Tech reviews

Ghost Stories From Our Coming Tech Dystopia


It’s strange to read a book in one world and write about it in another. I first read Mary South’s prescient and unsettling debut story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, a few weeks ago, in a world where the streets were busy, the bars were heaving, and the skies were full of planes. You might, in that world, catch up with a friend over dinner at a busy restaurant; you might stand in a chaotic huddle of strangers, waiting to be seated. You might visit your parents or your grandparents on a whim, hugging them close when you arrived. You’d spend your day hopping back and forth between the physical and the virtual, your mind a tangle of social feeds and the on-the-ground, natural chaos of the city you moved through. Technology was a convenience enhancer at best but more often a vice, something you half-joked about being “addicted” to, something you were always trying to “detox” from, something you thought you’d be better off without—calmer, less anxious, more present.

You Will Never Be Forgotten reads like it was written for the world we’ve just entered, a liminal space between the dysfunctional, false glut of the past and an unknowable, emaciated future. Over recent weeks, we have become increasingly dependent on the same technologies so many of us have spent years criticizing for their dehumanizing effect. Social media websites in particular have gone from a favorite punching bag to a vital lifeline for those of us in isolation. Now and for the foreseeable future, technology’s commodified and surveilled virtual landscape forms the primary site of human connection.

You Will Never Be Forgotten is set in a recognizable, barely exaggerated near-reality, blending yesterday’s tech-induced indignities with those yet to come. South demonstrates, across 10 stories, how dependence—coerced or chosen—always comes with a cost. Our current, surreal moment of virtual reliance is no exception. South writes as though she has always been where we find ourselves now: looking back on a world where we believed we might gain personal agency over technology’s dominion, entering one where such agency is a luxury we might never again hope to afford.

South’s stories are, without exception, stories of exceptional loss, spilling out at the point of conflict between the cool detachment of the technological world and the tender vulnerability of the users living within it. In some of these tales, technology sets the tone but does not drive the action. In “The Age of Love,” a young, overworked flight attendant finds emotional fulfillment in graphic phone sex with an impotent octogenarian, after her elder-care-worker boyfriend begins playing her recordings of his charges’ phone-sex-hotline calls. To one person, this illegal surveillance is an act of violation; to another, an opportunity for fresh intimacy. In other stories, like “Keith Prime,” techno-dystopian capitalism plays a more direct role in the action: A widow, impoverished by her deceased husband’s medical bills, works at an organ warehouse, where she develops feelings for one of the lab-grown bodies in her care. Widows, care homes, and ghosts abound, Petri dishes where South examines the aftershock effects that technology has had on the ways we look after each other and ourselves.

In an era of unprecedented digital acceleration and societal fragility, speculative fiction often offers a clear-eyed assessment of the present. You Will Never Be Forgotten joins a growing cross-medium genre that includes Catherine Lacey’s The Answers, Ling Ma’s Severance, Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years, and the subtler episodes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a genre that we might call “dystopic realism,” marked by the imaginative quality of science fiction, the pacing and recognizability of realist fiction, and the nauseating bite of satire. Like other dystopic realist fiction, South’s stories find their momentum in the usual, unwieldy mainstays of human experience, caught at a glance. Grief comes up again and again, tinged with humiliation, jealousy, and lust. This collection’s power, though, comes from South’s dark sensibility, her comfort with brutality, and her narrative insistence that, while the nightmare of tech capitalism won’t wholly eradicate the personal and the private, it will compress beyond recognition the spaces where personal, private moments can unfold.





READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.