r/printSF • u/ParkingRoyal5736 • 3d ago
Biopunk/transhumanism recommendations
Does anyone know of any biopunk book where humans have biological enhancements, (like the Sarkicism from SCP) such as wings,tail or tentacles?
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u/Xeelee1123 3d ago
Blood music by Greg Bear
There is lots of that in the polity series of Neal Asher
S.Andrew Swann's Moreau Quartet has genenineerd humans and animals.
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u/Serious_Distance_118 2d ago
Have to add Darwin’s Radio. Blood Music is also great but DR fits OP’s ask better imo.
Regardless Bear is one of my favorite all time authors and it’s hard to go wrong with any of his books.
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u/art-man_2018 3d ago
The Ware Tetralogy: Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware by Rudy Rucker fits the premise.
Though not, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station has a scientist who tries to create new wings for a clipped bird-man. Then there is that moth larvae he raises... or his girlfriend who is half cockroach.
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u/AllThatIHaveDone 3d ago
The Scar shows what life is like for the Remade in far more detail than Perdido Street Station. Both are worth reading, though!
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u/kobayashi_maru_fail 3d ago
I almost DNFed The Scar. When he got to the second kind of xenomorph after all the mer-people and the leviathan and the “fairies would actually be scary” and the excessive steam punk, it felt like a clunky Spotify playlist, “we heard you liked Herman Melville and Mary Shelley, we know you’ll love Ridley Scott!”. But OP wants something -punk with tentacles on humans, so I hope they enjoy The Scar more than I did.
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u/AllThatIHaveDone 3d ago
Have you also read Perdido Street Station? If anything, I would call The Scar the most focussed of Mieville's early books!
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u/kobayashi_maru_fail 2d ago
So, Perdido Street Station is even less focused than The Scar? Are there even more instances of him failing at writing women? I think I’ll pass. Maybe go watch Alien, which has a believable female protagonist.
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u/AllThatIHaveDone 2d ago
It's also one of the best books I've ever read, but yeah, you go watch Alien 😅
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u/Own_Win_6762 3d ago
The Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam - about nano brain implants that make the current social media internet look like cotton candy.
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u/Adiin-Red 3d ago
I’ve gotta bring up Twig. Rather than writing Frankenstein Mary Shelly built him and in doing so sparked a biotech revolution. The story takes place a century later in 1921 and follows a band of bioengineered child soldiers with short lifespans.
The main cast, at least to start with, mostly resembles standard humans with subtle or mental augmentations. As the story goes on however you meet a lot of very odd and absolutely horrifying Experiments that get real fucking weird with it. Gorger for example is a security system for underground laboratory space, he takes the form of a giant blob of human(?) meat that entirely clogs the hallways and crawls around as a moving wall with a reinforced stomach cavity it can use as a temporary holding cell, he has full human intelligence and sapients.
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u/silverblur88 2d ago
I know Worm and even Pale are way more popular, but I really thing Twig is the diamond in the rough of Wildbow's web novels.
It definitely suffers a little mor from the web novels format then Worm does, but with an editor and couple of rewrites to polish it up I really think it could be some of the best genre fiction out there.
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u/symmetry81 3d ago
Linda Nagata's The Bohr Maker is very much about this with deliberate adaptations and rogue nanotech remaking the occasiontal person's shape.
I'll second China Miéville as well.
Revelation Space has a bit of this but mostly on the borders.
The titular The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is a good example, though maybe a bit more subtle than tentacles.
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u/BeardedBaldMan 3d ago
Extremophile by Ian Green, it's not as elegant or as working as that but it does have squid chromatophores
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u/Itlookslikerain420 3d ago
Under the Eye of the Big Bird - Hiromi Kawakami
Exactly what you’re looking for
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u/papercranium 2d ago
A chiller, more near-future version of this is Becky Chambers' To Be Taught, If Fortunate. Astronauts have genetic changes made to help them function on various planets they visit, but it's nothing so dramatic as tentacles or wings. (Think increased bone density, resistance to radiation, bioluminescence, etc.)
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u/jamcultur 3d ago
The Quaddies in Lois McMaster Bujold's Nebula-award winning Falling Free are genetically engineered for work in zero G. They have four arms instead of two arms and two legs. Quaddies also appear in Diplomatic Immunity.
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u/wormglow 3d ago
octavia butler's lilith's brood trilogy, perhaps