My attention has yet again been abducted by fiction, tentatively titled The Box, but this time it is (ever so slightly) different. A publisher mate suggested that no one reads nonfiction, and anyway, fiction sticks better because it captures both attention and salience; I decided, why not both? I wrote some perhaps esoteric but non-academic nonfiction and decided to convey at least some of this through literary speculative fiction.
Besides the obvious nod to MEOW and The Architecture of Encounter, the novella explores several philosophical concerns:
- Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray
- Robert Nozick’s experience machine (in Anarchy, State, and Utopia)
- Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra
- Bluma Zeigarnik’s unfinished business
- David Hume’s commentary on the unreliability of inference
The first three are diagnostic. The fourth is operative. The fifth haunts the whole enterprise. None are cited in the text – readers will encounter them through the fiction rather than the sources, which is rather the point.
A generous reader might also find the story brushing against Lem’s Solaris, Bartlett’s work on memory as reconstruction, Kuhn on paradigm persistence, the Orpheus myth, and possibly Benjamin’s Angel of History – though I’m less certain which of these I invited and which simply showed up.
I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I wanted to share a post today, and this is where I am: somewhere in the middle of a first draft, trying to make a speculative premise carry philosophical weight without the reader feeling the load. It’s harder than nonfiction. It’s also more fun.
Philosophics 