A Monster’s Notes was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year, and was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC International Fiction Prize. It was chosen by Amazon as one of its “Significant Seven,” and was one of the most widely reviewed books nationally at the time of publication. Kirkus, in a starred review, called it “Utterly astonishing and not to be missed.” Bill Goldstein of NBC Today described it as “An intellectual phantasmagoria, a magnificent book,” and The New Yorker called it “A provocative metaphor for spiritual and technological crisis.”
Sheck’s fiction Island of the Mad received endorsements from Meghan O’Rourke, Lewis Hyde, Junot Diaz, and Jayne Anne Phillips. Her book of poems, The Willow Grove, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In Cyborg Fever, acclaimed writer Laurie Sheck (A Monster’s Notes) brings us a probing and lyrical philosophical fiction in the spirit of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing transhumanism,. Throughout, many strange, surprising facts appear: an artist clones a flower from his DNA and the DNA of a petunia, an astronaut plays golf on the moon, a mathematician on a rest cure re-thinks the life of Shakespeare, and particles and antiparticles collide at lightning speed beneath the green hills of Switzerland and France. Threaded throughout, one question lingers: in this age of AI and genetic engineering, how can we come to know more fully what it means to love and be human among the wonders and destructions we have wrought on Earth.
At the center of the book is the narrator, Erwin, left as an hours’-old infant on the steps of an orphanage where he is named after the renowned physicist Erwin Schrodinger (of the famous Schrodinger’s cat experiment). After a traumatic fall into a year-long fever-dream, he experiences many visions that take him into many areas of inquiry including the nature of the universe, bio-engineering, medical experimentation, cyborgs, AI, space and time, and ultimately teaches him the nature of love.
Along the way he encounters glowing white screens that come alive with facts and stories about such giants of modern science as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the self-taught “father of modern rocket science”. He learns about Laika, the first living being sent into outer space without any prospect of return, and Michael Collins the Apollo 11 Astronaut who traveled alone to the far side of the moon. He develops a friendship with a gentle cyborg who has escaped from a Lab involved in covert medical intervention.
Guided by the Cyborg and a vision of the half-paralyzed boy, Funes (lifted from Borges’s iconic story Funes the Memorias) Erwin experiences the Information Age and the promises of AI in all its beauty and, ultimately, its terror, as he watches the Cyborg he has come to love devolve into an unfeeling information machine.
Throughout, issues of personhood, human attachment, and the dignity of all living beings, pervade Erwin’s thinking and leave him with a larger understanding and appreciation of what it means to love.
Additional information
| Weight | 1.2 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × 9 in |
