Synopsis:
Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn’t like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world’s largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse. One sham interview later, she’s offered the job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state—one with proprietary AI implanted in his head—from California to the East Coast.
To sum up in Julia’s own words: “You want me to remote control this dead dude across the country.” In a word, yes. But he’s not dead dead.
Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he’s trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn’t remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can’t remember.
Using a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls “Bernie” from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. All the while, the man endures an ever-changing and worsening nightmare that offers clues as to who he was—and who he must track down. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.
Review:
I did not enter into “Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep,” expecting ease, comfort, clear answers, or to not have my already barely clinging-on neurons promptly short-circuited. That would be naive. That being said, what the fuck? Equal parts existential horror, Silicon-Valley-skewering satire, and philosophical joke, Tremblay’s neurally-turbulent venture into cyberpunk is written with the usual amount of ambiguity, plus metatextuality, manic intelligence, and justifiable rage. Rage that the government and their tech bro chums seem to have read Orwell and decided that’s the way forward, that complex human-made art is being crudely approximated and imitated by LLMs, that we as a race seem determined to propel ourselves toward a trifecta of further surveillance, a climate disaster and an education crisis. I’m angry too- are you? A nod to Dick (behave) that I devoured and abhorred in roughly equal measure, I’m feeling rather discombobulated, like Tremblay has just shone a bright light into my eyes, exhausted from the mental gymnastics I have had to perform to end up somewhere that is not so far removed from grim reality. Fuck. It’s genius and original, a brainy, referential, slightly hysterical novel that you will grapple with and likely never forget. It’s out July 2nd in the UK from Bloomsbury and June 30th in the US from William Morrow.
I don’t know how to approach this- I’m still in stupor but also very riled up, the reaction, I imagine, that “Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep,” will garner from the majority of its readers. I don’t really want to linger on plot too much, to do so might sand down the odd, tingly, exhausting experience of reading it for yourself. Briefly then, we follow Julia Flang, she lives with her fun uncle, Uncle Fun, and away from her mother Janice, who works in LA high up in a big tech company. They don’t have the best of relationships but Janice calls up with a proposition, Julia, a semi-pro gamer could, NDAs signed and T&Cs accepted, cash in five grand for interviewing alone- the gig itself is only a couple of days and it pays well. But what Julia is asked, is obligated, to do, is the stuff of both nightmares and reality.
This cross-country cyberpunk travelogue is told using two perspectives. We have Julia’s limited third person, littered with Lebowski references, and then a little more unconventionally, second person chapters, (that’s not exhaustive of course, Tremblay performs increasingly weird but absolutely inspired narrative manoeuvres as the plot stumbles forward). These second person parts are deliberately hard to follow and incredibly disorienting, they drag us unwillingly into this novel, and in retrospect having staggered to the bitter end of this brain-frazzling book, they feel even colder and far more deliberate.
This is a bleak novel, not abstractly so. Tremblay has not written some far off dystopian but something that feels, deeply concerningly, almost adjacent to the present moment. So, yes it is bleak and queasy, but to be clear, it is also witty and referential and quite a fun time. You can’t separate this plot from its commentary but the premise is a wickedly funny one, a young woman having to remotely pilot what is for all practical purposes, a dead body across America- that is the stuff of comedy, and in fact, it is, literally. Kotcheff’s “Weekend at Bernie’s,” is a film Tremblay repeatedly references, even having Julia name her travel companion Bernie. Then we have, perhaps in another nod to Dick (come on), corporate tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, Stephen Richards and Richard Stephens- a completely unnecessary and yet rather hilarious addition to the novel. All of which is to say that this is a story you won’t be able to separate yourself from- it is serious in its concerns, furious in its outlook and chilling in its plausibility- yet still, it is not joyless. “Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep,” certainly does not lack heart or humour, and for all its commentary upon AI and automation, demonstrates implicitly too that the human voice and human art should probably stick around. Radical, I know.
“Black Mirror,” meets Cargill’s “Sea of Rust,” run through the uniquely wired circuitry of, well, Paul Tremblay, in this zinger of a novel. I chuckled and choked up and (as reflected in my completely deliberate, arguably inspired stylistic choice to make this review an absolute mess) my brain has yet to re-solidify after this book melted it into a grey fondue. Leave me alone. Anyway, I’ve gone on for rather long enough so allow me to conclude with a big fat, gleeful middle finger to AI and the meatheads imposing it upon us, and my most sincere and enthusiastic of recommendations.
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