biopunk n.

Eva asks what use is cyberpunk in a country where you can’t even find a functioning public telephone box. In an attempt to define a literature more appropriate for her country [sc. Czechoslovakia], she comes up with Biopunk, where mutants, genetic diseases and chimeric organisms take the place of computers, programs and viruses.

Cyberpunk and ‘biopunk’ writers ‘often foreground [the] metafictional potential of paraspace’ by developing an analogy between the author of the text and the author of the cyberspace or paraspace world.

Cyberpunk was about information technology and hacking the datasphere. Its successor, bio punk, is about biotechnology and hacking the gene pool.

Between mail-order synthetic DNA and a kitchen stocked with a thousand dollars of gear, an amateur could create a new lethal pathogen. Given how many people want to harm this country, biopunk is one of the greatest threats facing us.