Zero K

"I’ve long been a huge DeLillo fan and his work, generally, was something I was thinking about a lot when I was writing the book . I used some lines from White Noise as an epigraph to my book: This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. So much of his work is about the confluence of anxieties about death and technology. He combines those things in a really interesting way. It’s definitely in White Noise; Underworld is full of it as well, but Zero K — which I actually only read this book after I finished To Be a Machine — just becomes very explicit and tackles it head-on. It’s a book about cryonics and it’s set in this DeLillo-ised version of Alcor , the cryonics facility that I visited for the book. I talked to him, actually, when the book came out. I asked him about how aware he was of transhumanism and the Singularity and all these ideas. He told me that he didn’t do all that much research. He read a little bit about this stuff and then took it in his own direction. So, it wasn’t like he was doing a fictionalised version of somewhere like Alcor. He was just taking the notion of cryonics and running with it in his own way. I thought it was really interesting that a writer at such a late stage of his career — DeLillo is in his eighties now — has such a prescient and deep understanding of technology right now and of how it’s moving through society and through people. He shows that really brilliantly in Zero K . After I finished To Be a Machine I spent a whole year desperately casting about for a topic for a new book and nothing really took for me. I eventually figured out that the thing I was most interested in was the idea of the apocalypse, and the apocalypse as a way of thinking about the particular moment of anxiety and uncertainty and confusion and breakdown that we’re going through. Now, it seems like a really obvious move to have made. It seems like, in a way, I was already writing about the apocalypse with the transhumanism book and that this is just a continuation of that project. With this book, it’s less about the tech stuff, although I am writing about Peter Thiel again. I seem to be unable to move away from Thiel as a character! It’s a little bit more diffuse than the transhumanism stuff. I’m not writing about any particular movement or whatever. It’s a lot more personal, in terms of writing about my own life and my own anxieties that have, in the past, tended towards an apocalyptic despair. I visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone for the book and spent a bit of time there. I hate using the term ‘psychogeography’, but there was a little element of that to it. I write about places a lot in this book. I went to Transylvania with an amazing group of artists and environmentalists and spent a week on a mountain, just thinking about these apocalyptic ideas around climate change and so on. I also visited a former dairy farm in South Dakota that’s been bought by a sort of apocalyptic entrepreneur who converts old missile silos and military bunkers into luxury apocalypse solutions. There’s a few different strands to it that I’m currently trying to wrestle together. That’s the idea anyway."