Jayson Greene – UnWorld

Steve Thomas: Jayson, welcome to the show.

Jayson Greene: Hi, Steve, really appreciate you asking me to come on today.

Steve Thomas: Before we get into your writing, what’s been your experience with libraries through your life? Like, did you go to the library a lot as a kid? Did you do any of your research for your book using any library resources or anything like that?

Jayson Greene: Of course. I grew up in a library. I spent my entire childhood in one, and that was my babysitter. My parents both worked and so they would just drop me off at the library and I wouldn’t need to look up for three plus hours easily.

And for this book for sure, I relied on my local branch in Carroll Gardens. Sadly, it has been suffering through some delays with its reopening after COVID and New York City funding not being what it needs to be at the moment. So I haven’t had it as much as I’ve wanted to in the past two years. But when I was writing the first two or three drafts of what would become UnWorld I used to go and write there, and of course a lot of the books that ended up being crucial to me were ones I took out. I’ve always been a library rat for sure.

Steve Thomas: And now you’ve got some books that are in the libraries. Your fiction book just came out. Have you ever gone to look at the library and see your memoir on the shelf there?

Jayson Greene: I have seen it. I’d be lying if I said there’s not a little joy for every author to go by and just take a peek and see what they made on the shelf next to other people’s books.

Steve Thomas: Are you one of those authors that go and sign copies of books in bookstores?

Jayson Greene: Oh sure, yeah, I’ve done that already. I signed some copies of the book for the Strand. They chose my book for their June sci-fi pick of the month, which made me really happy ’cause I’ve been going there for 20 years and I’m gonna be signing books at Books Are Magic, which is my local bookstore. Absolutely the week it comes out, I love to drop by the indie bookstores. There’s Community Books in Park Slope. I mean, I’m calling from New York, so I’m obviously listing my personal local indies, but Greenlight, and absolutely I’ll be hitting them all up and saying, “Hi, my name’s Jayson Greene” and signing as many copies as they will care to let me, honestly, it’s part of the joy of it, especially when you live in a city with luckily like myself, live in a city with lots of great bookstores in it.

Steve Thomas: So UnWorld is your first novel but you previously wrote a memoir Once More We Saw Stars. What drew you to fiction and to speculative fiction in particular as your next step?

Jayson Greene: I hadn’t tried writing fiction before I attempted to write this novel since I was probably in seventh grade, which is kind of shocking to me to admit out loud, but it is true. When I was younger all I did was read fiction and I was kind of the nerdy kid and I would read under my desk. And the things that drew me in and allowed me to probably escape the world at my school or around me at the time were books that transported you way out of your circumstances and into something else very vivid, fully realized, and deeply imagined. And when I was 12, that usually meant fantasy novels. I was big into obviously Tolkien and David Eddings who wrote like a very Tolkien inspired cycle of books that I was obsessed with.

It just planted a deep seed in me for imagined scenarios. I don’t think that what I wrote is anywhere, even in the close same galaxy. I wrote a literary fiction novel that sat in a speculative world because that’s where my adult interests took me. But my taste for an imaginative scenario that just puts a chill on the recognizable world that we live in has never, never gone away. It’s what draws me to storytelling for sure.

And I got the nerve to try to give myself the liberty to write fiction again after my memoir had come out. I hadn’t expected to break into the book world that way. It was a tragic story and a sad book to have written, but once I had done it, I looked around and realized that I had become an author. I had spent the previous 15 years as a music journalist, and here I was in the world of books and I felt like I had been given an opportunity to try something that I hadn’t let myself try for a very long time. And that was the seeds of UnWorld.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you do explore kind of a lot of the same emotions in the memoir and in the novel, grief being the underpinning to both of them. Did writing in a fictional format offer any different kind of catharsis or insight than the memoir?

Jayson Greene: A thousand percent. I often say to people when I explain to them why I made this seemingly maybe on the surface hard-to-fathom pivot from memoir into speculative fiction, which is not necessarily a direct move for most to make, I try to explain to them that this book feels like a nightmare that my memoir has had.

And that’s a very fanciful metaphor, but what I think I’m trying to get at by using it is that my memoir was really excavated out of me as I wrote it in a time of acute crisis. I wrote it in the 15 months between the violent death of my 2-year-old daughter and the birth of my son. There was a sense in which I was operating with a real urgency and there was a sort of blunt trauma still operating. And the book I wrote was, I don’t wanna say it was all catharsis, ’cause that sounds almost like I’m putting it down, but it was written for catharsis. It was written as a cathartic act.

And what I think I wanted to write when I had this novel is that that’s often the feeling that memoir can give you. You can explain yourself to yourself, but what do you do with all the things that you can’t explain? And what other form for that is there but fiction? Fiction is for us to explore all of the feelings that aren’t easily named, that perhaps are strangers to us, and it’s the form for when we’re feeling around in the dark in a whole new way.

I think that all the stuff that I was left with, “stuff” being not the most elegant word, but all of the lingering hangover that I felt. My life had moved on from tragedy and I was a happy father and living a domestic life, and yet there was a slight tinge of unreality because the bleak math of child loss dictates that I had one child, that child disappeared, and I had another child, and so there’s a part of you that’s always looking around for the child that isn’t there, and looking at myself in the mirror, as I grew older and saw that I had a child that was eight years old and then some part of me was trying to do the math, but wait a minute, you used to have a child when you were younger and that child should have been eight and you shouldn’t be this gray ’cause it should have happened five years ago.

So there’s this weird echo that was happening and it was one in which I felt, again, like I was living inside a dream of my own life. There was a remove that trauma and loss gives to people, and I think that that’s what I wanted this book to explore. Most of the characters in my novel are having some version of an out of body experience, and that’s where AI, which I don’t even particularly like saying AI out loud if I’m being perfectly honest, because it has become so overused as a buzzword, but what drew me to it was the psychology and the psychological drives behind it. Why would you want to take everything inside of you and put it somewhere else?

And that’s the human story that I think tragedy brings out of you. Of course, if you are carrying around these broken feelings inside of you and they don’t have an outlet… I don’t have an easy way to mourn my daughter. I don’t live in the same neighborhood that she grew up in. It’s a new neighborhood, new parents, new smiling faces, new everything, but there’s an echo. And in the book there is a sort of echo of voices that are disembodied and I yearned sometimes for something to scoop out these feelings so I could put them in a different separate container, and I think that makes me really normal in today’s world.

I think one way or another, we’re all scooping out these parts of ourselves that we can’t figure out, can’t handle, can’t deal with, can’t carry the burden of, and putting them often in some kind of liminal space and all of our liminal space as a culture is digital. A hundred percent of our cultural space that is liminal is digital, and we spend nearly every waking moment of our lives right now, toggling between this liminal space where everyone’s hopes and dreams and fears and nightmares and coping mechanisms are just swimming around in a soup.

And then looking up and being on our block in our neighborhood, looking at our neighbors and the disorientation between those two things to me it is the human condition. It has nothing to do with phones or like any of these sort of things that make our physical world, our physical world. These are deep, spiritual human drives that we’ve just found another expression for, and that’s why I ended up writing a book that used AI, because to me it’s just the latest human desire to exit ourselves in some way, and every character in this book is clawing at the borders of themselves to get out.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And before we get too much more into it, can you give listeners the overview of what UnWorld is about?

Jayson Greene: UnWorld tells the story of, depending on how you count the characters, roughly four characters, a handful of people who live in a small suburb. It’s undefined, but it exists in this world where AI has sort of begun its encroachment on everything. When you read the book and you start to see, this world’s been depopulated in some very eerie ways. I won’t spoil what those signposts are, but you pick it up pretty quickly and you’re reading the story of a couple that has lost their son, a bereaved mother and father, and I’m giving nothing away by that.

And then in this world, that UnWorld exists in, one of the ways in which people interact with AI is that instead of having Siri or having Alexa as these disembodied digital voice assistants, they have themselves. The idea of the upload, the mind upload, which has been very prevalent in sci-fi for the last hundred years. I took that and imagined it as what people would use that for, what kind of psychological purposes, and so the characters in this book have these, and then what happens to one of these voices when it’s hit with overwhelming grief? And so what starts out as a very simple story of a family, a broken family of people, trying to navigate absolutely shattering loss of a child, is mapped onto this world where most of the things we see are at least recognizable, but we don’t have these things in our lives today. So in that sense it’s speculative, but UnWorld is very much set five minutes into our future.

Steve Thomas: Was the, especially the eruption, I don’t know the right word, with ChatGPT in particular coming out a few years ago, did that change the way you were approaching the novel?

Jayson Greene: Nothing in the book changed as a result of what the headlines of the past three years said. I had the outline of this story in my head since 2017 or 18, honestly, when it was very fanciful. The idea for this novel in many ways, in sort of ways that are eerie to me to think about in retrospect, predated my memoir and the death of my child completely.

I’ve always been interested in this idea of an intelligence that escapes its container, and what that means is that, I would say in 2013, 2014 I was reading some articles about these group of people in Silicon Valley who were transhumanists. They were the people who thought they were gonna upload their consciousness first. There’s this woman, Martine Rothblatt in particular, had become a big voice for this. She’s a Silicon Valley sort of big wig, and she runs a foundation now called Terasem. This is someone who deeply believes in this novel mingling of technology and spirituality. I didn’t subscribe to what she was necessarily advocating, but in researching this phenomenon for some frankly, straight up journalism pieces at the time, eons ago in my life that I was interested in, I just found myself captivated by this person’s specificity of vision and certainty that this is where we were headed.

And I started playing around with it because again, it activated all the same interests in my mind then that I then came to understand on a visceral level when I myself became a traumatized person and understood some of these forces even more. But we all long to escape ourselves no matter what’s going on in our lives, and back then I said, “Ooh, what about this as an idea for a novel? What would happen if a person and their mental upload came to some differences?” And that was the friction that I first encountered that my mind wouldn’t stop rubbing away at ’cause we all have voices in our heads that disagree with other voices in our heads, right? We are made up of a clamorous system of parts. There’s an entire branch of therapy that is devoted to this prospect, Internal Family Systems. We are made up of characters that have roles and names inside of us, and I just instantly gravitated towards this concept.

I had this idea, well before anyone made any sense of my pitch. I tell people, “Oh, it’s about a woman who has an upload, and her and her upload disagree about something in their lives.” And I got a lot of blank looks, stares, but what’s been fascinating is that once I had a runway path to really try and write it, the reactions I saw and it took me a while to get it off the ground ’cause I’d never really tried this, really started to change as the world changed around me. And I don’t want to overstate the degree to which I seemingly predicted something. I was just writing in a corner. But I think because I had read some of this stuff early, I was keyed into what some of it might mean before it was in mainstream media, if that makes any sense. It was very much fringe stuff. And it just so happens that it crashed from the fringe right into our doorstep.

So when ChatGPT came out, I was five drafts in probably. It was no looking back at that point, I was actually actively trying to not look too hard at what was happening in the world ’cause if something were to somehow invalidate the premise of my novel, I needed to know that that was happening. But other than that, I was like, keep the world outside of this writing space and just write it. And now, I look up and horrifyingly, there are headlines that resemble the stories in my book.

Steve Thomas: Right, of people wanting to do this thing that you’re saying is a nightmare, and they’re like, “Oh no, let’s do this. Great. I love it!”

Jayson Greene: Right, and also stories of people who are in the kinds of distress that characters in my novel are in, where they’re locked into relationships with digital beings, that they don’t know how to extricate themselves from, where the line between a human relationship and a digital relationship has become blurred in a way that leads them to harm. All these things are now, unfortunately, things that happen in everyday life.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, but I think it’s sort of like in your book, I feel like a lot of, well, all of the characters are missing something, I think, in their lives and for most of them, Alex is what’s missing in their life, but even Cathy, who’s another character who gets involved won’t go into too much ’cause I don’t wanna get too spoilery on it, but I feel like she’s been searching for something her whole life as well to fill that. And she thinks it’s getting involved in this AI kind of stuff. And even then she finds that that’s not what she’s looking for.

Jayson Greene: That’s not it. Right. I drew a lot on the language of recovery in particular with her character because people in recovery programs also often refer to substance abuse as trying to fill the God-sized hole, and I thought about the God-sized hole an awful lot.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. No, you can definitely feel that because that’s what grief is a lot of time. It’s missing this thing and you cannot have this thing ever again.

Jayson Greene: Yeah. And it’s too big. The thing that’s gone is too big.

Steve Thomas: Like parents who have lost a child, like you said, you have another child, that didn’t fill the hole of the other child. It’s a completely different person now you are loving and raising, but the gap is still there.

In the story, the AI upload is experiencing this trauma as well. But you go into the fact that a lot of the ways that we cope with trauma are hormones and other things in our body and so that’s part of what leads to the schism between them is the upload does not have any of that to help process this, so it’s really outside its scope of understanding.

Jayson Greene: Right. And if you think about, what is hell? Hell for most people is I’m trapped inside of my mind forever with no way out. And if you think about what these, what we’re talking about creating are intelligences. They are not bodies. They don’t have other ways of regulating. These are just minds, and a mind on its own, woo, you know, doesn’t have the skills it takes to live or to navigate or to make sense of anything.

And yeah, all of us are also not to belabor the metaphor or hit it over the head too hard, we are intelligences that are tethered, sometimes strongly and sometimes very weakly to a whole other system of feelings. And it’s very easy to spend all of our time trapped in this skull and trying to think our way through our pain, our loneliness, and think our way out of it. It is a seductive trap. We write to heal ourselves, or we try, and I wrote this as a way of addressing how it felt to try to think my way out of situations where nothing could be thought that would make it any better. And the AI became a metaphor in some ways for that idea.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you do explore the concept of personhood as well, of like, would this upload be its own person? And there’s legal things that go on in the background, so that’s not the core of the book, but there’s things in the background. How did you go about building in that kind of concept?

Jayson Greene: I tried to layer it in lightly, as you said. It’s not the thrust of the book because it would be a whole other story, and a lot of classic science fiction from the Isaac Asimov stories onward are way more focused on robots as metaphors for civil rights. What does it mean to have to grant rights to a thing that you didn’t use to think of as a person, but now has to become a person? And I don’t know. I mean, I more used it the way I used everything in this book as like a sponge brush where I just wanted to apply the idea to the canvas in a blot where it would add color to the story of these humans.

Really, this is a humanist novel about four very specific people in a very private and wrenching emotional circumstance, but I wanted the world around them, we could see outside of their minds and see what was going on in the world, even if they cannot. That was the lens through which I tried to layer in some intriguing ideas, intriguing to me, about what it means to have to consider a being’s agency and an entity, and to think about what are the baseline limits for what constitutes a need for respect? What are the baseline limits for a being’s need for its own sense of self? And what sorts of promises of safety do we owe to certain kinds of beings that start to demand or ask for those things?

To me, it became part of the novel’s emotional sort of world of yearning for wholeness. Every being in the novel is fractured and broken and yearning for wholeness, and the AI struggle is wrapped up much more in who or what she is. and I read stuff about robot rights. I read all these legal papers because it is interesting.

The idea of also the apparatus of a state telling you when and how and where you become a being, getting into the nitty gritty of that. It didn’t really manifest in UnWorld in any overt way, but it informed the way I wrote about this idea which is, one of the ways in which we start to afford responsibility to people or agents in society that have been outside of that, they haven’t been granted their own rights, is the law realizes or decides that it needs some legal way to punish this population for infractions.

And this is often a sneaky and sometimes inadvertent way of acknowledging a being’s personhood. Because if someone or something needs to be held responsible by a law, even if these sorts of states would rather not acknowledge these beings as independent or with their own agency, suddenly you have to, you have to hold a person accountable for a crime and then you accidentally wind up in some ways awarding personhood.

And so much of the literature about this now talks about how that’s going to be the first time that the law is forced to grapple with what it means for an AI agent to be. It’s not gonna be because someone is moved by an impulse to recognize one being’s cry for self-respect. It’s going to be darker, a crash on the highway and there’s a lawsuit and there was a self-driving car, and there’s going to be a company that’s going to argue that they are not responsible. The AI agent is responsible legally, and this is going to be the path by which the state, which is traditionally not the softest touch, is going to start giving out personhood. Anyway, end soapbox!

Steve Thomas: No, I think that’s fascinating. Again, I don’t wanna go too deep on it because it’s not really, like you said, what the book is about, but they’ve already done that, not to get too political, but that’s around the abortion argument.

Jayson Greene: Absolutely.

Steve Thomas: When is a baby a baby? But even just corporations, a corporation can be a person in certain senses. And I’ve even read things of animal rights things of, how smart does a ape need to be before they’re a person?

Jayson Greene: A thousand percent, right.

Steve Thomas: I don’t know.

Jayson Greene: Again, this is another liminal space. This is why it fascinated me because it’s like, just like everything else, like grief, like digital world, identity is the liminal space.

Steve Thomas: Another big concept in the book I think is memory and how memories are formed and shaped. Alex, the son who passed away, is almost like almost the main character because everything revolves around Alex, but we don’t really know Alex. He’s not one of the four people that we follow. We only know him through memory. And you also get into the part of when you sync up, when you sync up every night with your upload, your brains are working together to decide what the right memory is. And sometimes the upload is nudging you a certain way and unconsciously you don’t realize it, but yeah, I think that goes pretty deep in the book as well, that concept.

Jayson Greene: Yeah. And that came about as basically reckoning with the way my own mind was abridging my own memories of my daughter, something I reckoned with a lot in the year after her death. And realizing that my brain was doing the horrible work of abridging a life into a series of memories that could be filed away and shaped, it was wrenching to contemplate once I had sort of keyed into that, what was being tossed off to the side, what was being lost, what was not being kept of her inside of me. I think it’s a really common fear. I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve lost children in the search for community and all of them talk about how scared they are that I’m gonna forget her. I’m gonna forget my child, I’m gonna forget this part about her.

And to speak to the theme in the novel, you pointed out astutely, that of all the characters, he’s the only truly major character who does not get a section narrated from his perspective, was very obviously intentional on my part because he is a ball of memories by the time the novel begins. There’s a line early on in section one from the perspective of the bereaved mother, and she talks about how the final violence of death is how it transforms people back into ideas.

Steve Thomas: I definitely have felt that, and I know other people have felt that, as you mentioned, especially with parents. I don’t want to forget when they had tantrums. That’s part of who they are too.

Jayson Greene: And your brain’s contending with a never ending influx of new stuff too. And it’s only so much storage space up here. We can’t keep it all.

Steve Thomas: And we get to the point where sometimes when you’re like, “Oh, crap, I didn’t think about them at all today. I am such a horrible person!” But our brains are our brains.

Jayson Greene: Exactly. We’re cursed with our own limitations.

Steve Thomas: And just as a writing process thing, a lot of what you’re doing in the novel is processing these emotions and things, but how do you do that while at the same time maintaining a narrative tension and pacing and keeping the story going as well? A lot of the story is internal, you also have a story going on that’s, not a mystery necessarily, but an ongoing narrative.

Jayson Greene: Yeah, a situation that needs clearing up. I think that that was an extension of the first book too, where the drama intention in Once More We Saw Stars is entirely inside of one person happens to be me, and I wanted it to be tense. I wanted it to feel like a book that had propulsion. It is a complicated mix of directives where I wanted it to exist very internally, but also what it boiled down to is that I wanted these sort of struggles to feel as visceral on the page as they feel it to the people that are happening. ‘Cause when they happen to you, they are the most important thing that has ever happened to you. There’s nothing else in your life that can compete with these feelings of self-realization or your gnawing need to fill a hole that can’t be filled. That is in some ways the entire animating drama of your life. Everything else is just incident, right?

You can build a plot about someone who has decided to be a jewel thief, but that’s the structure. The actual animating drama is the gnawing want inside of a burning individual who has gone out to such extreme lengths. And so to me that’s what sort of transformed the story sneakily into literary fiction more than into sci-fi is because it was much more about these murky emotional depths.

And as for like writing wise, how I did it, I rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. I mean, there’s probably 40,000 words, like half a manuscript’s worth of stuff that was boiled out. It’s a short book, relatively speaking. There are shorter books, but it is shorter than my memoir, and the reason it’s short is ’cause I was trying to boil it to the point where every sentence kept you moving forward in the journey. But yes, there’s probably 75 pages of boring ruminating that needed to be written in order for me to figure out what is the essence of that, to boil it down. It’s why it took six years. It takes much more time to write a short book than a long one, I am firmly of the belief.

Steve Thomas: So now that it’s out in the world, how do you feel now that the journey is complete? You finally got it out there. How do you feel about that?

Jayson Greene: Wow. I’m still trying to reckon with the fact that this very very private, very personal part of me, and it’s funny to say that as a memoir writer, but in some ways this feels so much more private. I’ve said this to my friends where when I put the memoir out, I knew exactly what I was showing people and people would be like, “Jayson, I can’t believe you appeared on this radio interview and talked about your daughter and all these intimate things.” And I would say, “Well, I know exactly what the story is here and if anything, I’m just showing people what I feel like is very obvious, right? And so what am I hiding?”

This one feels much more like, I don’t exactly understand it myself in a beautiful sense, so in that way, it was easier to convince myself that the memoir was about to be out in the world and that I could just walk into a bookstore and point to it. And this one is a little bit like, I’m gonna walk in and be like, “Oh my God, how did my dream, how did my weird dream end up in this bookstore?” So I’m still, I mean, it’s a beautiful feeling. I’m pinching myself every day. I look at the book all the time ’cause it’s beautiful. I love the design that they did and also because every time I look at it, it’s a reminder that somehow it’s transmitted itself into this physical object, so, yeah man, I’m bracing myself, but excited.

Steve Thomas: Great. And do you worked on this one for a really long time. Do you have anything else coming up that you’re working on that you would wanna share anything about?

Jayson Greene: I mean, yeah, I write a lot in general. I do a lot of music journalism profiles and stuff. I’ve got the first 20 pages of another novel that I’ve put together and hopefully this one will take a lot less than UnWorld did. I think it will, it’s much more rooted in the living world. It’s a lot less ethereal in its subject matter, so I’m very excited about it.

Steve Thomas: Jayson, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing about your book, and the book again is UnWorld, and it is available wherever you buy books and of course at your local public library. If they don’t have at your library, tell them to buy it and then check it out. And Jayson, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed the book a lot. Thank you for chatting with me today.

Jayson Greene: It was a pleasure, Steve. Thanks very much.

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Rebecca Vnuk: Hello, and welcome to the Circ Desk! I’m Rebecca Vnuk, the Executive Director of Library Reads.

Zack Moore: And I’m Zack Moore. I’m a librarian who works at Novelist and I work on training NoveList users.

Rebecca Vnuk: So today we are gonna help you find some read alikes for UnWorld by Jayson Greene. So as you just heard in Steve’s interview with Jayson we’ve got AI, and we have future, and we have dystopia, but we also have a focus on people and their feelings. That’s not… usually when you’re looking for science fiction read alikes, you’re not thinking about everyday normal people’s human feelings, right? Real human feelings. But this one, we’ve got this very, very deep focus on grief.

So I decided to look through our science fiction offerings at Library Reads, and the best way to do that, I wanted to put a plug for our archive. We do have our archive on the website and it is a Google spreadsheet of nearly 1,900 titles at this point, which is so exciting. And you can sort the list in a number of different ways, and one of the ways that’s very easy is by genre. So I immediately just sorted everything by science fiction to try and pick out, looking at all these, what can I match up?

So in doing that, the first one that I came across is actually a book that I read and really enjoyed and I thought, “Oh, this would be a good match for people,” and it’s The Ferryman: A Novel by Justin Cronin, and that appeared on our May 2023 Library Reads list. And the annotation we have for that is, “In a world where people don’t die but are ferried away to be regenerated into a 16-year-old with no memories, Proctor is responsible for making sure the retirees go without a fuss, but he is quickly drawn into a mystery at the heart of their society. The multilayered quality moves this from a poignant story into a thriller into world exploring science fiction.” So we have a lot of layers there. And that annotation is from John Sloan at the Chicago Public Library, and I thought that that would be a really interesting read alike because there’s also grief in this book as well, and I don’t wanna just hammer on the grief subject, but I thought just the feeling in general. Like, I think a lot of times, especially when you’re thinking about hard science fiction, you don’t think of emotions and feelings entering into that, and I know when I was reading this book, you get all the feels from it because here you’ve got this future society and people don’t die, but they definitely leave and you are sort of left behind not really knowing what has happened to your loved ones. You’re supposed to be excited for them because they’re going on to a better place. But are they? It’s really intriguing. So I thought readers who liked UnWorld would also find a lot to like in The Ferryman.

So the second one that I chose is definitely a little different, definitely lighter, but I thought it still would fit the mood, or maybe the setting really is more what I’m looking at. Anyway, my second one is A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. And that came out in July of 2021, so that’s on our July ’21 list. And our annotation for that is, “The quiet life of a tea monk is interrupted when a robot arrives after centuries to honor a promise to check in. The robot cannot return to the wilderness until the question of ‘What do people need?’ Is answered. This is a book readers will recommend for everyone. For readers especially who enjoyed The Bear and The House in the Cerulean Sea.” And that comes from Liz Aleshunas, from the St. Louis Public Library. So yeah, I thought that, again, you’ve got your AI companion, you’ve got future, it’s science fiction with an emotional core. I guess that’s really what I was sort of looking for. So, Zach, how about you? What did you come up with for us?

Zack Moore: Well, before I give you mine, the Becky Chambers, like that book’s just a warm hug too, especially if you’ve just read a grief book, maybe go read a Becky Chambers because it’ll make you feel a lot better about the world. I do have a couple myself. I was trying to think of different aspects. I did go one with grief, but I was trying to also do one that isn’t just about grief, but I did also stay with science fiction for both of my picks.

The first pick that I did, I wanted to do more about the connection between humans and artificial intelligence that we saw in UnWorld. So I picked Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. You might have heard of Ishiguro. He won the Nobel Prize a few years ago, and in Klara and the Sun, he uses his signature skill at characterization to create Klara, who is an artificial friend. Klara is sensitive and observant, and even though human bonds confuse her, she’s willing to take risks when her human teenager, Josie, becomes terminally ill. So there is a little bit of trauma and a little bit of grief in there, but it’s more about their connection. It’s a quiet fable, digs into friendships, connections, and the AI perspective. And it will especially appeal to those who liked the UnWorld bits narrated by Samantha and Aviva. So, if those two are your characters, you definitely wanna check out Klara and the Sun. And a little bonus to this one for movie fans is that Klara and the Sun has been made into a movie and it’s directed by one of my absolute favorite directors, Taika Waititi. And it is set to release sometime in 2025, at least that’s what we’re told. So that was my first pick.

For my second pick, I did go ahead and jump right into the grief of UnWorld, which was a lot. I wanted to find another book that explored grief through the lens of future technology. So if you do want a sad book about robots, you can read Toward Eternity by Anton Hur. This book is speculative fiction, which is just fancy science fiction, and it’s a peek into a near future world where humans can become nano droids with immortal bodies. The book takes the form of a notebook passed down through generations, exploring the metaphysical aspects of nano droids, such as how art shapes people and how we become the stories that we tell about ourselves. Obviously the plot on this one is pretty different from UnWorld, but each book is infused with deep human sadness and each uses big technology advancements as a lens through which we look at our understanding of life, death, and memory. A lot of UnWorld did deal with the memories that the AI characters essentially were fed from their human counterparts, so that melding was really an excellent choice for me.

Rebecca Vnuk: Those are really great picks, Zack, and I wanted to point out something that you said at the beginning that is a prime example of great readers advisory service, finding read alikes. You immediately identified that the Becky Chambers book would be a great follow up to UnWorld. I love that because so many times when we’re doing reader’s advisory, we think that the person wants exactly what they just read, and that’s something I always try and talk about when I’m doing workshops or things like that, is let’s find out what the reader, not only what are they in the mood for, but maybe what do they want their mood to be, so like they just read this book that left them maybe sad. Maybe they wanna continue that or maybe they want your nice warm hug. I love that, that you used that analogy, that was great. So I think that that’s an excellent thing to, we always sort of default to, “Okay, what’s the fastest and easiest thing I can find?” But then when you have the time and you have the tools, you can be like, “Oh wait, but this is an excellent counterpoint to that.” So finding out what the reader is wanting is key. So I love that. That’s a perfect reader’s advisory tidbit right there.

So thank you so much for being here at the Circ Desk with me, Zack, and we will check you all out next time!