Biopolítica i nostàlgia posthumana: Estació Boira d’Enric Herce

Abstract

Enric Herce’s Estació Boira (2018) is one of the most outstanding examples of Catalan cyberpunk fiction. It constructs a complicated detective noir plot which unfolds in hyperspace, developing a large cyberpunk repertoire that ranges from all kinds of technological devices and lives — cyborgs, androids — to the perverse interests of multinational companies. The story opens with a policeman, Max, who has to investigate the brutal killing of a man in an orbital station. The murder is suspected to have been committed by someone who has not taken the compulsory medication the government uses to neutralize people’s natural aggressiveness. Drugs, along with technology, are considered a biopolitical procedure to keep the population under control in the near future that the novel depicts. The article focuses on two main topics: on the one hand, the biopolitical control of the human population, and on the other, the protagonist’s nostalgia for some wasted opportunities: a home life, a human past, and what historian Enzo Traverso calls “left-wing melancholia.” By this term, Traverso means the utopian world dreamt by the left but never fully achieved, an egalitarian world where multinational corporations do not monitor democratic governments.