Cyborg Fever

In Cyborg Fever, acclaimed writer Laurie Sheck delivers a lyrical philosophical fiction in the spirit of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. This probing novel explores what it means to be human in an age of AI, genetic engineering, and transhumanism.

Strange and wondrous moments unfold: an artist clones a flower using his own DNA, an astronaut plays golf on the moon, a mathematician reimagines Shakespeare, and particles collide beneath the green hills of Europe. Woven through it all is a central question: amid the marvels and devastations we’ve created, how do we understand love, humanity, and connection?

The narrator, Erwin—left as a newborn on the steps of an orphanage and named after physicist Erwin Schrödinger—falls into a year-long fever dream that propels him through visions of bioengineering, cyborgs, AI, and space-time. A bond with a gentle cyborg fugitive and the influence of Borges’s Funes lead Erwin into the heart of the Information Age, where he witnesses the beauty—and terror—of a mind overtaken by data.

As the cyborg loses its humanity, Erwin is left to grapple with questions of personhood, attachment, and the fragile dignity of all sentient life.

Praise & Reviews

“A novel of surpassing beauty that enacts a complex and moving investigation into the nature of empathy.”
– Vivian Gornick

“A calmy terrifying novel, as impressive for its deep learning as its lyric sting. As always, Sheck writes superlative speculative epics out of civilization’s scraps.”
– Ed Park

“Brilliantly constructed and beautifully poignant, this is a complex and profound novel of deep inquiry, fluent imagination, and crucial questions of humanity and technology, power and freedom.”
– Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Will come back to haunt you days and weeks after you’ve read it….breathtaking.”
–Compulsive Reader

“In spare, haunting prose, Laurie Sheck crafts a meditation on loneliness, machine consciousness and the uncanny reality of loss. Cyborg Fever is a novel of heated visions and quiet devastations where the past vanishes like ghosts and the future dissolves into data. Sheck’s boundless prose made me feel like I was falling forever.”
― Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts