Laurie Sheck | Writers' Voices

In Cyborg Fever, critically-acclaimed author, Laurie Sheck, presents a complex and intriguing novel centered around an orphan named Erwin who falls into a year-long fever dream and wakes up with a plethora of information from esteemed scientists of the past. According to Sheck, “…in the book, I chronicle the beings that he meets during his fever dream and the kind of things that he learns as he goes along. He learns about astrophysics, bioengineering, information, computers…” So, how does Erwin gain knowledge of all the scientific information that he gathered from that dream? She explained, “…he was in an orphanage and there was the head of the orphanage, Sister Gudrun, used to read to him all the time and so one day she read to him a story called ‘Funes the Memorious’ by [Jorge Luis] Borges and in that story the boy Funes has this prodigious memory, he remembers everything, and so when Erwin falls into this fever because he’s been rejected by Sister Gudrun… in his fever he sees this young man, Funes, in a white room with a computer (even though Funes lives in the 1800s, in my book Erwin sees him in the present), and he can read everything that’s on Funes’ computer, so that’s how he learns…”

When it comes to her writing process, Sheck allows only one person to read her novels as she’s working on them and that is her husband, a former senior editor at Pantheon Books. “…he’s an excellent reader and what would happen is when I started writing the novels, I would write a few pages each day, I would email them to him, and then at dinner we would talk and so my characters became part of our little family… we both loved it and then when I would finish the book we’d both be sad… I was very lucky to have [him] and he’s very devoted, so when I was first learning to write novels… he would do things like, he was a very good researcher and I remember coming home one day and he had ordered like 12 volumes of all the plots in western literature and he’s reading them. He was just sitting there reading them, and so that was like a wonderful resource for me. He was great that way.”