From Belli Corum Instrumentorum Liber Cum Figuris (ca. 1420–30) | Johannes de Fontana / Bavarian State Library / Public Domain
Any book worth reading will refuse to be paraphrased. So it goes with Laurie Sheck’s new hybrid novel, Cyborg Fever (Tupelo Press, 2025). Even the truncated plot summary, rich as it is—a young orphan falls into a coma when his beloved nun suddenly stops speaking to him, and in the depths of his fevered sleep, he eavesdrops on a Borges protagonist, learns the terrible truth behind the nun’s silence, and befriends a deteriorating cyborg who tells him of brain-computer interfaces, secret DARPA weapons programs, and the cosmonaut dog Laika—barely hints at the full range of this striving, searching text.
But perhaps I can give you an even better sense of the book by applying a trick I learned from Sheck herself in a grad school seminar some years ago. If you want to suss out what a poem—or a novel that behaves like one—is up to, you compare the first line to the last line. The substance of the poem is the movement from the former to the latter. Cyborg Fever opens on the mathematical formula for entropy; it ends with the phrase “his gentle eyes.” The real action of the work is what happens in between.
Matthew Kosinski: In terms of both its form and philosophical considerations, Cyborg Fever is extremely interested in information—and, specifically, how we relate to it. Erwin eavesdrops on the scientific facts displayed on Funes’s screen. Gudrun and Erwin’s relationship is grounded in the shared experience of reading about the world. The Cyborg devolves into a cold stream of data: lists of weapons and cryptocurrency protocols. The total effect is that information takes on something of an elemental quality. Not merely a container for facts about the world, but a fundamental building block of the world itself, one with aesthetic, moral, relational and emotional dimensions. Can you say more about this—about the concept of information the book puts forth?
Laurie Sheck: Yes. It is an issue absolutely central to the book. The fact is, since 1947, when John Bardeen and Walter Houser invented the first working transistor, information technology and its uses has been proliferating at astonishing rates. We all experience this in our everyday lives. In 1990, there were 2.8 million internet users; in 2023, there were 5.4 billion. Wikipedia defines the Information Age as a historical period beginning in the twentieth century that is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries to an economy centered on information technology. This is the air we breathe, the sea we swim in. In Cyborg Fever, I was interested in exploring what I thought of as two different kinds of information. The first felt nourishing and often beautiful—facts one comes upon that help explain the world, bring it closer, lay bare to an extent its mysteries and complexities. These facts are connected to a sense of awe. It is these that often appear on Funes’s computer screen—quotes from scientists, from astronauts, facts about the passionflower, the behavior of particles and antiparticles. The second feels more chilling to me—information flooding into our brains from our various devices, and the attendant sense of randomness and glut. What is this doing to us—this constant glut of content, this ubiquitous attachment to our laptops and phones? And so in the book Funes and Erwin are enriched by one kind of information while the Cyborg is destroyed by the second kind, his mind and self taken over—he is a complex, deeply feeling being who, by the end, has been transformed into an unfeeling information machine.
Kosinski: For as much as the book is concerned with information, with what it means to know about the world, it’s also concerned with the impossibility of knowing, and the centrality of mystery to the universe. Gudrun’s sudden, unexplained silence dramatizes this, and it’s fitting that she speaks a line that can be taken as shorthand for much of the movement of the book: “There are always many questions and few answers. And the few answers shatter.” Can you say more about this, about the interplay between knowing and mystery, and what it means for answers to “shatter”?
Sheck: In both my poems and fictions I have long been interested in the experience of thinking—what it is, what it feels like, its textures, its pleasures and frustrations. And more and more, I have found the idea of “answers” to be very slippery. In his essay “The Creative Process,” James Baldwin writes of driving to the heart of every answer “to expose the question the answer hides.” This has been my experience. It is sort of like a set of Russian dolls—inside each seeming answer is yet another question. There is a certain humility involved in accepting this that I think is beneficial and true and that encourages an unending curiosity toward the world, a sense of exploration. Emerson said it too: “People want to be settled; only insofar as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Each time I start a book I want it to unsettle me. To challenge and upset my world, even in some ways to shatter and rearrange my seeing, not in a despairing way, but with a kind of radiance. I want this for my characters as well.
Kosinski: Intimacy and the inevitability of distance are also major concerns here. There is an almost tidal quality to the relationships in the book: The narrator draws close to a person—Funes, Gudrun, the Cyborg—before that person disappears and the narrator is left alone, uncertain if they’ll ever come back. Then they do reappear, and the cycle continues. I keep coming back to a line spoken by—of all people!—Deadpool: “Aloneness is not one thing, it keeps changing.” How do you see this notion of multifarious aloneness, and how it informs the book?
Sheck: In some ways it is a bit of a mystery to me. I started out as a poet and wrote five books of poems before I wrote a single novel. Over these last fifteen years of writing novels, I have noticed the isolate qualities of my narrators—there are three of them by now, and all without families. First there was the monster in a A Monster’s Notes, then the autodidact, hunchbacked Ambrose in Island of the Mad, and now the orphan Erwin in Cyborg Fever. Clearly a deep feeling for their fundamental aloneness is built into my character. I think, too, that isolation, however painful—that feeling of standing apart, the pain of feeling connected but at an unbridgeable distance in one way or another— can reveal very true things about being human, and about the world. My narrators hold others very tenderly in their hearts and minds even when they lose them in the material world. This is a kind of faithfulness and tenderness that feels important to me, and that my characters give me a chance to make palpable and explore.
Kosinski: For all the discussion of loneliness and our inability to know many things, the book is also concerned with the beauty and meaning inherent in these things. A line of Gudrun’s again: “Maybe meaning lies precisely in the way it shuts you out. Maybe that’s the nature of the world. Funes’s distance from you is the truth of him, but it’s a truth you don’t want to accept.” As I read, I came to see the book as a kind of hedge against entropy: a crystallization of experience that doubles as an instrument of thought. The atoms of the universe might be pulling away from one another, but the text persists. And it is a dynamic entity, the book. Its elements are not stagnant. I’m wondering what you think of this—of the text itself as a hedge against entropy?
Sheck: I like this idea very much. Not just about my book, but about texts in general. From a certain angle, a life can be seen as a series of losses and coping with those losses—of loved ones, in particular. Entropy wins out. It is one of the great tasks human beings face- the loss of those we love. There is also the loss of peace, of well-being, even of climate patterns. Amidst all of this, books have been a sustaining force in my life. I can’t imagine who I would be without them. I can take Emily Dickinson’s collected poems down from the shelf and find, “Pain— has an Element of Blank—.” I can open books by Borges, Bolano, Whitman, Melville, Stein, and their words are as present and as close as anything. Closer than the chair I sit in, the window in front of me.
Kosinski: This work, like your previous works, gets categorized as a “hybrid novel.” But I’m interested in digging a little deeper into what exactly it hybridizes on a formal level. I’d like to hear what you see as the work’s DNA, the formal and conceptual strands there. I’m also particularly interested in hearing how comic book characters like Professor X and Deadpool got in there! They were perhaps the most surprising appearances in the work, and even more surprising for the fact that they didn’t seem out of place when they arrived.
Sheck: I had no preconceived idea about what form I was writing in when I first began writing prose. I simply started writing. I was on a fellowship at the time at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and was supposed to be finishing a book of poems—which I did. But at the same time, I had become increasingly frustrated, not with the poems themselves, but with how they could not accommodate certain forms of investigation I was interested in. In addition, my husband had recently fallen terribly ill, and my world had been pretty much upended. Some of my husband’s symptoms reminded me of the monster in the Frankenstein movie—I had never read the book, and when I did it took me over. The monster, transformed by my own needs, and transported into the twenty-first century, became my imaginary companion. From there I began doing research on Mary Shelley and her cohort, as well as on topics I felt would interest my monster—bioengineering, et cetera. Writing that book I just flew by the seat of my pants and 500-plus pages later, I had my book. I did not really know what to call it. The publisher called it a novel, which is fine with me. All three of my novels combine elements of fiction, nonfiction, philosophy, poetry, and in this new novel, science. As a poet, I am very aware of form, structure, rhythm, and I think this awareness has been extremely useful in creating these larger, more inclusive, prose books.
Given the approach I talk about above, the form I work within is very elastic and part of the joy I find in it is its ability to include the unexpected. So yes, in this book the comic book character Deadpool plays a not insignificant role. I can’t remember exactly how he came to me, but when I discovered him I found his story compelling and relevant to the Cyborg character I had created. I love when boundaries break down—high culture and low, in and out, et cetera. I think of my novels as receptive sites that can accommodate many things, that can bring together the seemingly unlike and provide for them a kind of landscape of interaction and interpenetration. In the end, I treasure all forms of integration—the beauty and value of difference and the ways in which seeming difference also conceals many forms of likeness. It makes sense my books would reflect this, both in form and content which I don’t see as truly separable in any case. I let my curiosities guide me, trusting that my own need for coherence and a certain viable structure will not let me go too far astray.
