Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction

Book excerpt: "This book demonstrates how speculative fiction elucidates the ways the regime of epivitality enables the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital. At the same time, however, the fictions I analyze also provide imaginative resources to counteract this regime's biopolitical sorting of life into valued and disposable configurations. The importance of articulating a liveable life outside of this logic is why this book is also a project of posthuman ethics. New biotechnological entities such as GMO animals created as research tools or immortal cell lines derived from human bodies are key exemplars of what I argue is the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital. Yet, as the chapters in this book will theorize, this real subsumption of life is pervasive and not simply embodied in these innovative products of biotechnology. In industries such as cryonics, IVF and surrogacy services, transplantation and other biological harvesting practices, synthetic biology, and clinical labor, subjects and objects, organic and manufactured beings, persons and things blur into one another as biology becomes caught up in projects of bioeconomic innovation, and as capital becomes interested in humans less for their capacity to provide labor-power and more for their capacity as biological entities"--