Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction

Sherryl Vint

Oct 2021 · Cambridge University Press

About this eBook

Drawing on a rich array of twenty-first-century speculative fiction, this book demonstrates how the commodification of life through biotechnology has far-reaching implications for how we think of personhood, agency, and value. Sherryl Vint argues that neoliberalism is reinventing life under biocapital. She offers new biopolitical figurations that can help theoretically grasp and politically respond to a distinctive twenty-first-century biopolitics. This book theorizes how biotechnology intervenes in the very processes of biological function, reshaping life itself to serve economic ends. Linking fictional texts with material examples, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction shows how these practices are linked to new modes of exploitative economic relations that cannot be redressed by human rights. It concludes with a posthumanist reframing of the value of life that grounds itself elsewhere than in capitalist logics, a vision that, in a Covid age, might become fundamental to a new politics of ecological relations.

About the author

Sherryl Vint is a professor at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on speculative fiction and posthumanism, including Science Fiction (2021) for MIT's Essential Knowledge series, and the edited collection After the Human (2021). She is a recipient of the SFRA's Lifetime Achievement Award.