Cyborg Fever - Couverture souple

Sheck, Laurie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1961209268 ISBN 13 : 9781961209268

Editeur : Tupelo Press, 2025

Synopsis

Cyborg Fever addresses timely questions about AI, technology, and their role in shaping relationships.

In Cyborg Fever, acclaimed writer Laurie Sheck 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 Cyborg Fever, 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 rethinks 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, bioengineering, medical experimentation, cyborgs, AI, and space and time, and ultimately teaches him the nature of love. Along the way, 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 Funes (of Borges’s iconic story “Funes the Memorious”), 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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Laurie Sheck is the author of the hybrid novels Island of the Mad and A Monster's Notes, which was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 10 Best Fictions of the Year and longlisted for the Dublin Impac International Fiction Prize. She is also the author of five books of poems, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work had appeared widely in such publications as the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and the New York Times. A 2023 recipient of a Literature Award from the Creative Capital Foundation, she has also been a Guggenheim fellow, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Born in the Bronx, she has taught at Princeton, Rutgers, and Columbia University and is currently on the MFA Writing Faculty at the New School. She lives in New York City.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Tupelo Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1961209268
• ISBN 13: 9781961209268
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 383
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible