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 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 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 Cyberpunk and Visual Culture written by Graham Murphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the expansive mediascape of the 1980s and 1990s, cyberpunk’s aesthetics took firm root, relying heavily on visual motifs for its near-future splendor saturated in media technologies, both real and fictitious. As today’s realities look increasingly like the futures forecast in science fiction, cyberpunk speaks to our contemporary moment and as a cultural formation dominates our 21st century techno-digital landscapes. The 15 essays gathered in this volume engage the social and cultural changes that define and address the visual language and aesthetic repertoire of cyberpunk – from cybernetic organisms to light, energy, and data flows, from video screens to cityscapes, from the vibrant energy of today’s video games to the visual hues of comic book panels, and more. Cyberpunk and Visual Culture provides critical analysis, close readings, and aesthetic interpretations of exactly those visual elements that define cyberpunk today, moving beyond the limitations of merely printed text to also focus on the meaningfulness of images, forms, and compositions that are the heart and lifeblood of cyberpunk graphic novels, films, television shows, and video games.
Download or read book Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture written by Anna McFarlane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of engaging essays on some of the most significant figures in cyberpunk culture, this outstanding guide charts the rich and varied landscape of cyberpunk from the 1970s to present day. The collection features key figures from a variety of disciplines, from novelists, critical and cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars, to filmmakers, comic book artists, game creators, and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include: J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, Charlie Brooker, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Donna J. Haraway, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Annalee Newitz, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Sadie Plant, Mike Pondsmith, Ridley Scott, Bruce Sterling, and the Wachowskis. The editors also include an afterword of ‘Honorable Mentions’ to highlight additional figures and groups of note that have played a role in shaping cyberpunk. This accessible guide will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, film studies, literature, media studies, as well as anyone with an interest in cyberpunk culture and science fiction.
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 UnWholly written by Neal Shusterman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thanks to Connor, Lev, and Risa, and their high-profile revolt at Happy Jack Harvest Camp, people can no longer turn a blind eye to unwinding. Ridding society of troublesome teens and, in the same stroke, providing much-needed tissues for transplant might be convenient, but its morality has finally been brought into question. However, unwinding has become big business, and there are powerful political and corporate interests that want to see it not only continue, but expand, allowing the unwinding of prisoners and the impoverished. Cam is a teen who does not exist. He is made entirely out of the parts of other unwinds. Cam, a 21st century Frankenstein, struggles with a search for identity and meaning, as well as the concept of his own soul, if indeed a rewound being can have one. When a sadistic bounty hunter who takes "trophies" from the unwinds he captures starts to pursue Connor, Risa and Lev, Cam finds his fate inextricably bound with theirs"--
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture written by Anna McFarlane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this companion, an international range of contributors examine the cultural formation of cyberpunk from micro-level analyses of example texts to macro-level debates of movements, providing readers with snapshots of cyberpunk culture and also cyberpunk as culture. With technology seamlessly integrated into our lives and our selves, and social systems veering towards globalization and corporatization, cyberpunk has become a ubiquitous cultural formation that dominates our twenty-first century techno-digital landscapes. The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture traces cyberpunk through its historical developments as a literary science fiction form to its spread into other media such as comics, film, television, and video games. Moreover, seeing cyberpunk as a general cultural practice, the Companion provides insights into photography, music, fashion, and activism. Cyberpunk, as the chapters presented here argue, is integrated with other critical theoretical tenets of our times, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, animality, and empire. And lastly, cyberpunk is a vehicle that lends itself to the rise of new futurisms, occupying a variety of positions in our regionally diverse reality and thus linking, as much as differentiating, our perspectives on a globalized technoscientific world. With original entries that engage cyberpunk’s diverse ‘angles’ and its proliferation in our life worlds, this critical reference will be of significant interest to humanities students and scholars of media, cultural studies, literature, and beyond.
Download or read book Ribofunk written by Paul Di Filippo and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackling genetic engineering, “Di Filippo’s effervescent prose can provoke both hilarity and haunting reflections on our species’ possible fate” (Publishers Weekly). Ribofunk contains eleven masterful and surprising works of imagination. In all of them, biology is the science that drives the engine of life and of story: the Protein Police patrol for renegade gene‐splicers; part‐human sea creatures live in the Great Lakes and clean up toxic spills; a river has become sentient; there is a bodyguard who is part wolverine and a thrill‐seeker climbs a skyscraper and gets stuck, literally.
Download or read book The Windup Girl written by Paolo Bacigalupi and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko... Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe. What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?
Download or read book Red Rising written by Pierce Brown and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pierce Brown’s relentlessly entertaining debut channels the excitement of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. “Red Rising ascends above a crowded dystopian field.”—USA Today ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness “I live for the dream that my children will be born free,” she says. “That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them.” “I live for you,” I say sadly. Eo kisses my cheek. “Then you must live for more.” Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he toils willingly, trusting that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class. Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity’s overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society’s ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies . . . even if it means he has to become one of them to do so. Praise for Red Rising “[A] spectacular adventure . . . one heart-pounding ride . . . Pierce Brown’s dizzyingly good debut novel evokes The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and Ender’s Game. . . . [Red Rising] has everything it needs to become meteoric.”—Entertainment Weekly “Ender, Katniss, and now Darrow.”—Scott Sigler “Red Rising is a sophisticated vision. . . . Brown will find a devoted audience.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch Don’t miss any of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Saga: RED RISING • GOLDEN SON • MORNING STAR • IRON GOLD • DARK AGE • LIGHT BRINGER
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 Tool of War written by Paolo Bacigalupi and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a dark future devastated by climate change, Tool of War is the third book in a major adventure series by a bestselling and award-winning science fiction author and starring the most provocative character from the acclaimed novels Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. In this gripping, eerily prescient sci-fi thriller that Kirkus described as "masterful," Tool--a half-man/half-beast designed for combat--proves himself capable of so much more than his creators had ever dreamed. He has gone rogue from his pack of bioengineered "augments" and emerged a victorious leader of a pack of human soldier boys. But he is hunted relentlessly by someone determined to destroy him, who knows an alarming secret: Tool has found the way to resist his genetically ingrained impulses of submission and loyalty toward his masters... The time is coming when Tool will embark on an all-out war against those who have enslaved him. From one of science fiction's undisputed masters comes a riveting and all-too-timely page-turner that explores the intricate relationships connecting hunter and prey, master and enslaved, human and monster. "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
Download or read book City of Strangers written by Andrew Gardner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In City of Strangers, Andrew M. Gardner explores the everyday experiences of workers from India who have migrated to the Bahrain and the sponsorship system, the kafala, under which they labor and upon which they depend for continued employment.
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.
Download or read book Graphic Narratives about South Asia and South Asian America written by Kavita Daiya and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the field of Comics Studies in South Asia, illuminating an art form in which there has been a much-documented explosion of recent interest. A diverse group of scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America examine aesthetics, politics, and ideology in sequential art about South Asia and South Asian America. The book features contributions which address gender violence; authoritarian politics; caste discrimination; environmentalism; racism; and urban street art, amongst others. The unique interdisciplinary span of the volume considers mass popular comic books as well as the graphic novel. This edited volume would be of interest to those studying the influence of graphic novels, graphic narratives, and comic books in South Asia, as well as researchers interested in what these forms might have to say about important issues in society. This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Review journal.
