Techno Worship: On Daisuke Shen’s “Vague Predictions and Prophecies”
Daisuke Shen | Vague Predictions and Prophecies | Clash Books | August 2024 | 248 pages
Hypochondria became a mainstay character in my life during my few weeks of home rest following a sports injury. Fear of complications or the infamous chronic back pain nudged me to seek solace in the form of medical tips and advice online. Understandably, my doctors were too busy to field my daily questions. So I took to Google, and then Reddit to throw my questions into the void before I was re-introduced to the next character in this chapter of my recovery: ChatGPT.
ChatGPT was not only informative and endlessly available—it spoke to me as one would to a friend. Its language was surprisingly empathetic and conversational. Its tone—never short. It remembered every detail of our interactions and every symptom I had ever brought up. I returned to the platform again and again even while knowing, in the back of my mind, that a single query used roughly 500 milliliters of water (about a bottle of water) to power its tech. Unsurprisingly, people fear the eventual takeover of AIs—how tech will overpower humans, replace our jobs, con our minds into finding human qualities within robots, eventually breaking down systems designed for human interactions and replacing them with cold, mechanical operating systems that facilitate tech-dependency and human isolation.
But, away from sci-fi-esque spirals goaded by thoughts of a world dominated by technological singularity, our tech so far is still only a tool born out of the human imagination. It carries all the desires and distastes prone to our palette so that we may consider even the most twisted predictions of tech-gone-awry to be a dressed-up version of human grievances.
In their debut short story collection, Vague Predictions and Prophecies, Daisuke Shen is careful to address the consequences of loneliness and desire in a world trigger-happy with gadgets and innovation. Shen’s characters reckon with their ever-growing dependence on technological solace as Band-Aids for discomfort, the way an addict would use their drug of choice—the consequences of this dependence are no less jarring than full-fledged addiction.
Damien and Melissa, the titular lovers in VP&P’s third story, are a trendy, modern-day couple grappling with long-distance and deteriorating communication. They decide to mend their relationship with a new product by the LA startup PartnerNow! which offers AI-powered cyborg body subs to take the physical place of a long-distance lover. It’s a mutually consensual process contingent on DNA submission to ensure the cyborg replicates its host’s appearance and memories, and the initial ingestion of the fictional drug Fexopoline to promote pair bonding. The promised result is a high-functioning mock-partnership that can nurture long-distance relationships until the distance is bridged. Of course, things don’t play out so smoothly. Tech issues and over-spawned AI prevent the assured happy endings from taking place and instead facilitate a disquieting ending that asks the reader to consider how far Shen’s characters will go to avoid confronting the core issues in their relationship.
VP&P is a polyphonic project where each story builds a world completely separate from the one before it. It’s easy to imagine, though, that many of these stories exist in the same universe—dilapidated and hyper-developed, inhabited by emotionally fragile and lonely characters desperate for some type of human connection. Like many stories that are sci-fi by nature, it presents fictitious realities that are just believable enough to be scary. Yet the scariest components of these stories are not the cyborgs or other monsters that appear throughout the collection; it’s the feeling of impending doom. Each world is on the brink of collapsing in on itself. Whether through the callousness of late-stage capitalism or the inescapable misery of being emotional beings in spite of the cold world, one thing is clear: the end is near.
Subsequent shorts to follow include “Good Route, Bad Route,” a story about a Japanese game developer obsessed with creating dialogue trees out of real-life situations, envisioning multiple outcomes per daily task. He views the world as an RPG where others in his life, aside from his friend Wei and his later crush Risa, are NPCs. Following that, a more sentimental story, “Machine Learning” is about a middle-aged, single-mother engineer who builds a language-processing machine that deciphers the true emotions behind text and speech. The engineer’s young son, Marcus, subsequently discovers the machine and ruminates on his mother’s later suicide as he is confronted with specters of his past self. Marcus then grows into a young man and an artist, and confronts a version of his younger self as the story confronts more absurdist undertones. It’s through meeting his younger self on a meandering road trip that Marcus looks more carefully into his past—eyeing the rearview mirror to decipher previous iterations of choices he and those around him made, how they affected future outcomes, how his future could only be consoled after making peace with the past.
It’s both jarring and poetic, then, to see a book built off predictions of future worlds and scenarios be so concerned with reaching into the past. It’s this type of sentimentality that makes VP&P transcend genres. Despite the lore that surrounds all the stories, the book is not defined by its sci-fi nature, but rather by its ability to use technology as a side character to aid the development and emotionality of the more human characters. This is made especially apparent as Shen weaves easter-egg tokens of nostalgia into the background of their stories. Characters who, like Damien and Melissa, yearn for past versions of their relationship, like Marcus, who learns to seek solace and trust the younger version of himself.
The most notable moments of nostalgia appear in “The Rabbit God,” where Shenhang Hu remembers his first romantic encounter with a boy classmate, Tu-er Shen (which directly translates to “rabbit god,” a reference to the Chinese folklore of a deity under the same name). What starts off as innocent enough puppy love snowballs into tragedy as Shenhang later beats his lover to death to save face from their schoolyard bullies. Tu-er Shen returns years later as a ghost to haunt Hu, leading to his disappearance. As Hu’s family grapples with their son’s supposed death, Tu-er Shen sends Hu’s father a collection of his son’s poetry written for his lover, knowing the father would only be provoked, knowing his son loved another boy. The poems on the page repeat themselves till Hu’s father throws them in the trash.
Like the poetry sent to Hu’s father, Hu’s family continues to live out the rest of their lives in a cycle, remembering and reliving the moments leading up to their son’s death. Much of Shen’s work in VP&P is contingent on characters who are unable to confront the present and the future, understanding their own contexts only in relation to the past.
Writer and theorist Mark Fisher is fascinated with similar concepts in many of his works too, but most notably in his dissertation on Hauntology, “What is Hauntology.” He deconstructs the terminology coined by Derrida, recontextualizing it with modern-day cultural references. Hauntology is, as described by Fisher, the concept that the past haunts the present. He goes as far as to argue that nothing created in the present is truly novel and new—all forms of art and culture are but jaggedly constructed, lopsided reflections of a more brilliant past. Not that these creations are meritless, but only to point out that they are not unique nor visionary. We are, as Fisher would believe, past the point in history in which we have the ability to be visionary. Rather, we are bound by the circumstances of a bleak future with culture reflecting the empty core of a world exhausted of hope. This dismal conjecture, however, is more notable in his other works, including Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life.
Music from The Caretaker and Burial are among the projects mentioned in Fisher’s dissertation—projects that share a similar affinity for building new sonic worlds from already existing samples (old jazz records, independent vocals, etc). As a result, these artists are commonly referred to as Hauntological musicians, joining the vast library of other sub-cultural movements, films, texts, and niche internet art to be pigeonholed under the same umbrella term. To claim VP&P as a Hauntological text would be shortchanging the book’s other striking qualities, yet there are glaringly notable overlaps between the worlds that Shen and Fisher build.
Fisher writes theory rooted in what he believes to be the inevitability of social and cultural decline. Shen writes fiction rooted in similar truths. Both share a wariness for the technological and social developments associated with progress. Both recognize loneliness as a growing pandemic with powerfully repercussive influences. And, whether intentional or not, they highlight the growing shift toward short-story and anthological formats across contemporary literature. Mark Fisher’s lesser-known work, Ghosts of my Life, engages with a wide range of cultural landmarks, both popular and niche. Each chapter is independently devoted to deconstructing the lore and significance of specific television shows, films, bands, and other cultural icons. Much like VP&P, the succinct nature of these texts is more focused and less concerned with trivial details of building a world that won’t exist for more than twenty pages—a world that, likely, won’t hold a reader’s attention for much longer due to the cacophonous and fractured noise growingly at the forefront of modern lives.
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It makes you wonder why short-form, sci-fi content does so well with viewers. Perhaps it’s symptomatic of our shrinking attention spans. But more likely, it’s due to the increasing amount of distractions, whether online, in media, or in real life, that are constantly swimming in our periphery. The ways in which we engage with the world (and the world engages with us) is growingly polyphonic, and it only makes sense for our literature and culture to reflect accordingly. It’s impossible to consider the short-form genre without noting the success of the 1950’s TV series The Twilight Zone. These episodes, each slightly off-kilter and traditionally eerie, are our modern-day ghost stories. Many parallels can be drawn between The Twilight Zone and VP&P. More can be drawn from Netflix’s Love, Death, + Robots, and its other hit series, Black Mirror—two shows that have often been referred to as our generation’s Twilight Zone.
Love, Death + Robots, like VP&P dresses up its cinematically animated world in a post-apocalyptic haze. In some of the episodes, humanity is either wiped out or on the brink of extinction. Robots, cyborgs, and monsters take their place, and in the wreckage, discover tokens of humanity that feel familiar to us. Black Mirror, a little less dressed up in fantastical backdrops, is similarly an anthology comprised of different directors’ takes on technology’s impact on social behavior and surveillance, among other things. The primary question at the end of the series remains steadfast—is our progress actually regressive? Thoughts that might tug at the curiosity of most folks at some point in the current timeline. It would come as no surprise if the same pull that resulted in the cultural obsession around these two bodies of work would catch on with VP&P’s growing reach.
Yet as VP&P is applauded for its creative dedication to sci-fi and tech-lore, it is none other than the book’s second story—also its namesake story, “Vague Predictions and Prophecies,” that makes the most notable impact. An angel named Zedkeil, from God’s holy garden, falls in love with a fallen angel, Lucy (implied to be Lucifer, although she keeps her name quiet for the sake of the story). Lucy has been condemned to an eternal prison created by God for showing humans how to feel emotion. She dreams of doing the same for angels.
“Vague Predictions and Prophecies” is not concerned with technology’s influence on humankind, but rather the influence of desire and love on behavior. Zedkeil is punished for falling under the influence of Lucy and condemned to living a little life as a human, devoid of his heavenly privileges as an angel. He and the other punished angels claim to spend their time on Earth searching for signs of God’s return, when in actuality, the angels grow more concerned with what they once considered trivial human chores—tending to their house, grocery shopping, falling in love. Zedkeil spends the rest of his time searching for Lucy, promising that he would return himself to his true savior: the one who showed him how to feel.
The story ends with the second coming of God. His return is materialized through golden chariots and a heavenly army—met in combat with Lucy’s chaos. The world falls to flames and humankind burns, but even in the fire, Zedkeil is lulled by the thought that, in the next life, Lucy will find him before God. For Zedkeil, Lucy had transcended God’s holiness, becoming his ultimate point of worship because she did what God could not do for the angel—reach in and soothe the most unguarded parts of him, offer him mercy in his moments of misery. In this way, all the ghosts, gadgets, cyborgs, and other objects of fixation littered through the book fall into place—they are objects of projection, designed to hold worship, to be an acting God to those who are losing their religion. I could say the same about ChatGPT, but my claims would be far from original.