Introduction: Science fiction and biopolitics

The concept of biopolitics emerges from Michel Foucault's work on biopower and his analysis of the increasing turn of governance toward the bodies of citizens since the late seventeenth century. For Foucault, biopower has two interrelated objects of governance: the disciplined body of the individual subject and the managed citizenry, conceived on the aggregate level of the population. In twenty-first-century technoculture, both of these biopolitical objects are thoroughly colonised by subjects which once belonged entirely to the fictional realm. For example, bioethical debates over the status of emergent citizen/subjects, such as embryonic stem cells or 'brain dead' patients, challenge the ideas of what counts as life or death, distinctions once thought to be pragmatically straightforward. At the same time, epidemics and their attendant panics - such as 2005's spread of 'avian flu' and 2008's H1N1, with their images of burning pyres of animals and airports filled with people wearing surgical masks - conflate the management of borders, disease vectors and agriculture trade with speculative fantasies about invader species and zombie plagues. Under biopolitics, life itself becomes the object of political governance, and political governance becomes the practice of steering the biological life of individuals and species. Technoscience, sf speculation and biopolitical practice converge in this context.

We live in an era in which the speculative and the material are so entwined that neither can be understood in isolation. This is true not only in the mundane sense that biotechnological science has advanced to the point that a layperson can no longer distinguish hype from fact, but more importantly in the material sense that our beliefs and assumptions about the biological world and its 'norms' can now be made manifest because biology has become a science of engineering. In Dolly Mixtures, her book on the famous cloned sheep, Sarah Franklin uses the term 'biocultural' to 'emphasise the inseparability of the new biologies from the meaning systems they both reproduce and depend upon, such as beliefs about nature, reproduction, scientific progress, or categories such as gender, sex and species' (3). In a biocultural age, understanding the speculative discourses of biopolitics is imperative, and sf is in a privileged position to help us think through its anxieties and contradictions: the complicated parenting of IVF and other assistive reproductive technologies, including ideas of 'designer' babies, evoked in films such as Splice (Natali Canada/France/US 2009); the fear of pandemics, often conflated with the spectre of bioterrorism to produce narratives about virulent disease and equally treacherous carriers, as in 28 Days Later (Boyle UK 2002); the new economics of patented life forms and privatised food, presented as a nightmare which leads to cannibalism in Pandorum (Alvart Germany/UK 2009). As all aspects of human biological life increasingly fall under government management and control, the external functions of the military and the internal functions of the police converge, and the 'state of exception' (see Agamben) becomes normalised and continual, hyper-security vigilance becomes naturalised 'to ensure that there are no procedural hindrances to state violence if it is deemed necessary' (Gerlach et al. 162-3).

Biopolitics involves a new power over life, and a new relationship between sovereignty and life. While 'the right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live', the new right established with the rise of modern governance is 'the right to make live or to let die' (Foucault Society 241 ). Crucially, there are two aspects to the new exercise of biopower. Not only are certain kinds of lives fostered and shaped through its disciplinary institutions, while others are let expire through neglect or design, but also, and more importantly, this new biopower establishes a logical connection between the making live and letting die that institutes a paradoxical logic. The metaphor of the body politic shifts from taking as its referent the body of the sovereign himself to the aggregate body of the population whose 'health' is now the object of good governance. One of the ways of fostering the 'making live' of this body is by expelling or excising that which is unhealthy. This 'letting die' is integrally bound up with the 'letting live...