The Bram Stoker– and British Fantasy Award–winning author straddles the line between absurdity and horror in Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep (Morrow, June), in which AI has become integrated into the body of a person in a vegetative state.
Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep feels like a mash-up of Weekend at Bernie’s and Peripheral. How did you come up with the idea, and why did you want to write it now?
The nascent idea came from reading Mary Roach’s nonfiction book Stiff, which discusses the ways dead bodies are used. At one point she talks about transporting bodies via planes, and I thought, I wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where someone’s remote controlling a body. Once I had that conceit, it dovetailed with when I was first learning about large language model generative AI, when I first became part of a class action lawsuit in June of 2023 against OpenAI for copyright infringement. A lot of my anxieties of going through that experience are certainly in the book, but the rest was just following my weird brain where it went.
How did you balance the absurdity with the darker aspects of the story?
I wanted to make the sections from the gamer Julia’s POV feel absurd by making them as real as possible, really getting into the details of what it would be like to actually, physically control another body. The reader stays with Julia through training and trips to the airport. I wanted to highlight that because of how normal and everyday it seems, it’s that much more absurd. Honestly, my biggest worry about this book was, man, I hope no one can actually do this before it gets published.
What does the book say about how we use technology and the limits we should potentially put on that usage?
Part of why things go so horribly wrong is that a lot of the characters are going along to get along, but also feeling that controlling someone this way isn’t right and they shouldn’t be doing it. I try not to be a technophobe. I have a master’s in math, and I find myself arguing against the use of analytics and numbers because—take sports analysis for example—all these people use math to predict game outcomes and say “you can’t argue the math” when it’s all just computer-generated projections. It’s not based on actual events. Part of the book is a little bit of my response to how math illiterates are using math to ruin the world.
How do you write a technology story so that it feels gruesome without becoming horror?
Even though body horror and violence are very different, I’ll put them in the same bucket for now: I want to explore the experience of bystanders and witnesses, because like the victims, they’ll never be the same. I want to root things in reality, so while there’s humor, I definitely want readers to be disturbed. Sometimes you have to go there. You can’t whitewash it.
