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This introductory chapter outlines the theoretical approach with which this volume develops a Marxian, psychoanalytic, and schizoanalytic programme. The foundations for this programme is an overall engagement with the science-fictional thought of Deleuze, Baudrillard, and other noted intellectuals who have contributed to science fiction (SF) studies, and the grounds for this engagement is called ‘becoming-Deleuzian’, the transition from late capitalism to biocapitalism, and their cognate expressions, cyberpunk and biopunk. After establishing how Deleuze and Baudrillard will underpin a Marxian analysis of SF, the chapter then goes on to identify the parameters of their contributions to Marxism, and their relationship to SF.

This chapter focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's ‘becoming-animal’. Deleuze and Guattari's animal is one of the specific concepts that attracted Baudrillard's critical attention. His ‘The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses’ developed a sustained critique of their position. Here, the chapter takes Deleuze and Guattari's thesis that there are three animals — Oedipal, State, and demonic; and far from being a general taxonomy, they are ontological categories defined by the intertwinement of desire, technoscientific experimentation, and investments of capital. This chapter thus establishes the organising theme — contagion. In so doing, it seeks to show how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Baudrillard and SF acquire a new relevance in biocapitalism.

This chapter recasts Karel Čapek's 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), as the foundational biopunk text, as it reveals a profound intimacy between capitalism and the life sciences, though the play is better known for introducing the term ‘robot’ into SF (derived from the Czech robotá, meaning hard or enforced labour). The play dramatises the simulacral, autonomised organs of the working class, bodies in pieces that (mis)identify with the specular imago of the productivist ego, only to rebel against their bourgeois human creators. This chapter thus situates R.U.R. within the discourse of biopolitics, and explores how its technoscientific inventions make possible a contagious and revolutionary — though ambivalent in denouement — line of flight, thus making it an antecedent to biocapitalism and the bioeconomy.

This chapter takes up the question of empathy’s intersection with medicine in the era of biocapitalism. The first section, ‘Emotional capital’, considers the concept of emotional capitalism; a culture in which emotional and economic practices mutually shape and constitute each other. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s analysis of ugly feelings, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s representation of narrative voice in Never Let Me Go not as affectless, but as symptomatic of what happens when emotion is placed in the service of the marketplace. The second section, ‘Life stories’, moves on to the question of cloning, asking what kinds of life stories are produced in and through biotechnological interventions and arguing for Ishiguro’s interest in their political, as well as social and ethical, implications. ‘Ishiguro and biopolitics’ addresses the novel’s treatment of the global organ trade, asking how models of flow and exchange affect the capacity to care for others. The final section, ‘Empathy and art’, probes Ishiguro’s critical treatment as art as a vehicle for empathy, arguing that empathy becomes, in his vision, the ultimate realisation of the neoliberal subject.