The mirror has two faces
It’s near-impossible to find a part of our daily life that does not involve a screen — smartphones in our hands, computers at grocery checkout counters, televisions in all manner of public spaces. When whatever is drawing our attention ends, and the screen is powered off, we’re faced with a strange sight — our faces staring back at us from the dark reflective surface, the black mirror.
The Netflix sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror returned in June 2023 after a four-year gap. Each of its episodes in previous seasons took place in a different setting, sometimes different worlds, but often set in dystopian near-future worlds with innovative technology. The new season explores further the themes that make it so gripping — imagined worlds where the technology present in our everyday lives is taken to its extreme. These stories tell us less about possible technologically advanced futures and reveal more about our present-day anxieties. After all, as the SF author Ursula K Le Guin once said, “The future, in fiction, is a metaphor."
What can near-future stories tell us about our present? In Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, we enter a world where small, furry toys called “kentukis” become available for sale. Resembling stuffed toys of dragons, rabbits, or pandas, each kentuki is outfitted with a webcam and wheels. Customers can choose to become a kentuki “dweller” or a “keeper”. To be a dweller is to control its movements and see through its eyes through your laptop screen. To be a keeper is to allow a kentuki into your home, allowing a stranger to have access to your world. The dweller cannot talk, and the keeper cannot hear the dweller. Anonymous dwellers and keepers are connected to one another, across the world.
In Little Eyes’ hyper-connected world, technology enables connection with the click of a button. But what's the quality of the connection? There’s a thin line between a kentuki’s presence in friendship or as a surveillance tool. We see cases of profound failure of communication between dwellers and keepers. Schweblin seems to be asking where the real danger lies: in the technology that enables these situations, or in our own expectations, fears, and prejudices that we bring with us to our screens.
Ted Chiang’s short story collection Exhalation explores a breadth of sci-fi possibilities (much like a season of Black Mirror). A tech writer for the New Yorker, Chiang uses real-life science debates — on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and space exploration — to explore philosophical questions. In Exhalation, we encounter time machines, meet characters who escape their real lives for virtual ones and are introduced to technology like the “lifelog”, a personal camera that captures continuous video throughout a user’s life. In each story, Chiang explores the real-world implications of scientific advancement, examining what it would mean to our sense of identity, morality, and mortality. These stories aren’t prescriptive and don’t always go where we expect them to — instead, they thoughtfully and seriously engage with ideas that impact our everyday lives.
Mary South’s You Will Never Be Forgotten is another short story collection that grapples with technology — but where Exhalation is philosophical, this collection is biting, and almost absurd. The stories have interesting formats (one story is told entirely through a Frequently Asked Questions section on a fictional site) and are often provocative. Although modern or near-future technology runs through the collection, the stories are more concerned with how people navigate their use — how technology enables, or disrupts, the idea of a “genuine” connection.
These books, like Black Mirror, might take place in an imagined future, but they’re all concerned with ideas that humanity has struggled with throughout time — ideas of ownership, identity, privacy, and connection. In today’s world, it’s no surprise that writers find such rich material in the intersection of these anxieties with technology. These ideas aren’t bound to the sci-fi genre alone — you find them in literary novels like Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Rather than looking towards a possible future, these books encourage us to look closer at our present — at our reflection in the ever-present screen.
The author is a writer and illustrator.
