In the spring of 2005, my husband fell suddenly ill with the same crippling illness that had afflicted his father at the same age several decades before. But whereas his father’s illness lasted for several months, my husband’s lasted for several years. During this time, he lived on high doses of steroids and was mostly confined to our apartment. In the earliest, most acute days of the illness, even the touch of a sheet on his skin was excruciating; he could not walk or type. As he lay in bed, hour after hour, half-awake, half-sleeping, he listened to the audiobook of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all six volumes, over and over. In the weeks leading up to his diagnosis, I had noticed his gait had become stiff and uncertain; it reminded me, I realized later, of the monster in James Whale’s classic 1931 movie, Frankenstein. And now, with him unable to participate in our daily life, and I missing him and our hours’-long evening conversations, I turned to Mary Shelley’s book and read it for the first time.
The book astonished me. It was nothing like what I imagined. The monster was a deeply feeling, complex being. I was surprised to learn he was a vegetarian. In the laboratory, as soon as he opened his “yellow, watery eyes” his maker, Victor Frankenstein, had found he could not stand the sight of him and fled. The monster was left alone with no choice but to forage for berries in the woods and make his way through the forest, vulnerable and baffled. At one point he hides outside a cottage where a foreigner is being taught to read and, by listening, learns to read along with her. The book she is learning from is Volney’s The Ruins of Empire, an examination of fallen civilizations and a radical critique of power written in the early years of the French Revolution. Later, he finds a satchel in the woods containing three more books—Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. He becomes a voracious reader, hungry to understand the strange race that made and yet fears and shuns him. “The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight, I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories…” And yet with delight comes a darker knowledge, his increasing awareness of how he is seen, as he puts it, as “a filthy type of yours. I am solitary and abhorred.” This deeply feeling, but abandoned being, delighted by the songs of “the little winged animals who had often intercepted the light from my eyes” is confronted with a world that wants no part of him and sees in him only a monstrousness to be fled from or worse, annihilated.
How could I not feel close to him? In the months that followed, I found he had become my imaginary companion. If I went to a movie, I would think to myself, what movie would the monster like to see?— and I would go to that one. (The first one I chose was Blade Runner). And then I would return home and write notes in the voice of the monster. Soon the monster was learning about many different things: robotics, bioengineering, the earth seen from outer space, the artists Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, John Cage, and Stelarc; the philosophers Albertus Magnus and Lao Tzu. Up until this point, I had written five books of poems but little prose. I’d had no ambition to write fiction, but for a while a nagging feeling had been coming over me: how could I bring research and non-fiction into my writing? I wanted to explore the non-fiction world, to learn from it, and to find for it a home within my creative work. The monster, I realized, was offering me a methodology. As he studied and took notes, so could I. A few years and 500 pages later, I had my first novel, A Monster’s Notes.
The methodology I developed was to identify areas of fascination I knew little about and then find a basic fictional frame within which to carry out my investigations. I needed characters I could deeply care about, and at least a hint of plot, but not too much. In A Monster’s Notes my characters included the monster and Mary Shelley herself, her husband Percy, her step-sister Claire, and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. I was lucky to have a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library where I could use the Shelley papers. I will never forget holding in my hands the almost unbelievably thin paper of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters from the French Revolution, or seeing the letters in which Mary and Percy wrote together on paper so scarce that when they filled one page they turned it crosswise and continued writing. Once, when I opened an envelope, a lock of Mary’s auburn hair fell out. After A Monster’s Notes, for my next novel, Island of the Mad, I explored the Venetian plague, the life of Dostoevsky, and his great work The Idiot. Dostoevsky helped confirm and clarify the impulse that had been guiding me—that there is nothing more radical than reality itself. I wanted to study the real, to learn from it, to become a kind of curator—culling and sharing the facts I might find with my readers. And those facts often conveyed a sense of wonder and awe. I wanted the texture of the real, its terror, beauty, and all things in between. But I also wanted magic. I wanted characters who lived outside the realms of the familiar, and who would feel extremes of tenderness and isolation, feelings I was interested in and wanted to explore.
By the time I came to writing my most recent novel, Cyborg Fever, I was interested in learning about astrophysics and bioengineering, and I also wanted to think about the nature of information, though I didn’t put it to myself so directly. The sense of wonder my monster in A Monster’s Notes had felt still stayed with me; I had a lingering sense there were issues connected to him still waiting to be further explored. He had been, after all, a kind of bioengineered, experimental subject, deeply aware of a large, unfeeling universe; if I followed further the thread that left off with him, what might I find? And by then I had realized the boundary between my monster and myself was, and had been all along, immensely porous. Weren’t we, in a sense, the same baffled, striving, creature? What would the physicists have to say to us? What would the world of bioengineering confront us with as we learned more about it? Except my monster wouldn’t be in this book (though I still carried him in my mind). Instead, I named a traumatized, young boy after the physicist Erwin Schrodinger and put him into a year-long fever. He would be my narrator. In his fevered state he would see a computer screen on which many facts about astrophysics appear. And in his loneliness, these facts would help to calm and companion him. Later, he is approached by a gentle Cyborg who, as he tells his lonely tale, takes Erwin into the world of bioengineering, AI, and information. I knew I had to trust the beauty, integrity and mystery of the real. I would mix it into my fictional world and let it guide me.
And so it did. As I researched and wrote, I found many fascinating and often very beautiful ideas and examples. Here, for instance, is a quote from the physicist Arthur Eddington which Erwin reads from the glowing white screen he sees in his fever: “When you disturb the smallest petal of flower, you trouble the most distant star.” This short sentence is almost a poem in itself and offers much food for thought about proximity and distance, the minute and the large, and the mysterious connection between the earthly and celestial. The facts Erwin comes across are numerous and varied: “The number of carbon atoms in one ink dot on paper is greater than the sum of all humans who ever existed”; “The mass of a black hole the size of a pinprick is greater than the mass of the earth’s tallest mountain”; “ The surface of the exoplanet Kepler5 1b is the texture of cotton candy.” He learns about Ludwig Boltzmann and entropy, about Nikola Tesla, Paul Dirac, Georg Cantor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and the astronaut Alexi Leonov who, as he carried out humanity’s first spacewalk, concealed a cyanide pill in his pocket, as no one knew what might happen. He becomes familiar with their lives, their theories, their struggles. I am no scientist, I am a writer—I confess that, as much as I value the facts, I at times will skew or alter them to get at certain emotional truths. And yet, overall, they guide and teach me. As the writer Benjamin Labatut has pointed out, “Fiction gives reality a human shape.” It is about perception, not just stories. It is, as he says, “an excitement, not an entertainment.” I immerse myself in the lives and worlds of my characters and feel them as deeply as possible. Writing is an adventure—I set out to explore, not knowing what awaits me. As my book came into being, I found the facts and my characters constantly interacting.
In the second half of Cyborg Fever, Erwin experiences a visitation by a gentle cyborg who has escaped from a biomedical lab. In this section, even though I invent his circumstance and the biomedical experiment he has been forced to participate in, non-fiction still informs much of what he says. At one point, he explains how in the lab he was given a computer and encouraged to look up whatever he wanted. So, for instance, he looks up the word “cyborg” and discovers its origin in the space program; he looks up empathy and the brain imaging and animal experiments connected to trying to understand it. Over the course of his recollections, he shares the detailed story of Laika, the first dog sent into outer space even though the technology to bring her back to earth had not yet been invented. The cyborg recounts visiting the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) website and finding this: “As former Director Michael Goldblatt explained at the initiative’s inception in 1990, ‘Soldiers having no physical, physiological or cognitive limitation will be key to operational dominance and survival.’” He wonders how this might relate to the mysterious experiment he was a part of. He goes on to learn more—about brain research, AI, and various forms of bioengineering. And though I, as a writer, invented his fate—his brain has been tampered with in such a way that he finds himself turning into an unwilling, unfeeling information machine—that fate has been significantly shaped by what I learned as I researched.
About half-way into the writing of the book, I realized one of the areas I was exploring was the contrasting of two kinds of information. The first is the kind that appears on the computer screen that Erwin sees—facts that inspire awe and wonder, and have to do with curiosity, investigation, tenderness, striving. The second is the kind that seems to be happening more and more on our phones and other devices—the endless glut that often feels like it’s drowning us in trivia, meaninglessness, disinformation, distortion, rumor.
In the final section of the book, before the cyborg turns into an unfeeling information machine, he brings to Erwin’s attention the plight of refugee children suffering from Resignation Syndrome. An early reader of Cyborg Fever thought I must have made the syndrome up but it is real. In this syndrome, when the child’s family receives a negative decision from the migration board of the country they have fled to, which means the family will be forced to return to the home country they fled, the child falls into a coma-like sleep that lasts for months and often for years. In continuing to place the pressure of the real upon my book and holding it steadily there even as it mixes in with a somewhat magical fever-dream and cyborg, I have hoped to give that reality a place to feelingly live and be seen.
I hold my characters tenderly in my mind. Their suffering hurts me but it’s part of the deal, just as Ludwig Boltzmann suffered and Tesla and Georg Cantor and Laika suffered. Their vulnerability and striving is part of their beauty, of what moves me. Their courage in the face of hurt. To bring these facts forward feels like a privilege. I ask myself again and again, how can I make use of my own porosity? How can I let the world in, and let it speak through me? What can I learn?
