Reviewed by David Brizer
Cyborg Fever
by Laurie Sheck
Wiley
June 2025, Paperback, 384 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1961209268
William Shatner (‘Captain Kirk’) of Star Trek fame, had this to say about his real, not television series-inspired, ride into space: “Last year, I had a life-changing experience at 90 years old. I went to space, after decades of playing an iconic science-fiction character who was exploring the universe. I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.
“I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.
“I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.” (cited on social media)
Shatner’s clear vision would make a suitable dedication for Laurie Sheck’s brilliant, phantasmagoric novel, Cyborg Fever. Cyborg Fever is a hallucinatory universe of detached disembodied voices and isolated monads – leptons, bosons, black holes, and human beings — forever striving for a ‘unified field’ but forever defeated by entropy and the forces of dissolution, vast emptiness, and disarray.
In this tale, which will come back to haunt you days and weeks after you’ve read it, frail but steadfast and persistent voices remind us of their isolated plight, rendered infinitely worse by a glut of dystopian technology and its accompanying lexicon. Erwin, giddily named after Erwin Schrodinger, reports from a ‘lab’ where other cryptic characters come and go. ‘Funes’ (namesake of a treasured Borges story), The Cyborg, Deadpool, and Mr. Killebrew, among others, inhabit their respective and mysterious orbits in this super intelligent dystopian bagatelle.
The book’s first section is breathtaking, encompassing a heady tour of some of the most astonishing thinkers and concepts of contemporary physics. But in Sheck, this tour quickly becomes a set of pokes against some of the icons that apocalyptic-minded Americans hold so dear: Mars, infinitely dense galactic rabbit holes, contortions of space-time that age you before you’re ever born, etc.
Sheck’s oracular voice in this novel is huge, giant, standing on the shoulders of a somewhat arcane but glorious literary tradition. The dystopia in Cyborg Fever is the very same dystopia described in Joy Williams’ Harrow, but a bit further down the road…the hallucinatory sequences, the extreme and beautiful lyricism of many of the pages, arise from Sheck’s background as a poet and her deep devotion and debt to literary forebears like Nerval, Rimbaud and other prose poets of a ‘bygone’ era. Echoes of Angela Carter abound as well.
There’s more, so much more. Readers will especially treasure the section on Laika, the Russian dog sent into space. During the second orbit, the cabin temperature in Laika’s satellite rose to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. After several hours of horrible suffering, the dog died.
Cyborg Fever is not just a cautionary tale, it is an elegy inspired by the opprobrium of false gods (= technology), false goals (= Mars and beyond), and the infinite darkness and emptiness of deep boundless person-less space.
About the reviewer: David Allen Brizer is a NYC-based author and book critic. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, The American Journal of Psychiatry, Rain Taxi, others. His short stories have been published in AGNI, Exquisite Corpse, Word Riot, among others. Brizer’s non-fiction books include Quitting Smoking for Dummies, and Addiction & Recovery for Beginners. His second novel, The Secret Doctrine of V.H. Rand, will be published by Fomite in January 2024, a follow-up to his Victor Rand (2014.) At present he is working on a collection of short stories and a metafiction about literary surrealists.