We tend to associated science fiction with space ships, time travel, robots, that sort of thing. But biotech and bioengineering are fair game as well. Creepier? Most definitely. Here’s a lsit of the some of the best science fiction books on the subject of biotech, from Will Canine:
The three books [from Margaret Atwood] Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, contain a hilarious and heart-wrenching biotech apocalypse. Post- climate catastrophe, the bleak world built here is run by CorpsSecCorps and walled-off autonomous bio-pharma and big media trans-national corporations. It is a tale of hubris and failure, but also the inexorability of hope and life regenerating after crisis.
Sitting in 2021, some of the predictive calls she made writing this starting in 2005 were 10/10 crystal ball moments. “Pigoons” is happening already, with a few companies showing successful product launches transplanting vital organs from GMO pigs into humans. “Chickie nubbins” represent lab-grown meat, aka cell agriculture, which has taken over mindshare in techno-optimists’ minds much as Atwood predicted. And DIY, extra-organizational activists around the world are surging together to catalog the genetics of species going extinct faster than we can list them. Yet the tools of creating biotech utopia are focused instead on prolonging the cosmetic shelf-life of the wealthy, curing only diseases of narcissism.
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