripheral and central positions within the spectrum of sf respectively.

On the one end, Margaret Atwood's recently completed MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake [2003], The Year of the Flood [2009], and MaddAddam [2013]) functions as a liminal work on the demarcation line between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction. Atwood herself has been instrumental in the demarcation, insisting on her work being ‘speculative fiction’ rather than ‘science fiction proper’ (‘My Life’ 159). I do not wish to engage in the genre debate and will for the purpose of this study simply repeat contemporary genre theory in that genre status is continuously negotiated by ‘communities of practice’ (Rieder 201) and that large parts of the reading community have deemed the MaddAddam trilogy to be ‘science fiction’ and possibly even ‘biopunk’ (as witnessed in the original inclusion of the first two books in the Wikipedia entry [removed in 2010]).