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Dear Cyborgs
A fractal fable about the possibility and power of protest as told by three superheroes on their lunch break
In a small Midwestern town, two Asian American boys bond over their outcast status and a mutual love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternative or perhaps future universe, a team of superheroes ponders modern society during their time off. Between black-ops missions and rescuing hostages, they swap stories of artistic malaise and muse on the seemingly inescapable grip of market economics.
Gleefully toying with the conventions of the novel, Dear Cyborgs weaves together the story of a friendship’s dissolution with a provocative and lively meditation on protest. Through a series of linked monologues, a surprising cast of characters explores narratives of resistance—protest art, eco-terrorists, Occupy squatters, pyromaniacal militants—and the extent to which any of these can truly withstand the pragmatic demands of contemporary capitalism. All the while, a mysterious cybernetic book of clairvoyance beckons, and trusted allies start to disappear.
Playfully blending comic-book villains with cultural critiques, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a fleet-footed literary exploration of power, friendship, and creativity that recalls authors like Tom McCarthy and Valeria Luiselli. Ambitious and knowing, it braids together hard-boiled detective pulps, subversive philosophy, and Hollywood chase scenes, unfolding like the composites and revelations of a dream.
In a small Midwestern town, two Asian American boys bond over their outcast status and a mutual love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternative or perhaps future universe, a team of superheroes ponders modern society during their time off. Between black-ops missions and rescuing hostages, they swap stories of artistic malaise and muse on the seemingly inescapable grip of market economics.
Gleefully toying with the conventions of the novel, Dear Cyborgs weaves together the story of a friendship’s dissolution with a provocative and lively meditation on protest. Through a series of linked monologues, a surprising cast of characters explores narratives of resistance—protest art, eco-terrorists, Occupy squatters, pyromaniacal militants—and the extent to which any of these can truly withstand the pragmatic demands of contemporary capitalism. All the while, a mysterious cybernetic book of clairvoyance beckons, and trusted allies start to disappear.
Playfully blending comic-book villains with cultural critiques, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a fleet-footed literary exploration of power, friendship, and creativity that recalls authors like Tom McCarthy and Valeria Luiselli. Ambitious and knowing, it braids together hard-boiled detective pulps, subversive philosophy, and Hollywood chase scenes, unfolding like the composites and revelations of a dream.
163 pages, Paperback
First published June 6, 2017
58 people are currently reading
2389 people want to read
About the author
Eugene Lim
16 books299 followersEugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008; Coffee House Press 2024), The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013; Coffee House Press 2026), Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017), and Search History (Coffee House Press, 2021). His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Baffler, Granta, Dazed, Little Star, The Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Your Impossible Voice, Vestiges and elsewhere. He is the librarian at Hunter College High School, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Jackson Heights, NY.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 261 reviews
January 25, 2021
Q:
(When I say cyborgs, of course I mean us.) ... if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we’ve outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn’t such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.) (c)
Q:
“Superheroes going out to lunch, complaining to their therapists, unsure about their parenting styles. A chase scene where the driver and his passenger, while making split-second decisions, talk about different forms of resistance to power. A murder mystery where the detective receives a call at the crime scene from her father and she tells him her theories about the history of suicide protests around the world, analyses of madness and megalomania versus desperate agency, and the dangers of aestheticizing violence.” (c) So, this is how the ideation of this book came to be?
A very strange read: a mishmash of actors and protesting and superheroes and writers and politician hobbyists and clairvoyance and some Miljear economy tumbling and personal breakdowns and there's this villainette who needs one of the superheroes to listen to her life story and back to protesting (including kidnappings/hijackings and making people eat their phones)... I don't know about phones but the author's computer someone should have eaten. As a protest against unintelligible writing.
I was ready to throw in the 2nd star for some phrases that actually made sense and a nice paragraph below on 'city ghostness'. But, well, then I thought better of it and it's back to 1 star.
A LOT of mumbling on what protesting is. Quite stupid, frankly. You can't just protest abstractly, you have to protest against something and that is what wasn't really discussed in much detail. It was all like:
Q:
“So I think that a protest,” she went on, “like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protester for the protester.”
She saw I was about to interrupt so said, “One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn’t be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some other level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protester it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protester, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.” (c) Come on... And I'm not in any hurry to become a fan of that grammar.
And so on:
Q:
When the NSA director was at home masturbating to pornography, animated heads of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden appeared on his computer screen. (c) Spoilsports!
Q:
I saw this piece of constipated shit—the themes and events of my short life—transmuted into a golden narrative that I channeled into a roller-coaster picaresque of eventual triumph from darker forces, something that came to be gloriously subtitled: The Jack Hu Story. (c)
Q:
I was ecstatic. The anonymity of the ghostwriting contract gave me permission to use all the underhanded emotionally manipulative tricks I couldn’t have borne to see enter the world under my own name. But knowing that these would merely appear as a higher-end version of hackwork, what harm, I thought, could it do to myself or others? (c) Nice idea.
Q:
Together Muriel and I form a secret vigilante superhero group called Team Chaos. Even though she works as a social worker and even though she’d rather be a poet and a painter, Muriel is actually a foundling extraterrestrial sent from a far superior civilization. She can fly, walk through walls, and shoot powerful beams from the palms of her hands. This origin and her superpowers were revealed to her only on her thirty-fifth birthday (a shock, as you might imagine). I’m a mere Earthling and therefore far less inherently powerful, but I’ve mastered various physical disciplines and martial arts as well as having proven myself in battle with a certain tactical wiliness, which seems to impress. Despite these accomplishments, as you no doubt will notice, I tend to be depressed and anxious much of the time. Dave has recently joined Muriel and me on a few adventures, including stopping Boss Mighty’s mind-control scheme and helping inoculate the planet against the deadly Xfoolinghi space disease. He is very good with a slingshot.
In no time at all we were in our secret-identity costumes and had arrived at the police commissioner’s underground bunker. (c) Huh?
Q:
It’s all this new technology,” he began. “It’s really taking a toll on my ability to concentrate. Every time I want to go sit and read a novel or even listen to some music, I can only do so for a few minutes before I get distracted. Even when I watch a movie at home I’m constantly looking things up, the names of actors or other movies or just trivial facts. (c)
Q:
Her movement was so sudden I didn’t have time to turn and was blinded. When I partly recovered, just a half minute later, I saw a wall had swung open to reveal secret stairs. I sprinted after her but was too late as I saw Mistleto speeding away on a motorcycle through tunnelworks that no doubt took her through an elaborately capable and planned getaway. I barely had time to curse and take cover before the Tomahawk missiles I’d ordered came raining down in a catastrophic and thunderous torrent. (c)
Q:
The president, several members of Congress, and two Supreme Court justices had had their emails and drives compromised. In addition to the usual infidelities and sex trafficking, the drug habits and corporate kickbacks, it was deemed most embarrassingly revealed that these politicians were atrocious hobbyists. Several of them wrote confessional poetry, two were authors of soft-porn fan fiction, and the president himself painted psychoanalytically revealing self-portraits in which he unintentionally confessed he was a child-man, a buffoon manipulated by devious puppet masters.
The CIA decided this information could never become public, and so a massive effort was made to find the hacker and hide the evidence. (c) This is so much fun.
Q:
Losing everything does gift you with freedom if nothing else. That’s a rewrite of a pithier song refrain.(c)
Q:
For the experience, I invite you to participate in city ghostness. It’s an odd sensation that quickly becomes almost comfortable, almost second nature. Now human exchange has been reduced to transaction. That’s what makes the ghosting possible. We even prefer it, at first. It’s less energy to simply watch the numbers go up or down than try to confront a person’s expression. And we don’t realize until it’s done that we’ve disappeared, gone invisible beside the transaction. We uncloak when we need to, I suppose, for touch, for anger or love. But if you have no reason or opportunity to, then you can live for quite a long time as a ghost, as an unseen agent in the market, softly padding to the void. Try it. It’s little more than a loosening up, a letting go.
I’d test it out quite literally. I’d go to the busiest plaza, the most packed rooms, the jammed streets. And I’d stand just to the side, next to the thoroughfare or just against the jostle of bar bodies in Brownian motion. And the world would revolve around me, even, it felt, flow through me, and neither it nor I would sense it. We’d pass by each other untouched. (c) One of the better parts of the book.
Q:
And so Muriel then cut the bright blue wire on the console. Fortunately for us this stopped the countdown to the lethal explosion and the city was saved. (c) And again to the super heroic deeds. Gosh!
Q:
In an alternative universe I had dinner... (c)
Q:
An odd story, it was composed of many shorter, similar stories. If it was a confessional novel it was also a puzzle with a fractal structure, and it mutated and yet duplicated its shape by my changing focus and perspective on it. (c)
Q:
I start noting the changes over the next month. First only isolated episodes but then a flurry that merged with current time until I thought I was going insane. I’d pick up the newspaper and read a profile of the newly elected mayor but then would be confused because, later in the week, I’d hear, on live TV, the voting results come in. I’d walk down the street and see a car accident. It would happen right in front of me, but then I’d blink and all evidence of it would be gone, as if the camera angle hadn’t changed but a sudden jump cut had removed all the evidence from the scene. My stock charts would project forward, and I was at first overjoyed but then frightened, because making vast sums suddenly became trivial. I passed a storefront and saw raging fire, which disappeared when I shook my head—but then this same building was ashes a few days later. (c)
Q:
...“you see the future but it’s helpless. It’s all incredible, fantastic—at first. Then it turns horrible. Clairvoyance. Maybe there’s a way out. Maybe it’s not hopeless, not impossible. I’m giving this to you. It’s a curse but maybe it’s also a shot. I’m sorry. Read it. You’ll understand.” (c)
Q:
I put the book in a box and put the box underneath my bed.
Years passed. (c)
Q:
They started hijacking the Google buses and the Facebook buses and the Apple buses and the eBay buses—that is, the special corporate vehicles that shepherded the Content Strategists and Sales VPs and Analytics Managers and Interaction Engineers and Risk Analysts and Data Scientists, and all the other employees of the internet empires to their quote campuses in the South Bay. One person did it but then dozens followed suit. The first to do it had a gun and muscled his way onto a bus, kicked everyone off, and then led the cops on a televised high-speed chase through the Presidio before he ran the bus into a building and died. He was, however, instantly martyred, because the following week a coordinated bunch copycatted. They hijacked several buses, either kicking everyone off or keeping them hostage. Groups would take over a bus, empty it, and then set it on fire. One insane ex-hippie made all his hostages eat their phones. (c)
Q:
I kept circling and people continued to gather around my orbit. I was glad and awed to see the bus broken, but in my circling, I began to feel the bus wasn’t yet beyond recovery... (c) Again with protesting or, better put, vandalism...
And this.... Ugh....
Q:
“I turned to see a black guy about my age, tall with a little roundness to him—maybe a tech kid, I thought when I saw his hip glasses. But then he said, ‘That’s nice what you did.’
“‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.
“‘You started it. You did that,’ he said. I shrugged.
“Then he said, ‘Do you want a blow job?’
“‘What?’ I said.
“‘I’ll suck you off. Not for money. I mean. Just as a thank-you.’
“I smiled. ‘That’s okay.’ And I added, ‘Thanks.’
“‘You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I want to do it.’ ...
I heard the police sirens coming. He led me just a few blocks away and took me down a dark side street and there, behind a dumpster, he unzipped my pants and gave me an expert and gratifying blow job. I groaned and came. (c) This is what? Sex sells vandalism?
Q:
“He gave me another smile. Together we walked out into the street. We headed back toward the burning bus.
“More and more police had arrived, were arriving, and this itself had attracted a new crowd. The growing throng was chanting and beginning to taunt the cops....
“Suddenly, from beside me, the man who had given me the blow job was grabbed by a cop. I saw him get hit viciously two times with a baton. He cried out and crumpled and then raised his head to look at me, to see what I had done and what I would do. I hadn’t moved. I didn’t say anything. As soon as he looked at me, I turned around and pushed my way back through the crowd, and then I walked away. (c) So, basically, the guy who provoked the crowd to start rioting, walks free? Very deep... yawn!
And, of course, we couldn't have done without a healthy dose of gibberish:
Q:
Cloud versus fog. Indra’s net versus mirrored pirate servers. Worldwide web versus world. The internet of things versus a panopticon versus irreducible shame. Hacktivism versus feeds versus hunger strike. First-person shooter versus first-person shooter versus first-person shooter versus. (c)
Personally, I felt like I might be an unwitting participant of this dialogue (yes, it happens here):
Q:
...she said, “The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings.”
“What?” I said.
“I tried shoplifting and arson at first, then participation in electoral politics both at the local and state level. I contemplated car theft and assassination. Social work and immigration law. At night I think about the Unabomber or buying large tracts of Midwestern land. None of it makes sense.”
I shook my head. “What?” I asked again. (c) I'm sure many readers can relate to this exchange, since the topics make about as much sense.
(When I say cyborgs, of course I mean us.) ... if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we’ve outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn’t such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.) (c)
Q:
“Superheroes going out to lunch, complaining to their therapists, unsure about their parenting styles. A chase scene where the driver and his passenger, while making split-second decisions, talk about different forms of resistance to power. A murder mystery where the detective receives a call at the crime scene from her father and she tells him her theories about the history of suicide protests around the world, analyses of madness and megalomania versus desperate agency, and the dangers of aestheticizing violence.” (c) So, this is how the ideation of this book came to be?
A very strange read: a mishmash of actors and protesting and superheroes and writers and politician hobbyists and clairvoyance and some Miljear economy tumbling and personal breakdowns and there's this villainette who needs one of the superheroes to listen to her life story and back to protesting (including kidnappings/hijackings and making people eat their phones)... I don't know about phones but the author's computer someone should have eaten. As a protest against unintelligible writing.
I was ready to throw in the 2nd star for some phrases that actually made sense and a nice paragraph below on 'city ghostness'. But, well, then I thought better of it and it's back to 1 star.
A LOT of mumbling on what protesting is. Quite stupid, frankly. You can't just protest abstractly, you have to protest against something and that is what wasn't really discussed in much detail. It was all like:
Q:
“So I think that a protest,” she went on, “like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protester for the protester.”
She saw I was about to interrupt so said, “One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn’t be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some other level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protester it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protester, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.” (c) Come on... And I'm not in any hurry to become a fan of that grammar.
And so on:
Q:
When the NSA director was at home masturbating to pornography, animated heads of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden appeared on his computer screen. (c) Spoilsports!
Q:
I saw this piece of constipated shit—the themes and events of my short life—transmuted into a golden narrative that I channeled into a roller-coaster picaresque of eventual triumph from darker forces, something that came to be gloriously subtitled: The Jack Hu Story. (c)
Q:
I was ecstatic. The anonymity of the ghostwriting contract gave me permission to use all the underhanded emotionally manipulative tricks I couldn’t have borne to see enter the world under my own name. But knowing that these would merely appear as a higher-end version of hackwork, what harm, I thought, could it do to myself or others? (c) Nice idea.
Q:
Together Muriel and I form a secret vigilante superhero group called Team Chaos. Even though she works as a social worker and even though she’d rather be a poet and a painter, Muriel is actually a foundling extraterrestrial sent from a far superior civilization. She can fly, walk through walls, and shoot powerful beams from the palms of her hands. This origin and her superpowers were revealed to her only on her thirty-fifth birthday (a shock, as you might imagine). I’m a mere Earthling and therefore far less inherently powerful, but I’ve mastered various physical disciplines and martial arts as well as having proven myself in battle with a certain tactical wiliness, which seems to impress. Despite these accomplishments, as you no doubt will notice, I tend to be depressed and anxious much of the time. Dave has recently joined Muriel and me on a few adventures, including stopping Boss Mighty’s mind-control scheme and helping inoculate the planet against the deadly Xfoolinghi space disease. He is very good with a slingshot.
In no time at all we were in our secret-identity costumes and had arrived at the police commissioner’s underground bunker. (c) Huh?
Q:
It’s all this new technology,” he began. “It’s really taking a toll on my ability to concentrate. Every time I want to go sit and read a novel or even listen to some music, I can only do so for a few minutes before I get distracted. Even when I watch a movie at home I’m constantly looking things up, the names of actors or other movies or just trivial facts. (c)
Q:
Her movement was so sudden I didn’t have time to turn and was blinded. When I partly recovered, just a half minute later, I saw a wall had swung open to reveal secret stairs. I sprinted after her but was too late as I saw Mistleto speeding away on a motorcycle through tunnelworks that no doubt took her through an elaborately capable and planned getaway. I barely had time to curse and take cover before the Tomahawk missiles I’d ordered came raining down in a catastrophic and thunderous torrent. (c)
Q:
The president, several members of Congress, and two Supreme Court justices had had their emails and drives compromised. In addition to the usual infidelities and sex trafficking, the drug habits and corporate kickbacks, it was deemed most embarrassingly revealed that these politicians were atrocious hobbyists. Several of them wrote confessional poetry, two were authors of soft-porn fan fiction, and the president himself painted psychoanalytically revealing self-portraits in which he unintentionally confessed he was a child-man, a buffoon manipulated by devious puppet masters.
The CIA decided this information could never become public, and so a massive effort was made to find the hacker and hide the evidence. (c) This is so much fun.
Q:
Losing everything does gift you with freedom if nothing else. That’s a rewrite of a pithier song refrain.(c)
Q:
For the experience, I invite you to participate in city ghostness. It’s an odd sensation that quickly becomes almost comfortable, almost second nature. Now human exchange has been reduced to transaction. That’s what makes the ghosting possible. We even prefer it, at first. It’s less energy to simply watch the numbers go up or down than try to confront a person’s expression. And we don’t realize until it’s done that we’ve disappeared, gone invisible beside the transaction. We uncloak when we need to, I suppose, for touch, for anger or love. But if you have no reason or opportunity to, then you can live for quite a long time as a ghost, as an unseen agent in the market, softly padding to the void. Try it. It’s little more than a loosening up, a letting go.
I’d test it out quite literally. I’d go to the busiest plaza, the most packed rooms, the jammed streets. And I’d stand just to the side, next to the thoroughfare or just against the jostle of bar bodies in Brownian motion. And the world would revolve around me, even, it felt, flow through me, and neither it nor I would sense it. We’d pass by each other untouched. (c) One of the better parts of the book.
Q:
And so Muriel then cut the bright blue wire on the console. Fortunately for us this stopped the countdown to the lethal explosion and the city was saved. (c) And again to the super heroic deeds. Gosh!
Q:
In an alternative universe I had dinner... (c)
Q:
An odd story, it was composed of many shorter, similar stories. If it was a confessional novel it was also a puzzle with a fractal structure, and it mutated and yet duplicated its shape by my changing focus and perspective on it. (c)
Q:
I start noting the changes over the next month. First only isolated episodes but then a flurry that merged with current time until I thought I was going insane. I’d pick up the newspaper and read a profile of the newly elected mayor but then would be confused because, later in the week, I’d hear, on live TV, the voting results come in. I’d walk down the street and see a car accident. It would happen right in front of me, but then I’d blink and all evidence of it would be gone, as if the camera angle hadn’t changed but a sudden jump cut had removed all the evidence from the scene. My stock charts would project forward, and I was at first overjoyed but then frightened, because making vast sums suddenly became trivial. I passed a storefront and saw raging fire, which disappeared when I shook my head—but then this same building was ashes a few days later. (c)
Q:
...“you see the future but it’s helpless. It’s all incredible, fantastic—at first. Then it turns horrible. Clairvoyance. Maybe there’s a way out. Maybe it’s not hopeless, not impossible. I’m giving this to you. It’s a curse but maybe it’s also a shot. I’m sorry. Read it. You’ll understand.” (c)
Q:
I put the book in a box and put the box underneath my bed.
Years passed. (c)
Q:
They started hijacking the Google buses and the Facebook buses and the Apple buses and the eBay buses—that is, the special corporate vehicles that shepherded the Content Strategists and Sales VPs and Analytics Managers and Interaction Engineers and Risk Analysts and Data Scientists, and all the other employees of the internet empires to their quote campuses in the South Bay. One person did it but then dozens followed suit. The first to do it had a gun and muscled his way onto a bus, kicked everyone off, and then led the cops on a televised high-speed chase through the Presidio before he ran the bus into a building and died. He was, however, instantly martyred, because the following week a coordinated bunch copycatted. They hijacked several buses, either kicking everyone off or keeping them hostage. Groups would take over a bus, empty it, and then set it on fire. One insane ex-hippie made all his hostages eat their phones. (c)
Q:
I kept circling and people continued to gather around my orbit. I was glad and awed to see the bus broken, but in my circling, I began to feel the bus wasn’t yet beyond recovery... (c) Again with protesting or, better put, vandalism...
And this.... Ugh....
Q:
“I turned to see a black guy about my age, tall with a little roundness to him—maybe a tech kid, I thought when I saw his hip glasses. But then he said, ‘That’s nice what you did.’
“‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.
“‘You started it. You did that,’ he said. I shrugged.
“Then he said, ‘Do you want a blow job?’
“‘What?’ I said.
“‘I’ll suck you off. Not for money. I mean. Just as a thank-you.’
“I smiled. ‘That’s okay.’ And I added, ‘Thanks.’
“‘You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I want to do it.’ ...
I heard the police sirens coming. He led me just a few blocks away and took me down a dark side street and there, behind a dumpster, he unzipped my pants and gave me an expert and gratifying blow job. I groaned and came. (c) This is what? Sex sells vandalism?
Q:
“He gave me another smile. Together we walked out into the street. We headed back toward the burning bus.
“More and more police had arrived, were arriving, and this itself had attracted a new crowd. The growing throng was chanting and beginning to taunt the cops....
“Suddenly, from beside me, the man who had given me the blow job was grabbed by a cop. I saw him get hit viciously two times with a baton. He cried out and crumpled and then raised his head to look at me, to see what I had done and what I would do. I hadn’t moved. I didn’t say anything. As soon as he looked at me, I turned around and pushed my way back through the crowd, and then I walked away. (c) So, basically, the guy who provoked the crowd to start rioting, walks free? Very deep... yawn!
And, of course, we couldn't have done without a healthy dose of gibberish:
Q:
Cloud versus fog. Indra’s net versus mirrored pirate servers. Worldwide web versus world. The internet of things versus a panopticon versus irreducible shame. Hacktivism versus feeds versus hunger strike. First-person shooter versus first-person shooter versus first-person shooter versus. (c)
Personally, I felt like I might be an unwitting participant of this dialogue (yes, it happens here):
Q:
...she said, “The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings.”
“What?” I said.
“I tried shoplifting and arson at first, then participation in electoral politics both at the local and state level. I contemplated car theft and assassination. Social work and immigration law. At night I think about the Unabomber or buying large tracts of Midwestern land. None of it makes sense.”
I shook my head. “What?” I asked again. (c) I'm sure many readers can relate to this exchange, since the topics make about as much sense.
January 1, 2018
Even though I love sci-fi and fantasy, I am not the intended audience for this book.
The book starts with an Asian boy in a small Midwestern town and his friendship with another boy with similar interests and background. Then it becomes something of an exploration on many subjects such as protests, capitalism, resistance, politics and other deep subjects. And this is where it lost me.
I generally enjoy books with a good balance of character and plot and I found this book to be a little bit confusing but very well written. Also, a lot of things went over my head because I'm regular human being or because I could not relate to the main characters' experiences. Or maybe I wasn't in the mood for it, the way I like to portray it is this is a great book but it was not for me.
Overall the book was ok, I did not find it particularly engaging but recommend it to those who like to delve into philosophical matters.
Review posted on blog
The book starts with an Asian boy in a small Midwestern town and his friendship with another boy with similar interests and background. Then it becomes something of an exploration on many subjects such as protests, capitalism, resistance, politics and other deep subjects. And this is where it lost me.
I generally enjoy books with a good balance of character and plot and I found this book to be a little bit confusing but very well written. Also, a lot of things went over my head because I'm regular human being or because I could not relate to the main characters' experiences. Or maybe I wasn't in the mood for it, the way I like to portray it is this is a great book but it was not for me.
Overall the book was ok, I did not find it particularly engaging but recommend it to those who like to delve into philosophical matters.
Review posted on blog
June 18, 2017
A completely mind-warping novel in which people patiently take turns to speak in improbably fully-formed stories about their bizarre pasts; seemingly ordinary characters suddenly turn out to be crime-fighting superheroes, some of them aliens; people melt and disperse into the air. Dear Cyborgs interweaves two plotlines: the initially down-to-earth tale of a boy losing touch with his childhood best friend; and a convoluted tale of good and evil narrated by one of the aforementioned part-time superheroes. The chapters are punctuated with indecipherable riddles, all addressed 'Dear Cyborgs'. There are always stories within stories in this book – a detail that turns out to be key to understanding it. We have the characters' monologues, recalled memories, dream sequences, imagined conversations, many 'origin stories', and even an extract from a novel one of the characters (who may be a fictional construct in the first place) is reading. Political protest and civil disobedience serve as motifs throughout all of them. There are odd yet endearing moments of modern realism, when the more fantastical scenes are grounded by a mention of a couple meeting on OkCupid, or someone's friend-of-a-friend being a blogger. I kept having to flick backwards and reread several pages to remind myself whether what I was reading was supposed to be real, imagined, a dream, or fiction-within-fiction.
If I had to sum it up in a sentence: Communion Town meets I Hate the Internet in an alternate universe. I don't know that I understood all of it, but I did like it, very much.
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If I had to sum it up in a sentence: Communion Town meets I Hate the Internet in an alternate universe. I don't know that I understood all of it, but I did like it, very much.
TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr
October 6, 2017
I honestly have no idea what I just read. It’s such a showy text with unlikely conversations emanating from characters mouths, on one hand mimicking the often stilted dialog of comic book characters but uncanny in the mouths of others. Characters are simply mouthpieces to forward ideas about capitalism, collective action, personhood and more. And all in the highly coded language of academia - “vestigial inflection point manifesting aggrandizing cultural erosion” I’m sure it rewards those willing to unpack it, decipher the fractal plot and reflect on the ideas within. But know that this is an exciting academic examination of protest that, among other things, introduces you to real world activists Kiyoshi Kuromiya and Richard Aoki and less rousing sci-fi romp.
August 10, 2017
dear cyborgs came out of nowhere and sucker punched me into speechlessness. this book somehow brings together all those things i find most suspicious about contemporary literary fiction - a rhizomatic structure, MFA-ish "pensive, wise-beyond-his-years narrator looking back upon the traumas of the past"-type narration (and, related to that, a preoccupation with the Ponderous Significance of male adolescence), fredric-jameson-ian marxist polemics, comic book fetishization, etc. - but very self-reflexively, and in a way that made me actually feel invested and engaged with everything that's at stake rather than inclined to hurl the whole thing into the nearest wastebasket. it helps immensely that the book wears both its heart and its politics on its sleeve, as it were, with absolute integrity and absolute sincerity. it is savage in its understanding of the late capitalist nightmare we are all in, but it also never once loses sight of what it means to have to live (brokenly, cowardly, defiantly, deliberately...) as an individual in it. like, oh god, that ending! i began the novel confused and intrigued; i finished it in tears.
i am pretty sure it has become impossible to use the word "zeitgeist" without sounding like a pretentious poser, but i am being earnest when i say that i don't this this book could have been written at any other time than the present (the darkest timeline). the meditations on the (non-)meaning of protest particularly hit me hard. in the book you see individuals able to gain a kind of articulative power or clarity through the act of protest, only to then be confronted with the futility of that articulation - brought up again and again against the insuperable invisible inescapable machines of corporate capital, and ultimately rendered superfluous by them. what does it mean to act meaningfully - how do you render yourself human - against that kind of fatalism? what even is the use and purpose of "meaning" in a capitalist reality in which meaning is always and utterly mediated by the commodity form?
what answers that are given in this book are bleak ones. and yet, and yet. in this interview with the millions, eugene lim describes his book in the following way:
I half-quote a piece of self-admonition associated with Antonio Gramsci on the first page of my book: “Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” For me, this captures a pretty common contemporary state of cognitive dissonance. So I’m not sure if the book is an act of protest as much as it’s an attempt to articulate this emotional state as well as look into what it’s like to try to constantly maintain it and what it’s like to live within its turmoil.
and then, later in the interview, he speaks of trying to find "a method that accounts for the intense mind-boggling complexity we live in that somehow must be apprehended by our puny individual minds." it's astonishing how well he succeeds. it may be that i feel so strongly about this book because i just so happened to read it at the right time, in the right place, with the right frame of mind. well, so be it. perhaps there's still something to be said about making meaning matter, even if only to yourself, in a life of enforced inescapable automatic insidious complicity. dear cyborgs: i'll take it.
[also: the stuff you learn about richard aoki and kiyoshi kuromiya etc. are worth it for the price of admission alone.]
i am pretty sure it has become impossible to use the word "zeitgeist" without sounding like a pretentious poser, but i am being earnest when i say that i don't this this book could have been written at any other time than the present (the darkest timeline). the meditations on the (non-)meaning of protest particularly hit me hard. in the book you see individuals able to gain a kind of articulative power or clarity through the act of protest, only to then be confronted with the futility of that articulation - brought up again and again against the insuperable invisible inescapable machines of corporate capital, and ultimately rendered superfluous by them. what does it mean to act meaningfully - how do you render yourself human - against that kind of fatalism? what even is the use and purpose of "meaning" in a capitalist reality in which meaning is always and utterly mediated by the commodity form?
what answers that are given in this book are bleak ones. and yet, and yet. in this interview with the millions, eugene lim describes his book in the following way:
I half-quote a piece of self-admonition associated with Antonio Gramsci on the first page of my book: “Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” For me, this captures a pretty common contemporary state of cognitive dissonance. So I’m not sure if the book is an act of protest as much as it’s an attempt to articulate this emotional state as well as look into what it’s like to try to constantly maintain it and what it’s like to live within its turmoil.
and then, later in the interview, he speaks of trying to find "a method that accounts for the intense mind-boggling complexity we live in that somehow must be apprehended by our puny individual minds." it's astonishing how well he succeeds. it may be that i feel so strongly about this book because i just so happened to read it at the right time, in the right place, with the right frame of mind. well, so be it. perhaps there's still something to be said about making meaning matter, even if only to yourself, in a life of enforced inescapable automatic insidious complicity. dear cyborgs: i'll take it.
[also: the stuff you learn about richard aoki and kiyoshi kuromiya etc. are worth it for the price of admission alone.]
August 12, 2017
Once I started this, I could hardly put it down. Smart and touching, funny and philosophical; this brief, fast-moving novel speaks clearly to the current political moment as well as illuminating more permanent truths about friendship, family, and the search for justice and a place to belong.
As a friend mentioned, the publisher's decision to attempt marketing this as a genre novel (science-fiction/fantasy, superheroes) is disingenuous and all too likely to backfire; that would be such a shame as this book deserves a wide audience of informed readers.
As a friend mentioned, the publisher's decision to attempt marketing this as a genre novel (science-fiction/fantasy, superheroes) is disingenuous and all too likely to backfire; that would be such a shame as this book deserves a wide audience of informed readers.
March 9, 2018
“Now we are all Icarus. Cyborgs with our wings. An augmented reality. The Cassandra warnings forgotten. And it’s always on, always simultaneous: the soaring and the panic, spasm and grace, flight and fall. Burn it to the ground. Burn it to the motherfucking ground.”
I’m not quite sure what I just read even though this is my second time picking this up. The first time I tried to read Dear Cyborgs as if it were an ordinary run-of-the-mill novel. What a misjudgment on my part. The vignettes didn’t tidily piece together to tell any story that I knew. Finally I went back to the book synopsis and read it carefully. This is when I realized I was going about things all wrong. Dear Cyborgs is not a fanciful coming of age story about two young Asian American boys who like comic books. I mean it is. But it isn’t. What Dear Cyborgs is is a series of monologues. Monologues that describe our overdependence on technology, our futile attempts to conquer the “dead soul grind of the computer monitor,” the ease with which we give our lives over to avatars. Yes. Reading is fundamental.
Early on in Dear Cyborgs Lim describes a young Korean writer’s dilemma between the book he wanted to write and that which he was tasked to write.
His vision – “old-fashioned moral tales disguised as science fiction” with stories “revolved around the affairs of technocrats who discovered that the mechanized times they’d created had, alas, made them, without their consent, no longer human.”
The expectation – a “modified coming-of-age novel that traded on his Korean-American identity”. Clever, but not too off-putting. Something that was different enough to tantalize the masses but not evocative in a way to stir up controversy.
Has Eugene Lim achieved this goal? I’m not quite sure. The fractal nature of this work is clever and yet puzzling enough to obscure the coming-of-age tale between the two friends. (I probably would have liked to see a little bit more of this story. But I digress.) Dear Cyborgs is an ode to comicdom and superheroes. It is at once a metafiction and a fable. The story nests inside of itself warping all sense of reality. Is it a confessional or simply a warning for our times?
“Speaking of cyborgs, dear. Does this augmentation make me look vestigial? Let’s be real, bipeds and germs, today’s puzzler: Who amongst us will opt out? Click poof to become forgotten click acquiesce to rising tide fallacy.”
“I don’t think that art can change the world. But at least art can help us unveil life.”
June 13, 2017
The novel, unfortunately, waits until we have gotten the point before it decides to explain itself:
The marketing of Dear Cyborg makes too much of the comic book connection. It does begin as if it were Kavalier & Clay or Oscar Wao (neither of which I admire, the latter of which I never even got through, even though I too was reared on Superman and Batman and science-fiction in an immigrant milieu), a first-generation bildungsroman for which superhero comics provide the model of bildung. The narrator and his friend Vu, the only Asian-Americans in their small midwestern town, bond over their love of comics and other nerderia in the novel's opening episodes. But such a linear, realist narrative is soon enough abandoned; Lim, with his critique of capitalist complicity, allows his narrator to make knowing remarks about the literary commodification of identity politics that characterizes the type of novel Dear Cyborgs refuses to be ("'What was expected was a slightly modified coming-of-age novel that traded on my Korean-American identity'"), and we are offered instead, after the first chapter, a series of monologues and adventures about artists, activists, aliens, superheroes, and detectives. As I said, none of the characters have much existence beyond their idea-laden soliloquies, but Lim's inventiveness, his profusion of concept and imagery on page after page, keeps the novel going in the absence of realist pleasures. The novel refuses to explain itself either by committing to its science-fictional scenario or giving a real-world explanations for those extravagances, though it flirts with both. These may be spoilers, but then again, I don't think it matters: at the novel's conclusion, we are told that Dear Cyborgs may be a webcomic created by Vu and the narrator, and also that it may be a Borgesian infinite book written by Vu's father.
As with the cyborg conceit, none of this is quite new (except perhaps the implicit rebuke, not unlike this one, to the Chabon/Díaz-style narrative); even the melding of superheroes with high theory has been done before in comics, and I was reminded at times of Daniel Clowes's psychoanalysis-inflected "Black Nylon" or Grant Morrison's Situationist autocritique in The Invisibles. The novel's more realist passages, commenting on our everyday lives in the totalizing world of what the comrades call "late capitalism," is well-observed and bleakly funny—a hospital employee's quest amid shifting cafeteria business plans to find somewhere to spend her lunch hour is particularly good—but it does owe a great deal to DeLillo, as does the whole theme of seeking an exit from "automatic complicity" through sublime aesthetic experience. Lim's anatomy of all the forms complicity takes, though, is his dead-end Marxism's gift to his aesthetic, a political incisiveness (as in a long, complex passage near the end of the novel about Richard Aoki) that is well beyond most other late-modern bards of anti-capitalist aesthetics, including DeLillo (whose influence, anyway, is no doubt all over my own work too).
Aesthetically, I enjoy the novel's monologic structure—even amid the superheroics, Dear Cyborgs is a set of speeches, a neo-Dostoevskean device common in twenty—first-century fiction, including my own, but done beautifully here. Supra-aesthetically, I am impressed by the novel's integrity. "'I was excited by the news of riot, but then I had to go to work,'" observes one of Lim's characters. The admission of excitement on every page, supervening as it does any more moralistic claims about justice, is what made Dear Cyborgs one of the few contemporary novels I have recently felt compelled to finish. I am infinitely more of a cynic than Lim appears to be—I no longer even slightly believe in the myth of the The Revolution and have in fact come to find it wholly pernicious, nor do I think it is capitalism that oppresses us rather than merely life itself—but, even so, I felt on reading this book that I had lifted my lantern and found an honest man.
(When I say cyborgs, of course I mean us.)It isn't an original observation at all; happily, it is, despite the title, not primarily what Dear Cyborgs is about. The cyborgean reference justifies the novel's form—a social-media-age collage of voices, of genres, and of fictions—but its theme is announced on the first page, in the first of a recurring set of exhortations that seem to belong less to the Twitter epoch than to that of pirate radio (I think of Lynne Thigpen in The Warriors: "Hey there, boppers…"):
[…]
(Some seem unaccepting of this transformation, and it indeed has been gradual. In a sense it began when the first simple machines were invented. But now, to deny the change requires a willful ignorance since, if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we've outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn't such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine have long ago merged inexorably.)
Dear Cyborgs,The absent signature signifies the lack of a clear agent (Marx's industrial proletariat, Mao's anti-imperialist peasantry) who might effect The Revolution, while the allusion to the first half of Gramsci's famous phrase ("optimism of the will") recalls the missing second half ("pessimism of the intellect") that will animate the novel. In short, as nineteenth-century authors like Melville or Dickinson knew they could no longer justify Christian faith but berated the empty vault of heaven anyway, so the twenty-first-century writer understands that Marxism is no longer intellectually tenable or honorably practicable within the First World but keeps gesturing plangently toward the space on the historical horizon where utopia was to appear. Why, by the way, is Marxism no longer tenable or practicable? Because, as another character in this novel explains, we have replaced Marxism's implicit teleological and humanistic model of the world with a chaotic and naturalistic one:
Today's puzzler. Enforced inescapable automatic insidious complicity. On the horizon no viable just alternative and no path toward one. All proposals thus far fanciful, impossible, doomed. Sure, optimism of the will. But—either from the towers or beyond the grid, in the trenches, amongst the ruins, or burb'd—what to do?
Yours most truly,
"The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings."Twice in this short book we encounter the ubiquitous slogan, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," Slavoj Žižek's popularization of Fredric Jameson's paraphrase of H. Bruce Franklin's gloss on J. G. Ballard. As with the Gramsci tag, we are the realm of what might look to outsiders like leftist kitsch, but with my reference to Ballard we come around to what Dear Cyborgs is really about. To approach it obliquely: I was perusing a collection of testimonials from the protests about grad-student labor at Yale and found this arresting statement:
It’s hard to relate (without lapsing into cliché) the particular pleasures, the rough loveliness, of collective action—but when solidarity is enacted so forcefully in the bodies of a marching mass of workers, a strange thing happens. Your consciousness of yourself, and what you do and think and intend and contribute is broken open for a moment; you vibrate with the thrill of the group, emboldened to scream louder, walk longer, be looser and more uninhibited—but also sharply attentive. You start to feel the crowd’s little ecstasies and confusions; you’re moved, for the thousandth time, by its visual extravagance. And you relish its implicit menace. The banner at the front of the march, held aloft by people who had, until a few days ago, refused to eat, read JUST THE BEGINNING, YALE. It’s a good motto; I like its seizure of the future.I will not mock this because I have felt what it describes—I remember turning around at the crest of a rise in the road during the worldwide protests against the Iraq war in the winter of 2003 (also referenced in Dear Cyborgs) and seeing 3000 people at my back; I experienced the transport elaborated in the quotation above; it was as if we could keep marching clear into the sky. But consider the tacit admission in this statement: what is left of the agency of The People in the absence of any widespread faith that we can ever merge with the historical dialectic is simply a feeling of intensity and authenticity. As in Ballard (or DeLillo or Tom McCarthy or, perhaps [here I tread more carefully given his actual experience], Bolaño), this feeling is what Eugene Lim's characters are seeking even after the faith that supported it has gone. Their concern to be free of "[e]nforced inescapable automatic insidious complicity" is the desire for pure experience, and the key word in that train of adjectives is surely "automatic": we may be cyborgs, but how can we avoid becoming automata? Lim's characters—none of whom I remember though I read the novel yesterday; all are cyphers, vessels for ideas—answer either by joining political protests or making (or, in the novel's genre-parodying metafictions, inhabiting) certain kinds of artworks, either the world-destroying via negativa of the avant-garde or the world-making sublimity of popular fiction (detective/noir, SF, superhero comics).
The marketing of Dear Cyborg makes too much of the comic book connection. It does begin as if it were Kavalier & Clay or Oscar Wao (neither of which I admire, the latter of which I never even got through, even though I too was reared on Superman and Batman and science-fiction in an immigrant milieu), a first-generation bildungsroman for which superhero comics provide the model of bildung. The narrator and his friend Vu, the only Asian-Americans in their small midwestern town, bond over their love of comics and other nerderia in the novel's opening episodes. But such a linear, realist narrative is soon enough abandoned; Lim, with his critique of capitalist complicity, allows his narrator to make knowing remarks about the literary commodification of identity politics that characterizes the type of novel Dear Cyborgs refuses to be ("'What was expected was a slightly modified coming-of-age novel that traded on my Korean-American identity'"), and we are offered instead, after the first chapter, a series of monologues and adventures about artists, activists, aliens, superheroes, and detectives. As I said, none of the characters have much existence beyond their idea-laden soliloquies, but Lim's inventiveness, his profusion of concept and imagery on page after page, keeps the novel going in the absence of realist pleasures. The novel refuses to explain itself either by committing to its science-fictional scenario or giving a real-world explanations for those extravagances, though it flirts with both. These may be spoilers, but then again, I don't think it matters: at the novel's conclusion, we are told that Dear Cyborgs may be a webcomic created by Vu and the narrator, and also that it may be a Borgesian infinite book written by Vu's father.
As with the cyborg conceit, none of this is quite new (except perhaps the implicit rebuke, not unlike this one, to the Chabon/Díaz-style narrative); even the melding of superheroes with high theory has been done before in comics, and I was reminded at times of Daniel Clowes's psychoanalysis-inflected "Black Nylon" or Grant Morrison's Situationist autocritique in The Invisibles. The novel's more realist passages, commenting on our everyday lives in the totalizing world of what the comrades call "late capitalism," is well-observed and bleakly funny—a hospital employee's quest amid shifting cafeteria business plans to find somewhere to spend her lunch hour is particularly good—but it does owe a great deal to DeLillo, as does the whole theme of seeking an exit from "automatic complicity" through sublime aesthetic experience. Lim's anatomy of all the forms complicity takes, though, is his dead-end Marxism's gift to his aesthetic, a political incisiveness (as in a long, complex passage near the end of the novel about Richard Aoki) that is well beyond most other late-modern bards of anti-capitalist aesthetics, including DeLillo (whose influence, anyway, is no doubt all over my own work too).
Aesthetically, I enjoy the novel's monologic structure—even amid the superheroics, Dear Cyborgs is a set of speeches, a neo-Dostoevskean device common in twenty—first-century fiction, including my own, but done beautifully here. Supra-aesthetically, I am impressed by the novel's integrity. "'I was excited by the news of riot, but then I had to go to work,'" observes one of Lim's characters. The admission of excitement on every page, supervening as it does any more moralistic claims about justice, is what made Dear Cyborgs one of the few contemporary novels I have recently felt compelled to finish. I am infinitely more of a cynic than Lim appears to be—I no longer even slightly believe in the myth of the The Revolution and have in fact come to find it wholly pernicious, nor do I think it is capitalism that oppresses us rather than merely life itself—but, even so, I felt on reading this book that I had lifted my lantern and found an honest man.
August 10, 2024
“‘ I mean it's like the regret that comes after the purchase of something you don't really need and which isn't after all what you'd wanted. It's asking people to wake up to the fact that their desires have been manufactured….hidden in this remorse is another guilt, a knowledge that the entire social contract is contaminated, tainted, since it requires the hard labor of the unfortunate, as well as a violence to the earth and, importantly and even more subtly, an embedded faith in the eventual good of selfishness and greed….’
‘And the magical thinking?’
‘This is an idealism, a hope….To escape the current state….It's an impossible wish…desire to transcend our limitations….It expresses an impossible desire as if it were not impossible.’”
Two Asian boys, growing up in a small town in Ohio, spend their days obsessing over comic books and then suddenly one moves away. A superhero group called Team Chaos meet to tell stories over dinner, visit karaoke bars, and to fight their archenemy, Ms. Mistleto. Team Chaos includes the martial arts expert and writer, Frank Exit; the extraterrestrial being and social worker, Muriel; and the sling shot expert and artist, Dave.
“‘Someone said we can weaponize our invisibility, our outcast status, by converting it into anonymity,”
Their archnemesis, Ms. Mistleto has stolen sensitive information from corporate entities and later kidnaps a diplomat’s children. Her ransom note has the following demands:
“…the adoption worldwide of a single-payer universal health care system, mandatory carbon caps, nuclear disarmament, paid yearlong parental leave, and a tax on all securities transactions.”
And all along the discontent continues and protests erupt across the nation and the world. The economic insecurity, environmental decay, militarization of state forces, and the commoditization and co-opting of artistic works by corporate interests. Then on February 15, 2003, millions around the globe came out to protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq, the largest antiwar demonstration. And later in 2011, Occupy Wall Street begins in Zuccotti Park in NYC, protesting corporate greed and malfeasance.
I looked up the writers and visual artists mentioned in this novel, many were works of protest, but it was the list of Asian American political activists that moved me. Reminders, so often needed, to not succumb to cynicism but to remain hopeful and to illustrate the work of a real superhero.
“There are heroes…Grace Lee Boggs, Alex Hing, Fred Korematsu, Lee Lew-Lee, Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Yuri Kochiyama, Liz Ouyang, Harvey Dong ... Or how about Kiyoshi Kuromiya….Kuromiya was born in the internment camps, worked with SNCC in Alabama during Selma, was a close aide to MLK…was an early member of ACT UP and the Gay Liberation Front…and was a world-ranked Scrabble player to boot."
During the Vietnam War, leaflets were found on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania claiming that within days a dog will be euthanized using napalm. When a protest erupted, a second leaflet was delivered stating that the dog will be spared but to please consider the many Vietnamese civilians experiencing the same plight. Kiyoshi Kuromiya was the author of both pamphlets.
I picked up Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim, having never heard of the book or the author, because I found it on Jonathan Lethem’s list of the 10 best books of the 21st century for the New York Times.
Mr. Lethem was absolutely right.
‘And the magical thinking?’
‘This is an idealism, a hope….To escape the current state….It's an impossible wish…desire to transcend our limitations….It expresses an impossible desire as if it were not impossible.’”
Two Asian boys, growing up in a small town in Ohio, spend their days obsessing over comic books and then suddenly one moves away. A superhero group called Team Chaos meet to tell stories over dinner, visit karaoke bars, and to fight their archenemy, Ms. Mistleto. Team Chaos includes the martial arts expert and writer, Frank Exit; the extraterrestrial being and social worker, Muriel; and the sling shot expert and artist, Dave.
“‘Someone said we can weaponize our invisibility, our outcast status, by converting it into anonymity,”
Their archnemesis, Ms. Mistleto has stolen sensitive information from corporate entities and later kidnaps a diplomat’s children. Her ransom note has the following demands:
“…the adoption worldwide of a single-payer universal health care system, mandatory carbon caps, nuclear disarmament, paid yearlong parental leave, and a tax on all securities transactions.”
And all along the discontent continues and protests erupt across the nation and the world. The economic insecurity, environmental decay, militarization of state forces, and the commoditization and co-opting of artistic works by corporate interests. Then on February 15, 2003, millions around the globe came out to protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq, the largest antiwar demonstration. And later in 2011, Occupy Wall Street begins in Zuccotti Park in NYC, protesting corporate greed and malfeasance.
I looked up the writers and visual artists mentioned in this novel, many were works of protest, but it was the list of Asian American political activists that moved me. Reminders, so often needed, to not succumb to cynicism but to remain hopeful and to illustrate the work of a real superhero.
“There are heroes…Grace Lee Boggs, Alex Hing, Fred Korematsu, Lee Lew-Lee, Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Yuri Kochiyama, Liz Ouyang, Harvey Dong ... Or how about Kiyoshi Kuromiya….Kuromiya was born in the internment camps, worked with SNCC in Alabama during Selma, was a close aide to MLK…was an early member of ACT UP and the Gay Liberation Front…and was a world-ranked Scrabble player to boot."
During the Vietnam War, leaflets were found on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania claiming that within days a dog will be euthanized using napalm. When a protest erupted, a second leaflet was delivered stating that the dog will be spared but to please consider the many Vietnamese civilians experiencing the same plight. Kiyoshi Kuromiya was the author of both pamphlets.
I picked up Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim, having never heard of the book or the author, because I found it on Jonathan Lethem’s list of the 10 best books of the 21st century for the New York Times.
Mr. Lethem was absolutely right.
January 23, 2018
Dear God.
A messy, wordy, nerdy fantasia from an obviously intelligent man. The writing was a real barrier for me; cumbersome and awkward rather than artistically challenging. I am a big fan of indistinct, allusory prose. I adore Faulkner and Joyce, for example, and have always found the extreme effort required of them well-rewarded at journey's end. This book's reward was meager to nonexistent; a Happy Meal with an extra ketchup packet thrown in instead of the promised toy, making one downright nostalgic for the shitty little plastic thing that could have been.
Meandering "Origin Stories" and endless exposition make up the vast majority of these 163 pages. And just about every character has the same voice (Lim's?) and drones laboriously on in convoluted sentences which disorient rather than enlighten:
"While I believed each of these things to be true, privately I knew the real reason I refused that kind of help was because I'd become overly intimate with and somehow comforted by my own rotting, and I had also come to see the illness as inseparable from myself, and, most important if somewhat contradictory, I had felt it to be the necessary preliminary stage before a crucial transformation, perhaps the one I had just made."
Like I said: Dear God.
1.5 stars but I'm rounding up because he uses words like aporia, bricolage, crepuscular, and exegesis which surely counts for something in this Tweet-heavy world.
A messy, wordy, nerdy fantasia from an obviously intelligent man. The writing was a real barrier for me; cumbersome and awkward rather than artistically challenging. I am a big fan of indistinct, allusory prose. I adore Faulkner and Joyce, for example, and have always found the extreme effort required of them well-rewarded at journey's end. This book's reward was meager to nonexistent; a Happy Meal with an extra ketchup packet thrown in instead of the promised toy, making one downright nostalgic for the shitty little plastic thing that could have been.
Meandering "Origin Stories" and endless exposition make up the vast majority of these 163 pages. And just about every character has the same voice (Lim's?) and drones laboriously on in convoluted sentences which disorient rather than enlighten:
"While I believed each of these things to be true, privately I knew the real reason I refused that kind of help was because I'd become overly intimate with and somehow comforted by my own rotting, and I had also come to see the illness as inseparable from myself, and, most important if somewhat contradictory, I had felt it to be the necessary preliminary stage before a crucial transformation, perhaps the one I had just made."
Like I said: Dear God.
1.5 stars but I'm rounding up because he uses words like aporia, bricolage, crepuscular, and exegesis which surely counts for something in this Tweet-heavy world.
March 9, 2018
My faith in the American educational system is renewed knowing that the guy who wrote this is a high school librarian. Did I always know what what going on, who was speaking, and where we were going and why? No. Did it matter? Not a bit. The trip was a blast, the driver was in total mastery of the vehicle at all times. Actually, the end did tie a lot of things together, although you also get thrown for one last, exciting loop. This book may have been easier to parse if it was a graphic novel, but I like it better this way.
My copy is bristling with sticky tabs noting every time I was tickled by something.....a villain whose ransom note demands "...the adoption of a single-payer universal health care system, mandatory carbon caps, nuclear disarmament, paid yearlong parental leave, and a tax on all securities transactions"; an asian girl singing a karaoke version of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song ("Upon hearing the first notes, the crowd went wild."); a cyber attack against the US government, where, "in addition to the usual infidelities and sex trafficking, the drug habits and corporate kickbacks, it was deemed most embarrassingly revealed that these politicians were atrocious hobbyists. Several of them wrote confessional poetry, two were authors of soft-porn fan fiction, and the president himself painted psychoanalytically revealing self portraits in which he unintentionally confessed that he was a child-man, a buffoon manipulated by devious puppet masters."
My choice of quotes makes it sound like it's all jokey in a Pynchon-y way, but it's also earnest and poignant and I'm really glad I read it.
My copy is bristling with sticky tabs noting every time I was tickled by something.....a villain whose ransom note demands "...the adoption of a single-payer universal health care system, mandatory carbon caps, nuclear disarmament, paid yearlong parental leave, and a tax on all securities transactions"; an asian girl singing a karaoke version of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song ("Upon hearing the first notes, the crowd went wild."); a cyber attack against the US government, where, "in addition to the usual infidelities and sex trafficking, the drug habits and corporate kickbacks, it was deemed most embarrassingly revealed that these politicians were atrocious hobbyists. Several of them wrote confessional poetry, two were authors of soft-porn fan fiction, and the president himself painted psychoanalytically revealing self portraits in which he unintentionally confessed that he was a child-man, a buffoon manipulated by devious puppet masters."
My choice of quotes makes it sound like it's all jokey in a Pynchon-y way, but it's also earnest and poignant and I'm really glad I read it.
January 8, 2018
Attempted to read this for the Tournament of Books. Someone must see something here that I don't. I'm willing to accept that it may be over my head but if it is, it's beyond most readers. Who knew such a short novel could be so painful to read. I read about half so feel that I gave it a fair shot.
April 13, 2023
really cool and hard to describe. i'm really happy i read this book bc it's not like anything i've ever read and not like anything i would ordinarily pick up. it's also not like other asian american lit i've read, which feels more characterized by family themes. here the voice is so alienated and rebellious i really like it. i guess i usually don't talk about "asian american lit" as a genre bc that's kinda dumb but that alienated/rebellious voice felt very asian american, i mean every character referenced being asian at some pt, but also relevant to book's overall themes of what to do when society sucks. shoplifting? arson? social work? immigration law? "dazzling and pointless and defiant" art? "to be pure if only briefly"? the book is skeptical but moved by what art, or rather being an artist, can do, for the artist. "a reactionary or collaborative tactic" but "the only possible defiance left outside of the terminal possibilities of suicide, the morally corrupting option of guerrilla warfare, or the subtly but fundamentally distinct choice of utter acquiescence." this quote is in like the first five pages!!! i love the fun heightened language and it also reminds me of viet thanh nguyen what is wrong w these asian male psyches lol
being an artist is likened to being a parasite, like asian grandmas sitting in a mcdonald's for hours after buying only coffee. i was really moved by this bc i love couponing and siphoning cents of resources off of large institutions that do not care. at the same time, the book explores the idea of being a ghost. the city ghost section was beautiful. "tracelessless in some religions is the highest form of attainment." i was moved by this bc i love reusing plastic bags even though it doesn't matter! if i were a phd student in the fake genre of asian american literature i would write about asian/asian american sci fi this book and ghost in the shell
structurally/stylistically the book is crazy. it's piecemeal and covers immigrant boyhood; the beginnings and fizzlings and co-optings of fictionalized protests (of the last summer sorts—occupations, riots); the beginnings and fizzlings and selling-out of artistic careers; superhero stories. it's quite confusing and the characters will monologue about art/politics in between fights and car chases. it's so fun! there are a few different characters/points of view who also are superheroes and one critique is that i feel like they could be developed better as distinct points of view/foils. also the book just ended without really knitting anything together but i was really fine w that
being an artist is likened to being a parasite, like asian grandmas sitting in a mcdonald's for hours after buying only coffee. i was really moved by this bc i love couponing and siphoning cents of resources off of large institutions that do not care. at the same time, the book explores the idea of being a ghost. the city ghost section was beautiful. "tracelessless in some religions is the highest form of attainment." i was moved by this bc i love reusing plastic bags even though it doesn't matter! if i were a phd student in the fake genre of asian american literature i would write about asian/asian american sci fi this book and ghost in the shell
structurally/stylistically the book is crazy. it's piecemeal and covers immigrant boyhood; the beginnings and fizzlings and co-optings of fictionalized protests (of the last summer sorts—occupations, riots); the beginnings and fizzlings and selling-out of artistic careers; superhero stories. it's quite confusing and the characters will monologue about art/politics in between fights and car chases. it's so fun! there are a few different characters/points of view who also are superheroes and one critique is that i feel like they could be developed better as distinct points of view/foils. also the book just ended without really knitting anything together but i was really fine w that
February 11, 2018
Not sure how that all fit together. It’s a puzzle web of interlocking narrative episodes focusing on the alienation of late stage capitalism and the futility of protest and art in the face of the same (I think). The book calls out to comics, noir and sci fi, and I think there’s a nested origin story that explains how the book came to be but I’d have to go back to the beginning to be sure and I don’t care enough to do so. Didn’t amount to much of anything, which is a shame because in some of the fragments you can tell that Lim can tell a really good story. Nonetheless giving it a 3 because while I never cared much, I also was usually interested and not bored, the narrator is good and the riffing on the endless variants of the Asian immigrant experience interesting.
November 27, 2017
What on Earth? So...some of it was good (the stuff with Ms. Mistletoe in particular I was fond of. But I don't know if it's due to--or in spite of--its reliance on vintage/cartoon bad guy tropes), and the framework of the book...Narrator and Vu. The stuff with the friends meeting and hanging out...were they supposed to be Cyborgs pretending to be human? Because they felt like Cyborgs pretending to be human.
Read
April 5, 2017Strange and oddly beautiful, with an amazing ending.
March 25, 2018
DNF at 30%
Highly pretentious. Rich language but too much stamina required to decode this smartish puzzle; as I've said, I am not a competitive type. You win, book, you win.
Highly pretentious. Rich language but too much stamina required to decode this smartish puzzle; as I've said, I am not a competitive type. You win, book, you win.
January 19, 2018
upon reflection, I returned to drop a star...
this is a better premise than it is a book... because it's not really a book, it's a series of note cards from the author's noodling that have been awkwardly strung together with a finale that tries to tell the reader that it's got more layers than it does if you realize [insert non-reveal about the book you're reading which was itself poorly thought through].
I LOVE the conversations that are happening though they were more anecdotal without deeper reflection than would have preferred... in fact they were sort of all the kinds of things you hear when someone tells you 'I had the weirdest dream last night, and you were there..." but pages long instead of a few paragraphs. One could project a lot of layers and underlying meaning to these stories if one wanted to do the work that the author abdicated, but without an actual story or background to interest me in these characters, I just didn't feel like it. The best moments were the in-between snippets as characters transitioned between stories as when watching reality tv at a bar or chatting while a colleague gets up for their turn at karaoke. One such after watching minutes of a "Wipe Out"-type show:
There were also some decent observations about society and the mechanisms of (and needs for) protest, especially from Ms Mistletoe who's purpose in the story always seemed ripe for a cool reveal but which never truly surfaced.
other decent quotes:
this is a better premise than it is a book... because it's not really a book, it's a series of note cards from the author's noodling that have been awkwardly strung together with a finale that tries to tell the reader that it's got more layers than it does if you realize [insert non-reveal about the book you're reading which was itself poorly thought through].
I LOVE the conversations that are happening though they were more anecdotal without deeper reflection than would have preferred... in fact they were sort of all the kinds of things you hear when someone tells you 'I had the weirdest dream last night, and you were there..." but pages long instead of a few paragraphs. One could project a lot of layers and underlying meaning to these stories if one wanted to do the work that the author abdicated, but without an actual story or background to interest me in these characters, I just didn't feel like it. The best moments were the in-between snippets as characters transitioned between stories as when watching reality tv at a bar or chatting while a colleague gets up for their turn at karaoke. One such after watching minutes of a "Wipe Out"-type show:
Dave spoke first whe new were outside and said, “That was amazing.”
“Yeah,” said Frank.
Muriel said, “Have you seen the show where audience members vote on which pregnant teenaged contestant has the mother with the worst botched cosmetic surgery?”
There were also some decent observations about society and the mechanisms of (and needs for) protest, especially from Ms Mistletoe who's purpose in the story always seemed ripe for a cool reveal but which never truly surfaced.
One day we woke to realize the police were no longer guarding us. And while I’d like to report otherwise, at the time no one, including myself, brought up the argument of staying, The moral logic for communal living was abstractly very persuasive, but we’d soon discovered the pressure to conform to the needs of the group had become, even for the most aggressively righteous among us, insidiously stifling and unbearable.
other decent quotes:
“Even though they’d ignored her for so long, after her suicide the art critics responded with their usual self-serving nostalgia,. Her commercial protest was reframed as a now historical (and therefore toothless) but valiant defiance…”
We journeyed through junior high on an entirely separate path from the others. Almost everyone in this small town seemed to think this was for the best, but we did eventually find a group of others, those who had been shunned for their fatness or queerness or intelligence or non-Christian-ness, or some combination thereof – a familiar drama of Nerddom and xenophobia played out in small towns across the Midwest and South. The pariah status and bigotry seemed so inevitable and immutable a condition that we didn’t think to complain – with one exception, for me, and that complaint had to do with girls.’
February 8, 2018
Goo. Dreads.
January 30, 2018
“He said this all lightly at first, and only at the end, reluctantly, did he revel behind the seemingly entire, impish mirth, a wide, dark ocean of implacable sorrow.”
Dear Cyborgs reminded me a bit of Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Maybe because it is a story within a story within a story. Or maybe because of the detached, flat manner it is told. Or maybe because it is a reworking of classic genre fiction (only comic book superheroes rather than hard-boiled detective fiction)? In any case, I liked it more than The New York Trilogy because despite the detached manner, I think it had heart. And I liked the parallels between art and protest and the futility/importance/transience of both in humankind.
Read for the TOB 2018
Dear Cyborgs reminded me a bit of Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Maybe because it is a story within a story within a story. Or maybe because of the detached, flat manner it is told. Or maybe because it is a reworking of classic genre fiction (only comic book superheroes rather than hard-boiled detective fiction)? In any case, I liked it more than The New York Trilogy because despite the detached manner, I think it had heart. And I liked the parallels between art and protest and the futility/importance/transience of both in humankind.
Read for the TOB 2018
January 14, 2018
Quirky and, like the author indicates late in the game, fractal rather than linear. I wouldn’t want to read 500 pages of this, but it was a fun, quick read that gave me several snort-laughs. Maybe 3.5 stars.
February 8, 2018
I'm not sure how to review this. An anti-novel that fuses genre tropes from SF and mysteries with philosophy? A novel in essays? The novel's main concerns are about protest, capitalism, and art in these shitty times. In terms of its tone, it perfectly captures our internet addled era. I think it's an attempt to write a political novel in a way that is relevant to how information is disseminated now. The way through and into the concerns of this book isn't through relatable characters. The characters are kind of like ciphers, in a way; they're mainly distinguished by the things they say--monologues on the efficacy of protest, or how to make art mean something when the market is king. And so in a strange way that also works, reading this novel felt like logging onto Twitter, just a finely-curated, more polite Twitter (of leftist and artists). None of them are interested in getting into "Twitter beef" and no randos @ you out of nowhere to tell you why Trump is right. Another way this novel is better than Twitter: no journalists.
This is novel that tenderly satirises "superhero fetishism", to borrow a term that I think I saw here in someone else's review. It is also a love letter to Asian-American radicalism of the past. It tries to grapple with protest art and activism in a time where everything seems to be co-opted by the state/corporations. I was very moved by the central story of the first narrative, about two second generation immigrant kids finding and losing each other. There is a pathos underlying it, and to use an old-fashioned word, a sincere attempt at connecting threads despite the fragmentary nature of the narrative. I'm not sure if it was marketed as a "superhero adventure" or whatever, but some people seem pissy about the fact that it's not properly reverential about comics and comics culture. Clearly, it's written by a person who loves/loved comics and probably grew up with it, but who is probably also sick of the cynical way in which politics these days seem to be worked through via DC and Marvel franchises and assorted merchandise. There is a sense that our current obsession with superheroing the world is being gently held up for inspection.
Having said all that, it's a strange book. A really good strange book. Perhaps I got everything wrong about it. But I'm glad I read it.
This is novel that tenderly satirises "superhero fetishism", to borrow a term that I think I saw here in someone else's review. It is also a love letter to Asian-American radicalism of the past. It tries to grapple with protest art and activism in a time where everything seems to be co-opted by the state/corporations. I was very moved by the central story of the first narrative, about two second generation immigrant kids finding and losing each other. There is a pathos underlying it, and to use an old-fashioned word, a sincere attempt at connecting threads despite the fragmentary nature of the narrative. I'm not sure if it was marketed as a "superhero adventure" or whatever, but some people seem pissy about the fact that it's not properly reverential about comics and comics culture. Clearly, it's written by a person who loves/loved comics and probably grew up with it, but who is probably also sick of the cynical way in which politics these days seem to be worked through via DC and Marvel franchises and assorted merchandise. There is a sense that our current obsession with superheroing the world is being gently held up for inspection.
Having said all that, it's a strange book. A really good strange book. Perhaps I got everything wrong about it. But I'm glad I read it.
February 4, 2018
Another of the ToB shortlist for 2018 and this may have been the biggest disappointment so far. Staccato bursts of geeky interest that reveal onion layers of not terribly much. Parts of this felt like chore, sadly, and there was no great payoff bringing it all together. It was all a bit... er... bitty.
January 8, 2018
Fun, not at all linear, witty - and with lenses on several social and political elements of society. A good short read for when you're feeling all meta!
Read
July 18, 2018It took me a while to feel in tune with this--which makes sense, since it's a novel about living under/with/through all the dissonance that we do--and it took me a few re-readings of more than a few of the passages to get there, but I appreciated Dear Cyborgs for its lack of interest in settling down, for its ambiguities and the way it claws at itself. The way it seems to replicate our cyborg online communication with its ping-pong monologues and its offered reassurances of knowing exactly! precisely! exchanges that seem to underscore the lack of exactness and precision in our acts, that really got to me after a while: dissonance and attempts at connection that aren't quite connection and aren't quite disconnection.
I read Dear Cyborgs for the Tournament of Books, and it's not a book I'd naturally gravitate toward, in topic or in style: it's too performance-y (even though it's certainly about performances, yes), and sometimes too on-the-nose for me. The footnote in history being a footnote, for one, was too much, though the Richard Aoki passage that it footnoted and the content of said footnote constituted one of my favorite parts of the book; this is a novel not particularly interested in shaping characters, and I guess it makes sense that I clung very tightly to what read to me as the sharpest and most realism-hued, person-shaped part of the book. (I think the publisher description oversells the book's narrative coherence.)
Mostly, I was relieved to find that the book--bursting with politics, consumed with the idea of protest and its failures and its values--wasn't as snide as I braced myself for it to be, nor too idealistic, but energized by its own lack of solutions, its own offerings of contradictions. That's what I keep coming back to, the energy of this novel, despite the fragmented, porous space it created for itself, that it grapples with.
I read Dear Cyborgs for the Tournament of Books, and it's not a book I'd naturally gravitate toward, in topic or in style: it's too performance-y (even though it's certainly about performances, yes), and sometimes too on-the-nose for me. The footnote in history being a footnote, for one, was too much, though the Richard Aoki passage that it footnoted and the content of said footnote constituted one of my favorite parts of the book; this is a novel not particularly interested in shaping characters, and I guess it makes sense that I clung very tightly to what read to me as the sharpest and most realism-hued, person-shaped part of the book. (I think the publisher description oversells the book's narrative coherence.)
Mostly, I was relieved to find that the book--bursting with politics, consumed with the idea of protest and its failures and its values--wasn't as snide as I braced myself for it to be, nor too idealistic, but energized by its own lack of solutions, its own offerings of contradictions. That's what I keep coming back to, the energy of this novel, despite the fragmented, porous space it created for itself, that it grapples with.
March 1, 2018
Two lonely Asian boys living in the American midwest bond over a shared love of comic books. Three superheroes meet for lunch and swap stories. A woman leaves her husband and young child and joins a protest. A mysterious supervillain named Ms. Mistleto haunts her adversary's thoughts.
There's no linear story here, no way to give a tidy synopsis of the plot. People meet and tell each other stories in which they meet someone and tell stories. I've run into descriptions of this book that compare it to reading four random comic books in a longer series, or to the act of internet browsing, where one thing leads to another and you end up reading about Japanese internment camps after starting out with a trailer from the newest Marvel movie.
This book is all about the journey, where each segment is another interesting, yet tangential off-shoot of the one before. Eugene Lim's writing is clear and direct, which makes the random nature of this short novel an enjoyable journey. And, yes, he does sort of tie everything together in the end, in a way that is both clever and suits the novel well. It's a book where the journey is the point, not the destination.
There's no linear story here, no way to give a tidy synopsis of the plot. People meet and tell each other stories in which they meet someone and tell stories. I've run into descriptions of this book that compare it to reading four random comic books in a longer series, or to the act of internet browsing, where one thing leads to another and you end up reading about Japanese internment camps after starting out with a trailer from the newest Marvel movie.
This book is all about the journey, where each segment is another interesting, yet tangential off-shoot of the one before. Eugene Lim's writing is clear and direct, which makes the random nature of this short novel an enjoyable journey. And, yes, he does sort of tie everything together in the end, in a way that is both clever and suits the novel well. It's a book where the journey is the point, not the destination.
February 20, 2018
Every year I read the experimental novel for the Tournament of Books and every year I feel a bit mystified. There are lots of things I enjoyed about this but I still feel that many times these types of books are a way for authors to string together knowledge dumps through a pretty thin narrative structure. I just don't know. I'm glad I read it but I don't think I really got it.
August 10, 2017
I won this book in a goodreads drawing.
A strange sci-fi book about a Chinese guy in Ohio, and his friendship with the only other Asian guy in town, who commits suicide, only they meet again later.
Not as clever as it thinks, and astonishingly naive in its view of the "occupy" movement.
A strange sci-fi book about a Chinese guy in Ohio, and his friendship with the only other Asian guy in town, who commits suicide, only they meet again later.
Not as clever as it thinks, and astonishingly naive in its view of the "occupy" movement.
July 17, 2024
lots of the time i didn’t know what was happening but then again i have c*vid. very beautiful & explored philosophy of protest in a novel way & overall had good vibes.
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