Biopunk

Punk Punk with Organic Technology, usually centered around genetic engineering. Expect to see a lot of Organic Technology, sculpted physiques and Petting Zoo People walking around... or hopping, swimming, flying, slithering, etc. Many buildings and ships will be grown, and a general Womb Level aesthetic will usually prevail. Issues examined may include Designer Babies, What Measure Is a Non-Human?, what is human, various aspects of ecology and effects of modified crops/animals/bacteria. And you'll see Aesops (particularly Green Aesops about creating what you can't control), both real and Fantastic.

It should be noted that the line between Bio Punk and Cyberpunk is very thin, and many cyberpunk stories will contain Bio Punk elements.

Examples of Biopunk include:

Anime & Manga

• In Akira they are working on creating telepaths.
• Appears frequently in Tsutomu Nihei's works, most notably Biomega.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: a thorough deconstruction of the Humongous Mecha genre, except all the humongous mecha are actually gigantic aliens.
• The technology of the North in Xam'd: Lost Memories consists of this, including the titular Xamd.
• Gunnm features this in Venus, where everything is biological: furniture, vehicles and clothes. All of them are genetically enginereed, and based on the human DNA.
• Red Line features this when we are introduced to Roboworld, many of it's weapons feature Organic Technology
• Pokémon the First Movie revolves around the creation of Mewtwo, an artificial Pokemon created by reverse-engineering the Legendary Pokemon Mew. It doesn't turn out well; his story provides the page quote for Gone Horribly Right.

"We dreamed of creating the world's strongest Pokémon... and we succeeded."

• In the Suzumiya Haruhi universe, Asahina implies that future technology will evolve along these lines.
• Guilty Crown has shades of this.

Comics

• The comic book series Elephantmen deals with human-animal hybrids created in a war between Africa and China, and their struggle to reintegrate into society being essentially former child soldiers.
• The X-Men series and its spinoffs trade pretty heavily in biopunk themes.
• Finder fits into this very well, being set in an After the End scenario where a biotech-based civilisation collapsed, but many of its products, being self-reproducing living things, are still around.

Film

• Much of David Cronenberg's work, particularly:
  • Shivers, where a scientist accidentally creates a sexually-transmitted Puppeteer Parasite, causing in turn a Zombie Apocalypse of rape zombies.
  • Rabid, where an experimental skin graft creates a sort of Bio Punk vampire, whose victims all become rabid zombies and attack Montreal.
  • The Brood, where a revolutionary psychiatric method results in hideous bodily mutations.
  • Scanners, where a pharmacological error creates a Bizarre Baby Boom of socially-maladjusted, creepy psychics.
  • Videodrome, where warring ideologies use communications technology to mutate viewers into monstrous pawns.
  • Naked Lunch is Bio Punk via The Beat Generation, with sentient typewriters, giant bugs, and monsters who give you tremendous creativity in exchange for blowjobs.
  • eXistenZ, where genetically-engined amphibians are used to create Organic Technology video game hardware.
  • The Fly, where a failed teleportation experiment fuses Jeff Goldblum and... well, a fly.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera plays this with a healthy helping of Cyberpunk and Gorn.
• Aeon Flux (based on the animated show)
• Gattaca
• The Island
• Splice

Literature

• Monster Blood Tattoo seems to cross this genre with Steampunk and a healthy dose of Nightmare Fuel.
• Night's Dawn, a trilogy of well-researched Space Opera novels by Peter F. Hamilton.
• In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, a sci-fi novel by S.M. Stirling set on John Carter of Mars-type world made plausible with Bio Punk technology given to the Martians by Ancient Astronauts.
• Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris stories, especially the newest novel Finch are Urban Fantasy Bio Punk, or perhaps Spore Punk, with the Graycaps' fungus-based high technology that almost passes for magic, as far as the humans are concerned.
  • Hell, in Finch we even get fungus-cyborgs in the form of the Partials.
• China Mieville's Bas-Lag Cycle, though closer to Dungeon Punk, has elements of this with the ReMade: bio-thaumaturges can warp flesh, bone and biology to heal, remake a being as something new, or (far, far more often) to punish.
• The books Oryx and Crake and The Dry Flood by Margaret Atwood are set in the near future, and features many many bio-engineered animals, most notably pigs who can grow human organs for use in transplants.
• The Maximum Ride series skirt this genre, with the protagonists being genetically engineered bird people that were created by immoral scientists in order to find the secrets of immortality.
• S. Andrew Swann's Moreau Series is a perfect example. The protagonist is Nohar Rajasthan; a Half Tiger/Half Human Private Investigator in a world where hybrid "Moreaus" (As in "Island of Dr. Moreau") are confined to ghettos as second class citizens. The series also has genetically improved humans, called "Franks" as in Frankenstein, and aliens.
• Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, along with the attendant novels in the trilogy.
• The 'Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld has fabricated beasties created after Darwin discovered the "chains of life". Also uses Lego Genetics.
• The foundations of biopunk were arguably laid down as early as 1818, with the release of Shelley's Frankenstein—which means that biopunk was among the first science fiction ever published.
  • Another proto-biopunk tale that significantly predates the discovery of DNA is The Island of Dr. Moreau.
  • Also Karl Capek's Rossums Universal Robots.
• The West of Eden series by Harry Harrison is set in an Alternate History where dinosaurs never went extinct and the Earth is dominated by the reptilian Yilanè who use specially bred creatures as everything from microscopes to submarines.

Live Action TV

• Dollhouse is all about messing with the human brain.
• Farscape features heaps of organic technology (from the Translator Microbes to the Living Ships), and quite a few plots revolve around genetic manipulation.

Tabletop Games

• The Lords of Madness source book includes a "Fleshwarper" prestige class, designed for creating this sort of thing in a Heroic Fantasy setting.
• Shadowrun offers Bioware, genetically modified cultured tissue that can be implanted in characters to provide many of the same benefits of the more traditional Cyberware.
• The GURPS supplement "Bio-Tech" is all about Biopunk.
• Eclipse Phase is Post Cyber Punk, but most of the modifications available are biological in nature, and bio-morphs (bodies which are fundamentally organic—but still often weird) are culturally preferred over Synth-Morphs (robot bodies—derogatorily called the "Clanking Masses") or Pods (half-synth, half-biological bodies, the name comes from the derogatory "Pod-People," a riff on how the biological parts of the bodies are grown). For an example of the sort of bio-mods you can get in this game, see the Sex Switch—which switches your sex at will—or the Skinflex—which allows you to make major cosmetic alterations to yourself in around ten minutes.
  • Also, the bio-engineered space-whales that live in the corona of the sun.
• Mortasheen combines this with Mons.

Theater

• Rossum's Universal Robots by Karl Capek. The titular robots are not mechanical but artificially created organic beings who rebel against their master, making this trope Older Than Television.

Video Games

• BioShock (series) combines Bio Punk with Dieselpunk.
• The Resident Evil series.
• Ciem 2 combines Bio Punk with Cyberpunk and Spy Punk. And a sprinkling of The War on Terror just for the heck of it. So in some chapters, Dirbine feels like a (mutable) Crapsack Town.
  • There are ships, airplanes, cars and so on, but there seems to be not a single weapon.
• Final Fantasy VII has numerous examples of bioengineered Super Soldiers.
• Escape Velocity's third part feature the human race of the Polaris, who grow star ships and space stations of organic material.
• Evolva gives this feeling.
• Fallout has a lot of major plot built around this trope, with the Super Mutants of the series being the result of this trope being experimented with Pre-War, and we get to see the results of that in the games themselves, and the genetic engineering elements become major plot plots in the first three games of the series.

Western Animation

• Aeon Flux inhabits a world where self-modification is the new makeup.

Real Life

• Not really a huge concern as of yet, but western cultures are well on the precipice of this being an actual thing.
  • Already, cloning is being carried out with animals on small levels, and plastic surgery does touch on some of this.
  • Looking forward, nanotechnology has gotten a huge boost by integrating with microscopic organisms, and there have been other breakthroughs, like a prototypical memory storage device utilizing salmon DNA.
• One can say it is Older Than Dirt because agriculture uses artificial species. This is especially true for modern day agriculture.
• Today a set of substances (insulin for example) are fabricated using genetically engineered organisms, usually bacterias.