One thing I’ve happily stumbled upon in my writing is what I think is a new genre. A friend of mine calls it “techno-magical realism.” All of the stories I’ve written in recent years, including my latest, The Game, live in this genre.

The idea is that in these stories, technology takes on a magical quality that bears no relationship to the way things work in the real world. It is almost arbitrarily powerful, and we use that magic to explore what technology means in the world around us. In contrast, we can also explore what it means to be human and to make use of tools of our own creation.

As a result, there is very little care taken to create a cohesive vision of what technology can and can’t do in an alternative world. The thing is beyond any rational limits and in fact it can be kind of preposterous - which of course can make it rather fun to write and (I hope) fun to read. So you have, in this case, a cell phone which has nearly perfect capacity to understand all manner of text messages, to reason about fairly sophisticated logical propositions, to read its owner’s mood… and yet, it’s not able to make sense of a tongue-in-cheek inside joke about a nursery tale. In my last short story, The Recipe, you have a typewriter which suddenly becomes clever enough to pass the Turing test. In my first, The Menu, there is a real-time video processing chip which becomes a ridiculously omniscient and evil political strategist. None of these technologies are anywhere near seeing the light of day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are in fact physically impossible. But why should that stop me?

These stories sounds a bit like sci-fi or fantasy, but I think they don’t quite fit into those categories. They have very little in the way of cohesive world-building. The point of the stories is not to talk about the technology, to ask “suppose X were possible; then what?” Sci-fi and fantasy, I find, tends to hold that “X” constant throughout the story, as a way of making an argument about it. My view is almost the opposite - I’m happy to let the technology in my stories grow, shift, improve, and become impossibly clever. I’m curious about the nature of technology, and the way it can be used to regulate or alter personal relationships. If you think about it, that has been the really dramatic effect of technology through the ages, from the plow to the steam engine to the COVID-19 vaccine. What emerges, I hope, is a picture of the world in which personal relationships are our primary point of contact, and technology is used to shape and cultivate them in a way which makes us all better off.

The term techno-magical realism came from a friend of mine after reading The Menu, and I’m forever indebted. Not least because I love magical realism and some of its towering pioneers. I like to think I’m contributing, in my own small way, to helping move the genre forward. More than that, I like to think that my stories provide a new perspective on what technology means in modern life, and even an optimistic take on what it can do for each of us.