Laurie Sheck is the author of the new novel Cyborg Fever. Her other books include Island of the Mad. She teaches at the New School, and she lives in New York City.
Q: What inspired you to write Cyborg Fever, and how did you create your character Erwin?
A: For each of my three novels, I have identified areas of fascination I would like to learn much more about. In my first novel, A Monster’s Notes, I explored Mary Shelley, her cohort, and her novel Frankenstein; for my second novel I learned a great deal about Dostoevsky and the Venetian plague; and for this one I learned a lot about astrophysics, black holes, etc.
I found the 20th century physicists to be fascinating people who often said very striking and memorable things. I quote a lot of them in the book.
As for Erwin, I needed a character who was very vulnerable and very smart. I felt my way into him.
Q: What do you think the book says about the role of AI in our lives today?
A: We are denizens of the Information Age. In 1990 there were 2.8 internet users worldwide, in 2023 there were 5.4 billion. Our economy is now centered on information technology, which is growing and changing at an enormous rate. It is the air we breathe, the sea we swim in.
I wanted my book to explore this reality—its emotional, economic, moral, sociological, political, and other ramifications. I wasn’t looking to come up with answers but to pose salient questions.
I think the book shows various aspects of the experience of living with AI—on the one hand it can bring us close to a wide variety of amazing facts; on the other it can flood us in ways that are numbing and worse.
Like many powerful inventions, it is not just one thing. My characters experience it from many angles. Funes, who is paralyzed, is able to draw the world close by learning about it on his computer; facts companion and soothe him, whereas the Cyborg devolves into an unfeeling information machine.
Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started writing it?
A: Yes and no. I had the image in my head of a character devolving into an unfeeling being made of pure data, a kind of information machine. But when I started the book the Cyborg had not yet come to me, so I didn’t know how that would happen.
I started with the idea of an orphan boy in distress falling into a hallucinatory fever and in those hallucinations being exposed to many astounding facts about the universe—black holes, the births of stars, the planets, even the story of Laika, the first dog to be sent into outer space.
Q: The author Vivian Gornick said of the book, “In this stirring mix of fact and fiction, Laurie Sheck has created a novel of surpassing beauty that enacts a complex and moving investigation into the nature of empathy.” What do you think of that description?
A: I feel honored by it. Empathy is a central concern in the book.
In section 2, the Cyborg recounts his time as an experimental subject in a biomedical laboratory. The aim of the experiment is to rewire his brain to eliminate empathy—if successful such a being would be valuable to the military. The experiment on him fails, and eventually he escapes the lab. He is, in fact, a deeply empathetic soul.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Before I began writing novels I was known solely as a poet, and had published five books of poems. In fact I began my first novel while at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard where I was on a fellowship to finish my fifth book of poems.
Now that this third novel is done I am writing poems again and also feeling my way towards a new novel.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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