Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep: A Guest Post by Paul Tremblay

This genre-bending new story from Paul Tremblay is a hilarious and horrific blend of sci-fi and horror. A young woman is tasked with assisting a man whose mind has been taken over by AI as he unexpectedly finds himself in a strange, trippy reality. Read on for an exclusive essay from Paul on writing Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep. 

DEAD BUT DREAMING OF ELECTRIC SHEEP’s initial spark, ‘What if someone’s dead body could be transported by remote control?’, occurred while I was reading Mary Roach’s Stiff, a fun nonfiction survey of what can and might happen to corpses. Fast forward a year or two later to the heady days of late 2023 and I was embroiled in a class action lawsuit suing Open AI¹ on behalf of writers who have had their books stolen by AI/LLMs. That what-if turned into the wild anti-AI mashup of Philip K Dick and Weekend at Bernies you hold in your metaphorical hands².

Let me introduce you to Julia Flang, an economically struggling twenty-four-year-old woman hired by her estranged mother to pilot a “mostly dead” man across the county via a remote control consol on a cell phone. Because of Julia’s complicated family dynamics and her close relationship with her film-obsessed Uncle Fun, Julia seeks refuge from stress in older movies, especially her favorite The Big Lebowski, which she quotes from liberally. Julia is the heart and conscience of the novel, and our “What are we doing?” stand-in. I don’t know about you, but I find myself asking “What are we doing?” multiple times a day.

The character of Julia started with bits and pieces³ of my two early-20s kids and some of their friends⁴ including a few of Cole’s college friends from Occidental College in Los Angeles. One of the joys of my now adult relationship with Cole and Emma is seeing them experience the movies and music that I loved when I was their age. Rediscovering the *cough* classics is hardly unique to the Gen Zers who once lived in my house. To wit, a few years ago, the supremely evil Spotify released an overview of what music decades were most streamed with younger users and the 90s was number one or two. The largely homogeneous mainstream culture I was introduced to as a kid started changing/expanding in ’80s and ’90s with the advent of cable TV, the VCR, and eventually the birth of the web. I’m fascinated by how Gen Z makes use of the relatively easy and democratized⁵ access to more than fifty years-worth of art⁶ and pop culture and how that can’t help but influence their outlook on our current hellscape and the one that awaits them in future.

So yeah, the quick-witted, Dude-quoting, Julia Flang leads us through a satirized⁷ corporate tech nightmare while attuned to how our brains get rewired by our art and our experience. I like to think Julia is horrified at those who want to tear our humanity (as flawed as it is) down and have it regurgitated back as slop (for a price⁸), slop that too many of you are okay with lapping up. Okay, so Julia is a little angry too. She should be.

1. https://llmlitigation.com

2. Please considering holding the book in your real hands.

3. Not literal.

4. Sorry friends and family, it’s the price of knowing me, even glancingly.

5. For now.

6. I refuse to use the catch all word ‘media’ because I’m a cranky old(er) person.

7. Not all that satirized from where I sit.

8. currency is dollars plus bits of your soul