There’s a public intellectual that “handled everything: scandal, sex, politics, political scandals, racism, weather, the racism of weather, Japanese cartoons.” A restaurant nicknamed Inauthentic Sushi: “Owned by a genial and painfully good-looking 1.5-gen Korean couple, the food is all made by Mexicans from Chiapas, and the waitstaff is mostly from Fujian. It has a quick wit that comes on barrel-chested, deriding at times poetry, the neo-liberal consensus, and various pop culture ephemera. By the end of the novel, any narrative corresponding to one singular voice is subsumed within a general thread of conversation that’s carried along through each section. Luckily, the effect of these shifting perspectives focuses less on voice than on being multi-vocal, and creating a sense of polyphony. There are workers in a Chinese factory, an adjunct professor in the States, and conversations with a dog through an elaborate speaker system. There is an AI dog that may or may not be a reincarnated friend. And one of the practical results of these questions is a cascade of framing devices. This novel, like Dear Cyborgs, addresses questions around living and thinking in relation to one another, mediated through the internet. Search History by Eugene Lim charts the swerves that persist across our systems and ideologies.

Dear cyborgs by eugene lim