The New Speculative Fiction: A Conversation Between Nathanial White & Brandon Teigland

Brandon Teigland: We are both self-proclaimed writers of speculative fiction. Why have you chosen this moniker to describe your writing? How is speculative fiction different from science fiction?

Nathanial White: I like the vagueness of the term “speculative fiction;” there aren’t really any generic conventions other than the fact that it must have a “what-if” component. In my book this is what if consciousness could be transferred from the brain to a quantum computer and in your book it is what if there was a drug that could transform you into something beyond human. Our books could also be called science fiction because of their reliance on a technology that while  fictional is scientifically feasible. But here is where I see our work diverging from both of these genres: science fiction and speculative fiction traditionally draw out a set of essential and universal human qualities by defining what is human against the technological or alien other. What you and I are both doing in our fiction, I believe, is trying to show that technology is inextricably tied to our subjectivity, that we are changed by technology, that we become our technology. In doing this, our work questions what it means to be human at all.

BT: In Conscious Designs it is technologically possible, with adequate funds, to upload a human mind onto a digital platform, to migrate the mind’s mental states, beliefs, experiences and mental capacities such as rationality and intelligence. Do you think downloading human consciousness into a computer to escape death is a desirable aim?

NW: I believe digital immortality (whether good or bad) is an inevitability. Conscious Designs can be read as a testament to the importance of mortality or, conversely, as an exciting vision of the next step in human evolution. The book reflects my own conflicted perspective. I’m excited and terrified about the possibility of preserving my consciousness after my biological body expires. I don’t believe in a spiritual afterlife, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified about the prospect of biological death as a complete annihilation of the mind. In our increasingly secular and nihilistic world, I think people are more scared of death than they are willing to admit. We’ve found ways to deflect our attention away from death. In the United States, death has become sequestered and taboo in our social life, perhaps because we have come to regard it as meaningless. One of the few spaces we have to confront death is in our visual culture, where it is a spectacle to be consumed, not contemplated. These ideas are hyperbolized in the world of Conscious Designs. There are entire industries that promise perpetual youthfulness staving off death, premature death is almost an impossibility, and a robust culture industry forces everyone to live in a perpetual present.

BT: In the world of Conscious Designs, if people choose to copy their minds onto a digital platform, their original embodied self continues to exist alongside the digital copy. Your protagonist, Eugene, muses about the relationship his biological self would have with his digital “Second Self.” What are the metaphysical possibilities of mind uploading? How could we believe that the mind can be separated from the body? Even assuming such a separation was possible, how could consciousness in an entirely different medium remain unchanged, as if it had no connection with embodiment?

NW:  In some ways, we already spend so much time in virtual, disembodied worlds. Think about how much time we spend on screens. Screentime is really only a visual/auditory cortical experience, easily replicable in machines. And we quite enjoy our disembodied experiences (to put it mildly). My main character Eugene and I both suffer from neuropathic pain from our spinal cord injuries. We both escape our bodies by going into the virtual world of representation; I escape into books, films, tv; Eugene escapes into more sophisticated VR worlds. But it’s important to understand that embodiment does not have to be a physical phenomenon. A person’s experience of embodiment is just a flow of information, a phenomenon that could be simulated in a non-biological (computer) substrate, with complete morphological freedom, or freedom to create whatever kind of body the individual wants. In Conscious Designs, the Second Selves that inhabit the digital world of Arcadia have virtual bodies that give them the same sensory experience that our bodies do. Eugene has virtually no communication with most of his body as a result of his spinal cord injury. Even in the physical world he uses a robotic exoskeleton, a kind of mechanical prosthesis in order to overcome his mobility impairment. One of the reasons that Eugene so desperately wants to migrate his consciousness into this digital world is to shed his broken body and trade in for a virtual one, an able body.

As far as consciousness remaining unchanged, I don’t think it would. It could be even better. In a virtual world, we could create sublime mental states that haven’t even been dreamed of. We could even share each other’s subjectivity. One of the tragedies of being embodied is that your conscious experience is entirely cut off from everyone else’s. Language offers a pretty limited bridge between minds, if you think about it. In a virtual realm, individuals could experience memories together or even merge their minds temporarily. We may decide to shed our egos entirely and become a single superintelligent entity that is unlimited by the boundaries of selfhood and even time.

BT: Disability is not a common theme in speculative fiction and often characters with disabilities in fiction are sources of inspiration. This is not the case with your novella. Eugene feels stifled by his spinal cord injury. He sees himself as “broken” and as a “paralyzed force.” What are your thoughts on disability in literature and how might you respond to criticism that your book portrays disability as purely negative?

NW: The central theme of the book is not disability. I intended the book to be primarily a philosophical investigation into the nature of consciousness and selfhood in the face of emerging posthuman technologies. Eugene has a disability, yes, but he is not meant to represent all disabled people or even all people with spinal cord injuries. My exasperation about my injury is probably evident in my sketch of his character.

I’m always skeptical about the inspirational narratives where characters neatly come to terms with their disabilities, or even overcome them entirely. These kinds of stories are tailor-made for the able-bodied community. The able-bodied viewer sees the disabled character overcoming her adversity and comes to believe that the suffering imposed by disability (or by society’s problematic views on disability) can be surmounted with a little grit and an attitude adjustment. These narratives put the responsibility on the disablied individuals to change how they view themselves and their disability and therefore militate against any real socio-cultural critique; they deflect our attention from the bigger issue of how our ableist society regards disability with fear, pity, guilt, and disquietude. And so Eugene views his disability and pain as negative because he has internalized the negative cultural attitudes of his world, which is not much different from our own.

BT: Though I might have identical sensations as you, I cannot have your experience, and just as Eugene’s wife, Corina, cannot feel Eugene’s agonizing neuropathic pain I cannot feel your pain because experience is unique to the one who has it. According to Eugene, the sacrifice of enduring great pain alone gives purpose to our lives and ascribes meaning to our suffering. But for Corina, to share in suffering is what makes us human. How essential is suffering to the human condition? Will we cease to be human without it?

NW: I began writing this book, and writing Eugene into existence, as a way of trying to ascribe meaning to my pain. Or at least to share my experience of pain with the world through language. One of the tragic elements of Eugene is that nobody really understands his pain. So many of our cultural narratives in the West, from Jesus Christ to Rocky Balboa, suggest that pain is something noble and purposeful. And this might be true if you are running a marathon or birthing a child. But the problem with the chronic pain that Eugene and I suffer, both the physiological nerve pain and psycho-emotional pain that follows, is that it is inherently meaningless. Suffering without a clear and immediate purpose is usually construed as being pathological in our society, not meaningful. One of the reasons that Eugene can’t find meaning for his suffering is because pain is anachronistic in his world. It is because of Eugene’s pain that he is the most human character in the book, which is why I decided to call him Eugene (eu=true, gene=person). So yes, I do think that if there is any essential human trait, it is suffering. That being said, I don’t see suffering as inherently good. If we could move into a post-human state in which suffering were completely eradicated, but still maintain our cognitive and psychological complexity, I don’t see why that wouldn’t be utopian.

BT: It seems that the Second Selves of Arcadia would have little in common with our experience of embodied selfhood. The citizens of Arcadia, for example, would be capable of recognizing that their phenomenology is entirely a representation. What does this posthuman subjectivity look like? Is the digital universe of Arcadia a utopia or a dystopia?

NW: One of the reservations that Eugene has about living in an artificial, digital world, is that it would be a world of pure representation, and it would therefore not be real. Ashcroft, the proprietor of the eponymous corporation, Conscious Designs, tries to convince Eugene to purchase a Second Self. He brings up a philosophical point that is at least as old as Kant: even in the physical world, we don’t have access to the world as it truly exists. The mental models that our minds construct of the physical world are quite distorted and purely representational. This idea has been corroborated by the field of neuroscience. Color, for example, most likely does not exist in the natural world. It is a mental mode of representation contrived by the mind to interpret different wavelengths of light. Ashcroft’s point is that the human mind may be even more native to a world that is entirely representational. There would be no dissonance between what “is” and what “seems.”

In terms of whether Arcadia is a utopia or dystopia, that’s really up to the reader. I will say that it is hard to imagine a more dystopian world than our own current moment in late capitalism. We are not willing to sacrifice our hedonistic middle class lifestyle for the survival of our species or our ecosystem. We are starting to come to terms with the fact that our human presence is a plague on this earth.  Conscious Designs asks the reader to reevaluate the privileging of human consciousness over other forms of life. Eugene makes his living harvesting human engineered organs from pigs, and then comes to the realization that the pigs have a subjective experience of the world just as he does. Trading non-human consciousness for human consciousness begins to seem wrong to Eugene; it causes a kind of moral suffering that compounds his physiological pain. And so to Eugene, a virtual world that requires a small fraction of the energy of maintaining a biological body and no sacrifice of other organisms seems like a more ethical world. And it is the only way to escape being a mere consumer. There is something appealing about overcoming the human condition or moving beyond our humanity into some sort of cybernetic post-human form. If we look at our trajectory as a species, overcoming the human condition may not only be desirable, it may be absolutely necessary.

BT: How has your relationship with technology influenced how you envisage technology in Conscious Designs?

NW: I have a pretty conflicted relationship with technology. Most of our technology has a detrimental effect on my life. I am currently terrified about a nuclear conflict, and it seems to me almost miraculous that we have avoided nuclear warfare for the last 80 years. In the last few decades most of our technological resources have gone into technologies of escape. There have certainly been more advances in things like cell phones and streaming technology than clean energy and cosmology. We only tend to develop technology that can be sold. As a result, technology has become almost an impediment to our progress as a species. In the world of Conscious Designs, advanced technologies of escape have led to a sort of cultural sterility similar to the one I believe we are experiencing now. If it is true that we become technology, then much of our current technology has flattened our subjectivity, not enhanced it.

But I also have faith in technology transforming us into a better species. When I fractured my second lumbar vertebra, the surgeon was able to remove my vertebra and construct an artificial vertebral body by grinding up my rib and using it to create a bone paste that he put into a cylindrical titanium cage. For my neurorecovery, I underwent all kinds of high-tech therapies, including using a robotic exoskeleton and virtual reality programs to train my brain and body to establish new neural pathways. If I had lived a century earlier, I wouldn’t be walking. I’d probably be dead. I wonder if in a hundred years from now, people will be saying, “if I had lived a century earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to get uploaded into cyberspace, and I would have had to die.”

BT: You are both a teacher and an awarded novella writer—Conscious Designs was the winner of the 2021 Miami University Novella Prize! Where do you find motivation for your stories?

NW: I’m an obsessive note-taker. I write notes about my dreams, my classes, my readings, my interactions with strangers. I have hundreds of pages of notes. If anyone were to read them, they would certainly appear to be the rantings of a madman. A single note will sometimes germinate into a story. Here is the note that sprouted Conscious Designs: 5/16/2020 at 3AM: “What is the difference between information processing and consciousness?” I wrote Conscious Designs in about a month and a half during my summer break in 2020 (first summer of COVID). I was having a lot of pain in the early mornings, so I would open my computer and write. This is maybe why pain is such a prominent motif in the story. I recently re-read Milton’s Paradise Lost and I’m working on a sci-fi story where biological humans have been resurrected from extinction by AI.

BT: What other themes do you like exploring in your writing? Are there any you haven’t yet explored, but would like to?

NW: I get stuck writing dystopian futures. I recently read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dispossessed and it made me realize the value of imagining better worlds. I’m realizing that we may need less dystopia and more utopia in our narrative culture. But writing utopia is much more difficult. I feel like our generation has been conditioned to use cynicism as the only way to critique the status quo. I don’t want my writing to be cynical. I want to be able to imagine a coherent alternative to the dystopia that we seem to be currently trapped in.

Nathanial White: Under a Collapsing Sky is driven by some rich philosophical ideas. The novel has direct references to philosophers including Adorno and Badiou and perhaps indirect references to the ideas of Nietzsche, Derrida and Schopenhauer. One of your characters, Jaegwon Choy, a philosopher who studies the nature of events, is a disciple of Gilles Deleuze, whose conceptual rhizome pervades your book metaphorically and literally. I wonder if you could discuss some of the philosophical traditions and thinkers that have informed you as a writer and the world of Under a Collapsing Sky.

Brandon Teigland: The primary concern of my book is posthumanism. This philosophical critique of anthropocentrism opposes human-centered worldviews of life and reality by proposing that there could be nonhumans who may experience and understand the world very differently from humans.

NW: Under a Collapsing Sky accomplishes much in relatively few pages. It offers political critique, cultural critique, and a philosophical investigation of what, if anything, it means to be human. Yet all of this could be explored in non-fiction. What kinds of things can fiction do that non-fiction cannot? What do you see as the role of speculative fiction and more specifically dystopian fiction?

BT: Dense, idea-driven fiction, as opposed to the character-driven mode that predominates speculative fiction today, tends to correlate positively with concision. Unlike non-fiction, speculative fiction and, even more so, dystopian fiction, are not just mediums for expressing the truth and falsity of our inner selves or outer realities; they promise us new paths through a real space of engagement with what is otherwise radically unknown.

NW: One of your principal characters, Johannes Van Vyferyken, is a former biosphere scientist turned rogue cult leader whose religion is the drug Phoenix Tears. Phoenix Tears are hallucinatory and also annihilate the user’s humanness. I was intrigued by one of the phrases that you used in describing the cult: “happy nihilism.” I wonder if you might discuss that concept in further detail.

BT: Suppose your world is poised for a phenomenological speciation event, following which a proportion of formerly human individuals will acquire some disruptive cognitive capacity caused by a new pharmaceutical technology–call it Substance-X. However it works its derangements, the technology irreversibly changes its users, giving rise to deep divisions between users and non-users. As the technology disseminates over the planet you would have no choice but to decide whether to become posthuman or to remain human. Suppose some of your friends have adopted the drug. They now seem indifferent to everything that gives human life meaning. You cannot yet understand their joys, but risk losing much of what made existence meaningful to the human you will have been if you adopt the drug. The thought experiment illustrates the happy nihilism that would only be apparent upon leaving humanity.

Beyond the lines of life’s organic or living purposiveness, there may not be any defining features common to all life, just variably constrained states of vibrant matter. But I can still assume, like Nietzsche and other vitalists, that it is written into the very nature of all living matter that human and nonhuman cognition and subjectivity will experience any increase in their vital materiality as joyful.

NW: Under a Collapsing Sky presents various assaults on the rational “Cartesian” self. The drug, for example, has been weaponized to create voting zombies that give power to the alt-right regime. But the erasure of the self by taking the drug can also be quite liberating. And there’s a sense that humans are not the originators of thoughts, but rather the inheritors of thought. In spite of this siege on the “self,” your characters are unique and each has a rich interiority. Would you expand upon your ideas about the nature of selfhood?

BT: For now, let us set about our distinction-mongering: Assuming the falsity of Cartesian dualism or similar doctrines, mind and world are neither mutually independent, as Descartes thought, nor are they inseparably related, as Kant thought. The dynamically altering now described by Husserl, or even the projecting of Dasein described by Heidegger, are just aspects of the way in which creatures like us represent their relation to their environment. The only conception of reality we have is of the one we can know and access. Any phenomenology that transcends our subjectivity would be dark. Even the existence of this dark side of phenomenology could be the result of a cognitive illusion generated by the brain’s computational limitations. Other kinds of life, however, might have radically different natures and so radically different phenomenologies.

The structure of the self is imperative in determining what kinds of creatures we could become. We are either contaminated by the meaning of our understanding of human subjectivity or it is utterly inconceivable and irrelevant. Selfhood surrounds my characters, like an abyss. It revolves around them. It involves  them in a crime whose perpetual consequences are exerted even when they no longer act, so that there is never a single moment when they are not the cause of some disorder, and their disorder spreads to such a degree that it induces a general corruption so absolute that even beyond their lifetime its consequences continue.

NW: While reading Under a Collapsing Sky, I noticed all kinds of dubious binaries, which your novel calls into question at every turn, including East and West; synthetic and natural; self and other; form and content; and, of course, good and evil. What is the role of binaries as an ordering principle in the world of Under a Collapsing Sky, as well as in our own world?

BT: We may be simply too different to fit into the classical binaries. It is easy to see that the value-ladenness of most ordering principles does not allow for conceivable paths to value neutrality. The process of becoming human, our hominization, has been mediated by a confluence of biological, cultural and technological processes. It has produced novel assemblages where humans are obligatory components in emergent but decomposable wholes, socio-technical assemblages that exhibit powers and properties not attributable to their parts but which depend on those parts: for example, languages and archives, cities and infrastructure. Put more informally, we don’t need to be human in either sense that the binary confines us to. We have undergone revolutions in the past like the shift from hunter-gatherer to more sedentary modes of life, and through some unprecedented event we may even become feral to our own hominization.

NW: Under a Collapsing Sky, which takes place less than 20 years from today, seems to be a biting political satire of our current world. In the book, there is a manufactured culture war going on, elections have been sabotaged, fascism prevails over liberal democracy, and massive deportation and climate refugee migration have put the world in chaos. I wonder if you would talk about how our current moment in global politics has influenced the constructed world of your novel.

BT: It is a story of ceaselessly deracinated events, deracinated to the point that every memory and all perspectives are eliminated, and nevertheless it draws from this uprootedness a direction which seems to carry everything away in an irresistible movement toward an imminent catastrophe.

NW: Your writing is distinctive in that it is scientific and psychedelic, vivid and abstract, apocalyptic and yet strangely hopeful. I always try to find echoes of other writers in the literature I read, but I was stumped by your book. What fiction writers do you greatly admire, and what writers (if any) have influenced Under a Collapsing Sky?

BT: To give a non-exhaustive inventory: László Krasznahorkai for dystopian themes, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky for dark phantasmagorical surrealism. Thomas Bernhard for obsessive ideation. Michel Houellebecq for controversy. Philip K. Dick for hallucinatory realities. Jeff VanderMeer for weird morphological freedom. Thomas Ligotti for nemocentric vision. China Miéville for fabulatory politics. Reza Negarestani for blobjective dustism …

NW: We are both new to the world of publishing and promoting a full-length book. Would you discuss your experience in publishing and promoting your first book? What have you found surprising, frustrating, fulfilling? What advice might you give to new authors who are either publishing a first book or looking to publish a first book?

BT: The author of published writing does not exist. The author of published writing is a social matrix of relations between the psyche, society, and the world. Within this scene, on that stage, the solitude of the published author is not to be found.