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. The analysis deals with dystopian science fiction artifacts of different media from the year 2000 onwards that project a posthuman intervention into contemporary socio-political discourse based in liquid modernity in the cultural formation of biopunk. 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 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. Through this analysis, the dissertation proposes there is much to be gained by considering how this playful movement offers augmented perspective of earlier work on urban circulation, specifically within Edinburgh, and highlights the importance of a critique of play and games within Cultural Studies. This dissertation investigates how Edinburgh – whilst still in use by the general public – is co-opted by the game to host a scenario in which participants move through the city in a different, more playful, method than everyday motion in an urban setting. These varied theorists are drawn into this dissertation on playful movement in the city, incorporating case studies of the use of the City of Edinburgh in 20 for the “zombie chase game” 2.8 Hours Later. Anthropologists, sociologists and cultural critics have considered the value and importance of play – Johann Huizinga and Roger Caillois foremost, but also more recently Mary Flanagan and Brian Sutton-Smith, and urban theorists such as Quentin Stevens look at architecture as being playful and lending a “ludic” quality to city space.
Previous cultural theorists and philosophers who considered urban movement – including Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin – studied the city as a site of production and consumption, analysed rhythms of capital and the everyday, and considered dualisms in movement such as structure/freedom and constraint/wandering.
This dissertation considers the use of the city as a site for “playful” movement, and how this form of circulation may yield insight into existing theories around motion within the city.
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