Focused on selected texts by Paolo Bacigalupi, this book explores science fiction as a platform for activist interventions. It discusses genealogical debates, genre conventions of cyberpunk and biopunk, cognitive estrangement, metaphoric strategies and metonymic tactics, and analyses Bacigalupi’s texts in the context of ecocriticism.

This book explores literary techniques that allow science fiction literature to be a platform for activist interventions. The focus is on the body and food as storyworld existents in selected texts by Paolo Bacigalupi, whose writing is directed towards raising awareness of the environmental crisis. The book opens with a discussion of the position of science fiction as popular literature, genealogical debates, genre conventions of cyberpunk and biopunk, cognitive estrangement, metaphoric strategies and metonymic tactics. Then, it undertakes an analysis of Bacigalupi’s texts (The Windup Girl, «Small Offerings», and «Fluted Girl», among others) in the context of such ecocritical concepts as hyperexuberance, Capitalocene, and the temporal dimension of the environmental catastrophe.