BIOPUNK

What It Looks Like

Cyberpunk with one variable swapped: biotechnology takes the place of information technology as the thing that concentrates power.

Neither of these plates was made to disturb anybody. Both were teaching tools. A body opened up and labelled is the oldest image this aesthetic has, and it predates every word in this essay by four centuries.

Anatomie microscopique de la peau, plate 88 ter. Bourgery & Jacob, Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, 1831–54. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0.

What People Remember, and What It Is About

Say "biopunk" and most people picture flesh. Mutants, tanks of organs, machine grafted onto muscle, something wet and wrong.

Now look at what the canonical works are actually about.

Gattaca, 1997 — insurance and hiring. A society sorted by genome into people who may hold jobs and people who may not. No mutation, no monsters, no body horror at all.

The Windup Girl, 2009, widely called the defining novel of the genre — seed patents and calorie monopolies. Biotechnology companies own the food supply, and engineered blights destroy any crop outside the patent system.

BioShock, 2007 — a city that privatised genetic modification, and what happened next.

The subject is ownership. Who holds the patent on a living thing, and what that entitles them to do.

The Durham Ox. John Boultbee, 1802. Public domain.

The Durham Ox is the earliest picture of that idea available. Bred so heavy that its proportions stopped making sense, toured around Britain for paid admission, and painted with the composure of a landowner. Selectively engineered life, exhibited as property, in 1802.

The Reason the Picture Drifted

Ownership has no appearance. You cannot photograph a patent, and you cannot photograph a genome.

Mutation photographs beautifully.

So the visual channel kept the one symptom that could be rendered and dropped the argument. One published account of the genre puts the audience problem directly: where cyberpunk romanticises its implants, biopunk confronts a reader's subconscious fears — which is why there are cyberpunk clothes and no biopunk clothes. Nobody wants to decorate themselves with it.

The flea. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, 1665. Public domain.

Hooke's flea is the moment the scale becomes visible at all. In 1665 he put a flea under a lens and drew it as an armoured machine, jointed and plated. Everything this genre worries about happens at a size that needs an instrument before it can be argued about.

It Has No Native Look

Because the technology is invisible, each work borrows the look of whatever world hosts it.

Gattaca — minimal mid-century modernism, cold and immaculate.

BioShock — Art Deco, underwater, 1960.

The Windup Girl — twenty-third century Bangkok, tropical, agrarian, run on calories.

Cronenberg, and the game Scorn — clinical body horror.

Four canonical works with nothing visual in common. That is the diagnosis, and it also explains a filing oddity: BioShock is the title most people name first, and it is routinely catalogued as dieselpunk, because its setting and technology are more diesel than bio. Both filings are correct. Biopunk is a plot, and dieselpunk is a surface.

Where the Rules Came From

The seven characters in Mendel's pea experiments, 1856–63. Diagram, CC0.

Between 1856 and 1863 an Augustinian friar named Gregor Mendel grew somewhere near thirty thousand pea plants in a monastery garden and tracked seven either-or traits through their generations: round seed or wrinkled, yellow or green, tall stem or short.

What he produced was the first evidence that inheritance is discrete — that it moves in units, and that the units can be predicted. Everything the genre is about, from designer children to patented seed, requires that one fact.

His paper was published in 1866 and read by almost nobody for thirty-four years.

The Three Questions

The shape is cyberpunk's exactly. Only the hardware changed.

The Only One With Living Members

Every other world of this kind names a fiction. This one also names a job.

In 2011 Penguin published Marcus Wohlsen's Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life, reporting on people who use the word about themselves: a pair who started a cancer drug company in their kitchen, a team who built an open-source DNA copier, a woman who developed a genetic test for a hereditary disease in her own apartment.

Wohlsen describes their idealism as borrowed from open-source software, artisanal food, internet startups and the Peace Corps. Their stated goal is to open-source the basic code of life.

So the real biopunks are the exact opposite of the popular image. The picture is horror; the people are open-source campaigners. Both follow from the same premise, because if the genre's enemy is the patent, then the answer to it is publication.