Blinded by the Light: Neuropunk, Nihilism, and the ‘Blind Brain’ in R. Scott Bakker’s NeuroPath

Ashley Gordon   According to Darko Suvin’s famous formulation, sf is best understood as the ‘literature of cognitive estrangement’: an estranging literature because it defamiliarizes and reimagines social reality, and a cognitive one because it does so according to the supposed rigour of scientific rationalism (Suvin 1979: 4). Suvin proposes sf as the fictional mode…

The Utopian Potential of Biopunk

Lars Schmeink   The relation of science fiction and the utopian tradition has been a point of some contention among critics of either field—Darko Suvin, for example, famously argued that “utopia is not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction” (61). And Peter Fitting refutes Suvin’s simplistic conflation, instead arguing “that there is…

Young, Punk, and Disabled: New Worlds for Marginalized Bodies

Anelise Farris   The punk portion of cyberpunk indicates that one can expect to encounter marginalized figures who threaten—either aggressively or just by nature of their existence—the social norm. Of course, the referent of punk changes in meaning depending on who is using it and in what context. Oftentimes the label punk is used derogatively…