Synopsis:
Beauty doesn’t fade. It feeds.
Dorothy Wagner has spent her whole life wanting nothing more than to be seen. But after failing to make her mark (any mark, really) as an influencer, she takes a job at a company focused on cutting-edge deepfake technology. And there, in secret, she creates her salvation.
Isabella: an impossibly gorgeous girl who takes social media by storm. Dorothy’s code is brilliant, and Isabella seems real, so real that she garners millions of followers. Brands beg to partner with her. Everyone wants to meet her IRL. The adoration—and the cash—flows in. Dorothy is finally happy. She’s getting all the attention she ever wanted—isn’t she?
Then the cracks begin to show. Dorothy can barely stay ahead of the partnership requests, and love letters and the rabid fans filling her DMs trying to track Isabella down. All this time working in secret with all this pressure is getting to Dorothy—she can’t tell where she ends, and her creation begins. And when someone gets a little too close to her secret, a violent confrontation sends Dorothy on the run, forcing her to confront what she’s willing to sacrifice to keep her secrets.
Review:
It feels, at best, ironic to take to social media to rant and rave about Alma Katsu’s upcoming “Incarnate,” but I’m not clickbaiting when I tell you that this thing is sensational. “The Substance,” meets Dorian Gray in the age of Tilly Norwood, Katsu’s latest is a biting novel about the human need to be liked, and how such a natural desire can curdle into something dangerous, lethal, when your audience could be infinite and the algorithm is always hungry for more. A cold, blue-light bathed story of consumption, creation, identity, vanity and obsession, “Incarnate,” is a techno-Faustian bargain that was, for the couple of days I was reading it, the ultimate antidote to the mindless scrolling it discourages, with a seething anti-AI sentiment at its human heart. Utterly thrilling, deeply intelligent, as high quality and thematically rich as one has come to expect, this one is available from Putnam in the US September 22nd and October 6th from Titan in the UK.
Dorothy Wagner has, after a blip, got her life back on something resembling the rails, living in LA and working under VFX maestro Tomas Delgado. Delgado Visual Effects is one of the leading names in deepfake tech- and Dorothy is rather good at her job. But she’s not happy. She doesn’t see herself as attractive, she struggles to gain much in the currency of social media success, and compared to her decidedly less useful colleagues, she’s underpaid. It could be any or all of these things that compel her to make Isabella, an impossibly beautiful girl, practically, literally, made to go viral, but what has Dorothy had to trade for her clout? And now that she’s got it, can she keep up the facade?
As I said, this novel is about, at its core, the need to be liked- and that is somewhat a redeeming quality for Dorothy, in that I imagine most of us relate. We want to be accepted and validated and approved of by others, reassured we belong. Concentrate too hard on the fact you should be sleeping and your brain will give you a montage of every social humiliation you’ve ever endured, the sentence you mangled in 2014, the joke no one laughed at that one time, the occasion you tripped over your own feet in front of somebody you wanted to think you were cool- even now typing this I hope you think my analogy is charming and relevant as opposed to utter drivel. There’s nothing inherently pathological about the fact it’s nice to feel loved- but striving to achieve that appreciation can easily subsume who we actually are, especially in the age of social media.
Social media quantifies approval. Hearts, likes, views, comments, tiny digital confetti and things as seemingly inconsequential as the amount of people we follow compared to the number of followers we have ourselves, become the most important things in some people’s entire existences, and whilst that’s all too easy to roll our eyes at, I think a viral post on ‘the Gram’ would put a smile on most of our faces. Approval is no longer a feeling, but a figure that can climb and stall, and it’s devastating when it does.
Another strand of social media would be output. The algorithm rewards you if you have a constant stream of content to keep it satisfied (and you glued to your phone) but as Katsu explores in an epistolary element- if increased output means increased reward and increased validation, what happens to the quality of what we produce? And that question extends neatly beyond social media, perhaps alluding not simply to content creation but the use of AI too. Could ‘authors,’ squeeze another novel into each calendar year if they ask Claude for a little help? Sure, maybe, but quantity isn’t quality and output isn’t art.
Katsu, drawing on her professional background and research, ensures that “Incarnate,” also gets its hands dirty with the ugly, glaring, plain-to-see, consequences of AI, of which there are plenty. The theft, harvesting and regurgitation of the work of true creatives, the capability for deepfakes to ruin lives, revenge porn and the like- we all remember what Grok used to let you do to other people’s pictures, and we mustn’t forget the Broligarch owner’s defence of it. And the list goes on- overcorrected AI witchhunts (disproportionately aimed at black authors) which could destroy careers, the decline in human initiative and intelligence, early cases of AI psychosis, hell, the environmental impact.
I’ll wrap things up before this review descends fully into a froth-mouthed rant.
A gorgeously rendered, utterly brilliant, alarmingly prescient techno-nightmare with ferocious body horror, and psychological terror to match (let me influence you dammit) Katsu’s latest is a must read. “Incarnate,” is exactly the sort of novel that makes you want to log off, unplug and stare blankly at the wall, contemplating the last decade of ‘human progress,’ the cold light of your smartphone slowly dimming in your hand, moments before, naturally, you wake it up and open your app of choice to tell your friends all about how much you enjoyed it, just like me.
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