DEAD BUT DREAMING OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, by Paul Tremblay
“Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep,” Paul Tremblay’s 12th book, is a difficult novel to review. On the surface, it’s a straightforward science fiction setup: Julia, an aimless 20-something gamer, is recruited by her semi-estranged mother, an executive for a massive tech conglomerate called Decillion, for a very secret, very lucrative short-term job. All she has to do is escort a man across the country and she’ll receive a life-changing payout. The catch? The man, whom Julia nicknames “Bernie” for imminently obvious reasons, is brain-dead, and his body is being powered by experimental implanted A.I. technology. Julia’s role is to remote-control Bernie through the flow of commercial air travel undetected, serving as bodyguard and driver as well as proof-of-concept tester for Decillion’s investors.
Julia feels morally queasy about the gig from the moment she learns what it entails. The larger implications of the technology are horrifying, but more immediately, she can’t stop seeing the human being Bernie was, or is (even as she can’t help pointing out the parallels to “Weekend at Bernie’s”). Though he ostensibly consented to becoming a test subject while he was still in possession of his faculties, she can’t shake the wrongness of it all.
And Bernie is, of course, not actually totally gone, whatever the Decillion scientists say. In alternating second-person chapters, the reader is immersed in a hallucinatory, ever-morphing mental limbo populated by shadows, grotesqueries and “the clicks,” mysterious entities exerting an unsettling control over the landscape. What remains of Bernie’s consciousness lingers here, mostly divorced from his memories and personality, but cogent enough to know that he’s under someone else’s control. As Bernie’s physical body is piloted through the real world, his mind undertakes a nightmarish fun house mirror version of the same journey.
To delve much further into the plot would risk ruining the surprise and also, frankly, miss the point of the book. The basic who-what-where mechanics of the unfolding story are simply substrate for all manner of postmodern formal weirdness. A fourth-wall-breaking interlude about a third of the way through asks the reader to consider who, exactly, is telling this story; attentive readers will sit up, take notice and engage with the novel through a new lens. (Tremblay, who never metafiction he didn’t like, also includes abundant ergodic formatting in the Bernie chapters, where the text breaks free of such pedestrian constraints as paragraphs, as well as some autobiographical elements and connective threads to his other novels, which I won’t spoil here.) The purpose of all this narrative playfulness is crystal clear: The author is here to deliver a warning about, and repudiation of, the rise of A.I. How story and form intertwine, however, isn’t revealed until very late in the novel.
It’s tricky to execute this kind of narrative rug pull. On one hand, it’s a risk to ask readers to be patient enough to stick with you until you’re ready to unveil what it is they’re actually reading; on the other hand, isn’t that kind of the point? Real art made by real humans can and should require investment on the part of the audience as well as the author. In an age of shredded attention spans and never-ending attempts to turn art into “content,” there’s power in seeing an artist make a stand in defense of his principles (in fiction or in real life, where Tremblay is the lead plaintiff in an ongoing copyright case against OpenAI).
“Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep” will likely be a divisive novel, even among the Tremblay die-hards. The individual reader’s tolerance for formal inventiveness will be a determining factor, as will said reader’s attitude toward A.I. and art. Tremblay is not subtle in his fervent criticism of the technology, its boosters and its true believers (Richard, a sniveling, odious Decillion executive, is not so much a character as he is a punching bag for the author’s frustrations), but we no longer live in a particularly subtle world. Readers who choose to take the hand Tremblay has outstretched here, though, will find themselves entertained, enraged and satisfied.
One of Tremblay’s greatest strengths is his ability to keep a surprising number of narrative balls in the air; wildly different tonal threads coexist in his stories without the boundaries between them becoming muddled. Here, horror and absurd humor go hand-in-hand (I’m hard pressed to think of a bigger nightmare than having to covertly guide a brain-dead body through the Denver airport), and the prose is evocative without being overpowering (Bernie’s lumbering form, in one description, sags “into the front half of a hesitant parenthetical”). Even Bernie’s jumbled, experimental inner journey, so disconcerting in the book’s first act, lands gracefully in a place of deeply human emotion. If the author’s cri de coeur about A.I. occasionally overshadows the story, I think he’s earned it.
DEAD BUT DREAMING OF ELECTRIC SHEEP | By Paul Tremblay | Morrow | 321 pp. | $30
The post She’s an Aimless Gamer. Her New Job: Pilot This Brain-Dead Man. appeared first on New York Times.
