Toward a Minor Science Fiction: Literature, Science, and the Shock of the Biophysical

Abstract

Following a recent scholarly trend that conceives of science fiction (SF) as a complement to science and technology studies, this essay builds on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature to analyze SF as a mode of biophysical, not just social, experimentation. Minor SF experiments with scientific elements and potentials to embed culture and the human body in unstable biophysical micro-and macro-environments. This approach will be illustrated by analyzing Greg Bear’s novels Blood Music (1985) and Darwin’s Radio (1999) in which humanity undergoes radical transmutations as a result of viral genetic infections.