If I could state the novel’s central premise in one sentence, here it is: Intellectual freedom begins where interrogation is permitted. If I could add another distillation, it would be: Imagination, for me, is a moral practice—a way of seeing beyond self-preservation toward empathy.
In these early days of the AI reordering of all things human, this battle within the larger culture wars has been made to seem insignificant. Whether realist or anti-realist, we are up against the same problem: the end of reading, the end of the book, and certainly the end of anything as quaint as “aesthetics.” AI gives not a fuck about beauty.
While Afterlife is in no way a memoir, it’s threaded through with family history, mostly about my next oldest sister, who in real life died in 2020. She didn’t die of Covid, but of some mysterious other illness during the gloomiest, harshest period of the first big surge of the pandemic. Because of the circumstances, I didn’t visit her when she was in the hospital, and our family didn’t hold a memorial for her for another two years. During this weirdly empty time, when I knew she was dead but still hadn’t marked her passing in a way that felt real, I began to approach incidents I would not have put on paper while there was any chance she could have read them.
Translator’s Note: What follows is a translation from the Chinese of an excerpt from the novel The Lost Lives of Lena Wu (Wúlìnà shīqù de rénshēng) by Yvonne Fung. I came across it in the form of loose pages lying unassociated among my father’s papers.
Upon reflection, we realize most of his accomplishments have been associated with hats. When he lived in a cellar, he existed behind the burrowing beam of a miner’s hat. That was the closest he came to being a poet.
Fiction by Claire Bateman, author of The Pillow Museum.
Ever since the international oligarchy monetized the dream web, advertisements have been streaming continuously through everyone’s brains during sleep, flooding even the inchoate pre-consciousness of the unborn as they tumble in amniotic darkness preparing for a lifetime of retail opportunities.
