The Evolved, The Enhanced, The Engineered

By angerbda

Bugs are everywhere. Burrowed in the ground and hiding in your ceiling. Eating the leaves of your trees and bushes. Filling the screen of your device in your time of gaming entertainment...

Bugpunk is one of the derived punk subgenre from Cyberpunk. Compared to some "punks" that follow the way of the hard science and the anti-establishment opposition, Bugpunk is closer to the Biopunk approach of evolution.

In the entertainment industry, through literature or comics, big screen or TV, gaming implements, Bugpunk has built its nest in the science fiction sphere.

We could classify the bug evolution at the core of the punk subgenre into three categories:

the evolved bug,

the enhanced bug,

the engineered bug.

From those three, the evolved bug species roaming the vast expanse of the Universe is most likely what comes to mind when thinking of Bugpunk. Let's just throw some titles, and everyone will node at one or another of those...

On the reading side, we have some classics such as Anne McCaffrey's "The Tower and the Hive" series and Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game". In the former the Hivers, a insect-like life form spreads all over the galaxy to find new worlds where colonies could settle and feed, until the world is destroyed and they need to find a new one. In the latter, Earth forces battle with the Formics to control new worlds resulting in the annihilation of the Formics.

Many will also remember the hordes of insect invaders in Robert A. Heinley's "Starship Troopers" and the movie adaptation where evolved giant arachnids destroyed everything on sight.

(Source: Starship Troopers 3010, https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/apeorzombie/starship-troops-3010 - Artist: ApeorZombie)

The common point of the bugs in either McCaffrey, Card or Heinley stories is the classic structure of the insect-like alien species organised around a queen and sharing a mind link.

Though widely seen, the concept of critters bent on annihilating all we know and love starts to leave room for some form of fun and sympathetic evolved bug-like lifeforms...

It is on the gaming side that we find those lighter and funnier, adventure-seeker bugs coexisting with dreadful killer-bugs like in the Nintendo's Metroid game series.

Hollow Knight: Silksing

https://youtu.be/yQxwbZsL14Y

Bugsnax

https://youtu.be/XT4RdV9F8HA

Though those evolved bugs from somewhere beyond the stars are a common ground for a Bugpunk plot, it is rare that we know the origin of these species.

Yū Sasuga gives us an insight on an evolved species of cockroaches in his manga "TerraFormars" illustrated by Kenichi Tachibana. To counter overpopulation on Earth, Mars has been terraformed. It took five centuries and a biological approach to terraforming to complete the transformation, the slow process involving seeding Mars with a modified algae and cockroaches.

The result five hundred years later is a new species of sentient bipedal cockroaches... And everyone knows cockroaches eat everything!

(Source: https://terraformars.fandom.com/wiki/Terraformar?file=Terraformar_Key_Visual.jpg - Artist: Kenichi Tachibana)

In Yū Sasuga's manga, we can also find the second aspect of the Bugpunk lore: the human enhanced with bug DNA. The enhancement in this scenario is engineered, thus creating super-soldiers to fight the Terraformars, humanoid cockroaches.

(Source: https://www.animeclick.it/images/Anime_big/TerraFormarsBugs22599/TerraFormarsBugs2259948.jpg )

Human modified with bug DNA is also a classic, if not willingly, is not uncommon either. The man bitten by a spider becoming a superhero first appeared in an anthology comic book in 1962.

(Source: https://freepngimg.com/thumb/spiderman/21541-9-spider-man-photo.png )

In Peter Parker's case, the accident that made him transform into Spiderman did not end too badly. An experimentation with teleportation turned into a more dramatic situation for Andre Delambre in 1958 "The Fly". What could go wrong when a fly enters the teleporter with a man?

(Source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051622/mediaviewer/rm2054270465/ )

The occasional scientific accident or the bio engineering path created enhanced human. There is another sort of engineering bug-like form stemming from a more hard-tech branch. They could be considered machines. Evolved machines behaving like they were part of an insect community, sharing a collective mind. As any insects, their primal objectives is to reproduce and survive. To do so, as they are not biological-life-based, they replicate.

Such Replicator can be encountered in an Asgard spaceship in the Stargate universe.

(Source: http://alancastillo.com/sitebuilder/images/repsg3-964x557.jpg )

Nanobots assembling in many ways to create destructive machines, the Replicators are sentient pieces of technology.

Similar to the Replicator, the bugs in Steven Gould's "7th Sigma" are self-replicating, solar-powered, metal-eating machines.

To complete on the bug-like machine-based life form, evolved engineering pieces of metal, consuming metal and replicating, meet the K'ethic. In bloodsword's "Risen" series. Like the invader-type bug species in McCaffrey's or Heinley's stories, the K'ethic are out there to expand to new worlds, conquer and consume.

(https://www.wattpad.com/story/2087173-risen)

Being evolved, enhanced or engineered, you will find your pick of bug. Many more authors have explored the universe of the Biopunk via one of those three directions. As we read, watch or play, we just enjoy the fiction within the science.

Maybe thinking back to those stories we all know that fit the Bugpunk subgenre, we can see differently the little critters that more often than less seem to be out there just to bother us in one way or another...