¹ Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 26.

² Asian Development Bank, Asia 2050: Realizing the Asian Century (Singapore: Asian Development Bank, 2011), 1, 8, 12–13.

³ See Jini Kim Watson, The New Asian City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Simpson, Tim, “Scintillant Cities: Glass Architecture, Finance Capital, and the Fictions of Macau's Enclave Urbanism,” Theory Culture & Society, 30, 7–8 (2013), 343–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aihwa Ong and Nancy N. Chen, eds., Asian Biotech (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Aimee Bahng, “The Cruel Optimism of Asian Futurity and the Reparative Practices of Sonny Liew's Malinky Robot,” in Betsy Huang, Greta Niu, and David Roh, eds., Techno-Orientalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 163–79, 163.

⁴ These are terms I borrow from Sarah Franklin and Elizabeth Freeman respectively, and will develop later in the paper. See footnotes 1, 48, 54, and 55.

⁵ Luciano, Dana and Chen, Mel Y., “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?”, Queer Inhumanisms, special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, 2–3 (2015), 182–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). To the extent that Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic recognizes not only the disposability but also the insurability of slaves thrown overboard from the 1781 British slave ship Zong as an early instantiation of the financialization of biomatter, I understand the atomic devastations in the Pacific theater in the mid-twentieth century as a significant turning point that sets up the financial apparatus that would help fund the age of genomic sequencing and genetic engineering.

⁷ Lai, Larissa, “Future Asians: Migrant Speculations, Repressed History & Cyborg Hope,” West Coast Line, 38, 2 (2004), 168–75Google Scholar.

⁸ See Laura Kang, “The Uses of Asianization: Figuring Crises, 1997–98 and 2007–?”, in Paula Chakravartty and Denise da Silva, eds., Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime, special issue of American Quarterly, 64, 3 (2012), 411–36; Christopher Wood, The Bubble Economy: Japan's Extraordinary Speculative Boom of the ’80s and the Dramatic Bust of the ’90s (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992).

⁹ Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of the Emotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 208.

¹⁰ For a range of disciplinary approaches to the cultural studies of finance see Donald A. MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Karin Knorr-Cetina and Alex Preda, The Sociology of Financial Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Aaron Carico and Dara Orenstein, eds., The Fictions of Finance, special issue of Radical History Review, 118 (2014).

¹¹ See the work of Paula E. Stephan, especially How Economics Shapes Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). The tension between basic science and entrepreneurial science as it relates to genomics in particular was the topic of a 2001 special issue of Nature on the Human Genome Project (HGP). The opening editorial, “Human Genomes: Public and Private,” considers the burgeoning commercial sector that is based on genome information publication: Nature, 409, 6822 (Feb. 2001), 745.

¹² Milburn, Colin, “Modifiable Futures: Science Fiction at the Bench,” Isis, 101 (2010), 560–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 568.

¹³ Bruce Sterling defines “slipstream” as a genre related to speculative fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction, in which books that “tend to sarcastically tear at the structure of ‘everyday life’… Slipstream tends, not to ‘create’ new worlds, but to *quote* them, chop them up out of context, and turn them against themselves.” See Sterling, Bruce, “CATSCAN 5: Slipstream,” SF Eye, 5 (July 1989), 1–8Google Scholar, 4; Sterling, “Slipstream 2,” Science Fiction Studies, 38, 1 (March 2011), 6–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002), 70.

¹⁵ Ibid., 85.

¹⁶ Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 185. Gordon's psychoanalytic approach to “ghostly matters” makes for a productive frame through which to read Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the history of the HGP.

¹⁷ Lai, Salt Fish Girl, 85.

¹⁸ Ibid., 69.

¹⁹ Ibid., 160.

²⁰ Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism – An Introduction,” in Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, eds., Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime, special issue of American Quarterly, 64, 3 (2012), 361–85, 369.

²¹ Thanks to Tammy Ho for reminding me of this crucial detail and for offering her own insightful reading of Salt Fish Girl. Tamara Ho, “Larissa Lai's ‘New Cultural Politics of Intimacy’: Animal. Asian. Cyborg,” Speculative Life, special issue of Social Text: Periscope, 4 Jan. 2012, at http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/larissa_lais_new_cultural_politics_of_intimacy_animal_asian_cyborg.

²² I would like to thank Yoo Jung Kim for her excellent spring 2014 undergraduate research paper on this topic for my class, “Science, Fiction, and Empire.”

²³ Cook-Deegan, Robert, “The Alta Summit, December 1984,” Genomics, 5 (1989), 661–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 661. See also Deegan, The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996).

²⁴ Deegan, “The Alta Summit,” 662.

²⁵ “All about the Human Genome Project (HGP),” National Human Genome Research Institute (Web), updated 18 March 2014, accessed 24 June 2014, at www.genome.gov/10001772.

²⁶ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,” presented at Matters of Representation: Feminism, Theory and the Arts conference, University of Buffalo (March–April 2000), 2.

²⁷ Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 49.

²⁸ See Paula E. Stephan, “Human Genomes: Public and Private,” Nature, special issue on the HGP, 409, 6822 (15 Feb. 2001), 745. Stephan's work documents this shift in the years immediately following World War II. See also Slaughter, Sheila, “Beyond Basic Science: Research University Presidents' Narratives of Science Policy,” Science, Technology, & Human Values, 18, 3 (1993), 278–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Slaughter argues that during this period, the relation of university science to government and to industry also changed markedly, as part of an increasingly ubiquitous model of “academic capitalism.” Ibid., 278.

²⁹ Milburn, “Modifiable Futures,” 568.

³⁰ Green, Eric D., Guyer, Mark S., and National Human Genome Research Institute, “Charting a Course for Genomic Medicine from Base Pairs to Bedside,” Nature, 470, 7333 (10 Feb. 2011), 204–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 204.

³¹ Ibid., 207.

³² Ibid., 211.

³³ Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 45.

³⁴ Green, Guyer, and NHGRI, 212.

³⁵ Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 131.

³⁶ Stephan, Paula E. and Levin, Sharon G., “Property Rights and Entrepreneurship in Science,” Small Business Economics, 8 (1996), 177–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 181.

³⁷ Cooper, 130.

³⁸ Cooper, 140 (emphasis in original).

³⁹ Cooper, 141. See also Kaushik Sunder Rajan, ed., Lively Captial: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). In his introduction, Sunder Rajan highlights “the convergence of the life sciences with systems and regimes of capital. In that register, the title refers concretely to the ways in which the life sciences are increasingly incorporated into market regimes. This is an institutional movement, away from the university and toward the market, which has been particularly marked in the American context since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has, in the process, seen the university itself become a more entrepreneurial institutional space, one that explicitly encourages the commercialization of ‘basic’ research conducted within its confines.” Ibid., 2. Whereas Sunder Rajan attends to the commercialization of university research and the collusion between market and university, Cooper, 142, focuses even more intently on the “tight institutional alliances between the arts of speculative promise and risk-taking and the actual cultures of life science experimentation.”

⁴⁰ Eugene Thacker, “Biocolonialism, Genomics, and the Databasing of the Population,” in Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 132–72.

⁴¹ Judith Roof, The Poetics of DNA (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 28. See also Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

⁴² Roof, 3.

⁴³ Green, Guyer, and NHGRI, 204.

⁴⁴ Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Allesandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 252.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 253.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 254.

⁴⁷ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

⁴⁸ Franklin, Dolly Mixtures, 29–30. Franklin approaches the concept of genetic drag through the iconic example of Dolly the cloned sheep – one of the named influences of Salt Fish Girl. Franklin situates Dolly's circulation as a narrative and phenomenon within a history of cloning that is oddly textured with insecurities about genealogical normativity. The cloning technology that produced Dolly performed “genetic drag” insofar as it “enabled adult DNA to ‘pass’ as newly youthful.” Dolly, according to Franklin, reads as biologically queer and disruptive of the dividing line between animal and human.

⁴⁹ Lai, “Future Asians,” 171.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 174.

⁵¹ Ibid., 173, 174.

⁵² Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933), Series Reprints of Scarce Tracts in Economic and Political Science, 16. Written in 1917 in the midst of the first major global crisis of the twentieth century, Knight's Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit asserts that uncertainty is too quickly instrumentalized in risk calculations. He suggests that a “true uncertainty” exists insofar as there can be an uncertainty that is never fully captured or completely capitalized by the speculative calculus that tries to make it profitable.

⁵³ Dan Hurley, “Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes,” Discover: Science for the Curious (Web), May 2013 at http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes, accessed 20 June 2014.

⁵⁴ Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 64, original emphasis.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 65.

⁵⁶ As time-traveling snake goddess, Nu Wa instantiates what Karen Barad calls “the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements.” By cogitating on an electron's “quantum leap,” which is not a “leap” at all but a discontinuous transgression of linear movement, Barad theorizes space–time as diffracted, and multiply threaded through a “nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering.” See Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Disc/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida Today, 3, 2 (2010), 240–68, 241. Like Larissa Lai, Barad uses the atomic bomb as a site of exploding preconceived formulations of human experience.

⁵⁷ “Key Facts,” Asian Development Bank (Web), at www.adb.org/about/key-facts, accessed 14 June 2014.

⁵⁸ Lai, Salt Fish Girl, 29.

⁵⁹ Paul Lai reads the novel's theme of smelliness (recall that one of the indicators for dreaming sickness is a pungent odor) as the text's critique of punishing difference, especially nonnormative reproduction. Lai's essay “Stinky Bodies” argues, “The novel's focus on stinky bodies emphasizes the materiality and biology that undergird social relations even as biotechnological control promises a transcendence of the biological.” See Paul Lai, “Stinky Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl,” in Stephen Sohn, ed., Alien/Asian, special issue of MELUS, 33, 4 (2008), 167–87, 177, 167.

⁶⁰ Lai, Salt Fish Girl, 65.

⁶¹ Ibid., 64.

⁶² Ibid., 64.

⁶³ Ibid., 15.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 14.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 32.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 18.

⁶⁷ Cooper, Life as Surplus, 99.

⁶⁸ Jackie Stacey, “Genetic Impersonation and the Improvisation of Kinship: Gattaca's Queer Visions,” in Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 113–36.

⁶⁹ Lai, Salt Fish Girl, 259.

⁷⁰ In the longer version of this paper, I argue that Salt Fish Girl performs a kind of “literary drag,” as the novel alludes to and revises several literary antecedents, including Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.