Like many of you, I have a very active DM meme thread with one of my closest girlfriends (hi!). Daily hourly we fire a range of memes to one another, giggling in our respective time zones. Last week, she sent a post from Saint Hoax, a favorite account of ours (can we crown them queen of the internet, already?).
The meme was of a new(ish) TikTok trend of influencers acting like robots. Reacting to gifts sent from their followers, they’d oscillate between feigning baby voices to eating imaginary ice cream cones. It seemed like they were auctioneers who fell down a rabbit hole and wound up in The Twilight Zone. I was fascinated.
Here’s what grabbed me. With AI on the brink of blitzing just about every industry to smithereens, Earth yelling at us to get off her lawn, and cringey tech billionaires threatening to fight each other in a caged death match, becoming a robot arguably has some attractive qualities. To embody a robotic demeanor promises the opportunity to fully check out, disassociate, and let the machinery (operated by whom?) take over. It’s like quiet quitting, but from yourself. It’s equally escapist and assertive and unapologetic, a reasonable response to the dumpster fire we call home, IMO.
Cue the rise of science-fiction content, across mediums. With The Last of Us, Black Mirror, and Yellowjackets continuing to captivate audiences and investigate how far we can probe our species before liquidating ourselves (and everything else we touch), I’m left wondering: When do you become the content you consume? If nothing else, isn’t self-optimization, heralded by the wellness industry, a form of hacking your hardwiring? Are we all just low-key becoming the robotic version of ourselves? Apparently we’ve entered the simulation, we were just too distracted to notice.
Maybe unless you’re a book nerd. Robots have long been key characters in science fiction. They make appearances in “Dune,” “2001: Space Odyssey,” “Cyborg” and many, many others. Sometimes they have emotions, sometimes their coldness enables humankind’s survival. It seems like GenZ is following the latter’s approach.
It should be no surprise, then, that sci-fi literature has been climbing in sales, even while much of publishing and book sales continue to constrict in the wake of post-Covid reopenings. Sci-fi is a now a prime category, not one left for the fringes or outcast middle schoolers. According to research conducted by Gitnux, a marketing strategy firm, fantasy and sci-fiction accounted for about $590 million in annual sales last year. While it remains in romance’s shadow as the leading genre, this isn’t the full picture. Authors like Jennifer Egan and Kazuo Ishiguaro have dabbled in the space and new (or newly translated) work by Djuna, Izumi Suzuki, and Haruki Murakami have also been top sellers. Octavia Butler’s legacy is finally being recognized. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend the apocalypse with a good book, or at least enjoy one as a reprieve from activism and advocacy required to slow the boiling of our planet?
So, then, where does a science fiction-curious reader begin? Below, a starting point. See you on Mars.
Sci-Fi Books for the Burgeoning Robot
“Dune” - Frank Herbert
“Klarna and the Sun” - Kazuo Ishiguro
“Station Eleven” - Emily St. John Mandel
“Hit Parade of Tears” - Izumi Suzuki
“Counterweight” - Djuna
“A Psalm for the Wild Built” - Becky Chambers
“Kindred” - Octavia Butler