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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.In his book Biopunk Dystopia:  Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, published in 2017 by Liverpool University Press, Lars Schmeink 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. Schmeink argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of “biopunk”, a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s.Lars Schmeink is Professor of Media Studies at the Institut für Kultur- und Medienmanagement of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg and the editor of Collision of Realities: Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe (De Gruyter, 2012).This post is based on the materials from the Open Research Library site and an item from the No Shelf Required blog.ReferenceSchmeink, L. (2017). Biopunk Dystopias. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Retrieved February 13, 2020, from https://openresearchlibrary.org