Interview: Deni Ellis Béchard
Deni Ellis Béchard’s speculative novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, is set in a future dystopian United States divided by a civil war. The machine, a powerful AI which was designed with the goal to protect humans from harm, determines that the only way to accomplish this task is to isolate all humans into simulated realities where people can live without suffering. The novel follows a group of different but interconnected characters as they relive traumatic memories and grapple with what it means to be human within this strange new existence.
I was struck by this book’s stylistically complex narrative that transcends time and space, and the clever, layered way it tackles its many philosophical quandaries. In this interview, Béchard and I discuss the challenges of structure and character in a novel that was born from a thought experiment, along with its relevance to questions around changing technology, social class, and political divisions, and the relationship between AI and art.
—Shehrazade Zafar-Arif
Shehrazade Zafar-Arif: You were inspired to write this book by your time at Stanford University writing about developing AI technology. Was there anything in particular that sparked the idea for this story? How much of your portrayal of the machine is rooted in reality and how much was inspired by your own imagination or other speculative fiction, and how did you bring these together in a way that felt believable?
Deni Ellis Béchard: One of the first features I wrote for Stanford Magazine was about artificial intelligence and the news media, and I have a habit—or a manic tendency—where when I have to write about something, I go and read everything on the subject, far more than is necessary to write the article. I came across a well-known thought experiment by Nick Bostrom from his 2003 book, Superintelligence. He says that AI that’s not aligned with human values could possibly override its limitations in order to carry out what it’s designed to do. So if we design an AI to make paper clips and that is its purpose and it’s not sufficiently constrained, it could turn the universe into paper clips. As I read, I thought about how the greater risk might be AI that is aligned with our values in such a way that its sole purpose is to enhance those values. Something that comes up a lot is the trolley problem, which is something people designing autonomous vehicles have to think about. Are we comfortable letting a machine make that decision? It’s a tricky question. It got me thinking, any AI that’s told its purpose is not to harm humans, and is given a global situation where human harm is inevitable—what would it do? It would just separate us forever. That’s the misalignment that would occur.
So that’s where the book began, as a thought experiment. I actually had no plan for a book. I thought, I’m just going to let my imagination go and see what happens. And it was a bit of a disaster, to be honest. I mean, the book just went in all directions. I kept putting it aside and then one day I hit this point where I thought, Okay, this actually can work. But it was a pretty long process. It was a very hard book to figure out.
I have this irritation with dystopian novels—I often think authors write them with a moral in mind. I personally think we live in a profoundly dystopian world, and I thought, I don’t want to write a book saying AI is good or bad. What I really wanted to understand was, who do we become once AI removes us from our world and allows us limitless potential? But I didn’t have a clear ending or solution in mind.
SZ-A: I suppose that’s why the book has somewhat of an ambiguous ending?
DEB: It came to me as I wrote. At one point I thought: What’s interesting about the machine is that it is itself constrained by human values, is the product of human thinking, and its purpose is human centric, so there has to be something else in the universe that’s smarter than it. So I thought I would reintroduce death, to see how that changes people who’ve had death removed from their lives—this concept that’s so deeply programmed into us that even after thousands of years of having it removed instantly has power when reintroduced.
SZ-A: Each character in the novel has a different voice and a different relationship with or response to the machine. How did you go about developing and expressing each unique narrative voice? Did some come more naturally than others?
DEB: It was a lot of work. This book felt like a first book, like I’d gone back to the beginning. With my very first novel, there was a lot of “I think I know where I’m going,” and with my subsequent books I felt a lot more aware of what I was doing. But with this book I felt I had to discover everything all over again. I wrote so much material that I threw away because I didn’t know the characters yet. Then at a certain point I started to get to know who the characters were, understand their relationships, understand their worlds better.
I wanted to have some characters who were deeply rooted in a place in a way that felt inextricable, and Jae and Simon allowed me to explore this kind of dynamic. A lot of this conceptualization of place evolved organically. I spent many years of my life in rural Northern Virginia, pretty much in the same sort of landscape where Jae and Simon live—which allowed me to understand my relationship to place and how it would change. And as the world came into focus, their voices came into focus.
With Jonah, Ava, and Michael—they experienced the machine through what gave them meaning in life before the machine. Ava’s capacity to live the world through art allows her to transform the machine into a vehicle for her art, and that perspective allows the experience to be more sustainable. Whereas Michael, what gave him satisfaction was this feeling of taking society apart and reshaping it and having a sense of a future, and the future doesn’t really exist anymore inside the machine. His relationship to the world cannot function in the same way within the machine. But with each character it was very organic, trying to imagine their worlds and what drove them and then trying to feel how they would experience the machine.
SZ-A: Almost like that initial thought experiment you cited as the novel’s genesis. I’m glad you mentioned Ava. I loved her character, and how her art both responded to and inspired the technology in the novel. It was interesting in light of the current conversation around what AI means for art. What inspired the decision to weave art with AI in an almost harmonious way?
DEB: I think everyone who has artistic interests is struggling with what AI means for us right now. I wanted to explore this relationship we have with reality, where we want as much freedom as possible without consequences, and how art allows us to live vicariously and experience other realities. Most people don’t want to go to a war zone but are open to reading a book about experiences inside a war zone. Most people don’t want to dive with sharks but would still put on a VR headset to experience diving with sharks. In a sense, AI just became a continuation of that desire to experience freedom with as much safety as possible. Writing fiction and storytelling and all these other art forms had so long to evolve, but we’re at a point now where technology is changing so fast that it’s very difficult for us to figure out our relationship to that technology. Hypothetically, in a hundred years we could treat VR the way we treat writing a great novel or reading poetry, and there could be some very high artistic expressions that evolve with it. I became interested in the continuous line between the way we have created art and told stories and given space for freedom within our imaginations to where technology’s artistic incarnations are leading us.
But there’s another discussion to be had around what AI is doing to art. I do have moments in which I feel worried about living in a world where all people believe that they are artists because there’s AI available that can translate what they want to express better than they can. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the line between being an artist and being a consumer of art has been getting blurred in the minds of many people. And so the book touches a little on that anxiety.
SZ-A: Your depiction of a post-Partition United States feels harrowingly close to home, but it’s also a fascinating paradox that combines science-fiction futurism with a regressive, lawless society akin to the Wild West. How did you conceive this sort of setting and what details felt particularly important in bringing it to life?
DEB: When I am writing fiction, there are often autobiographical elements that sneak into the work when I’m not looking. Drawing inspiration from my life was a way to anchor an alienating experience with other experiences that were familiar and that I could concretely evoke. In the novel, the world of the Confederacy has many elements that are already present in American culture. Whereas there are sections of the country that are deep in the future—where people have integrated advanced technology into their lives—there are other areas where everyone has a gun in their truck and a vision of wanting to defend their culture from change. And we also have techno-optimists allied with populists who want to return to a 1950s version of the US. As in the novel, we’re rushing towards this utopian vision of the future even though the country’s foundation is unsound. I was trying to explore how we don’t get superintelligent AI because we move towards it thoughtfully and cautiously. Rather, we stumble into something that is not exactly what we wanted.
As for the Wild West stuff, it grew out of a long time spent thinking about the characters and the sense that the people who often support populist leaders—if you really see where the vision of those leaders is taking them—are often not the ones who benefit. Within any new group that arises there will be new divisions and new power structures, so I was looking at what happens if these people really get the version of the United States that they think they want, at what that would look like.
SZ-A: The novel has a beautifully nonlinear and nested narrative, simultaneously juggling present and past as the characters consciously relive and react to their memories. How did you go about structuring this sort of plot?
DEB: It was really hard. I was tempted to give up many times. I’m pretty persistent and I think a little obsessive, so when I get stuck on something I have a hard time stopping, and that’s what got me through it.
The book was in fragments for a very long time. Not all the characters were included in the first draft, which was a thirty-to-forty-page thought experiment. At some point I thought I would just focus on episodes from people’s lives and what they’re struggling with in that moment. The process of crafting these episodic fragments was very different for Jae and Simon than it was for the others because Jae and Simon are deeply anchored in the past. I wanted their experiences in the book to be almost independent of the machine in a way, like the machine is there putting pressure on their experiences of the world, but they’re living almost as if in a separate novel within the novel. And so for those sections I was very much thinking about just the immediacy of their world, of their concerns, the things that really don’t matter anymore inside the machine. Then I separately wrote Michael’s and Ava’s and Lux’s worlds, and I tried to find a place where they would start to join. Jonah was one of the obvious places where the worlds would begin to merge because he sort of lives between these worlds. But there were these places where the two worlds could connect with each other, through art—Ava’s art, Michael’s virtual world. Once I had those narratives I rewrote them again so that they could speak to each other a bit more. So I wrote Jae and Simon, and then I wrote Jonah, then I wrote Ava and Michael, and then I wrote Jonah over again.
A lot of what happens to Jae and Simon in the real world is stuff that happens to people all the time today. And I wanted to let the reader feel what the world can look like and what problem the machine is trying to solve, by just giving space to characters to live their world and struggle with challenges and reach a place of hopelessness. I did a bioethics course a few years ago, and a lot of the literature would say that if we’re not careful, we’re going to end up living in Brave New World. Something about that idea bugged me, because I remembered Brave New World being more ambiguous, so I went back and read all of Aldous Huxley’s work and what I found was that his vision of the perfect future was actually somewhere between Brave New World and reality. He’s depicting technology that went too far, but he wasn’t dramatically opposed to a lot of that technology. So I wanted readers to feel how it is to live in a dystopia that reflects a lot of what is happening today. I created a fictional situation that heightened real-world politics, which I then juxtaposed with the world that Michael and Lux are trying to create. The Confederacy pushes people back into the past that Michael and Lux are trying to escape. But is the machine’s solution objectively worse than going back into the past? I didn’t want readers to walk away with an easy answer to that question.
SZ-A: You’ve had a fascinating career. How has your background as a journalist influenced the way you write fiction?
DEB: I started as a fiction writer and ended up doing journalism afterwards, mainly because I felt I wasn’t able to address some of my concerns about the world through fiction. And now I’m mostly writing fiction. I’ve had a very nonlinear career.
I grew up very poor and as a kid, I read everything I could find—I didn’t even distinguish between nonfiction and fiction, they were just books. And when I began writing I was trying to make sense of a lot of what I grew up with and at a certain point I became a journalist. I worked on a lot of political and environmental issues and then I started writing about science and eventually did a master’s in biology because I do think it is the discipline that’s really shaping the world the most rapidly. But I find that this novel wraps a lot of my other books together, a lot of the things I was working on early on. Simon’s and Jae’s characters especially—those were the sorts of questions I was asking in my early books about working-class people in rural North America. In some ways as a writer it can be difficult to escape the influences that set us into motion.
But each project sort of expands my understanding. And I think journalism was good in the sense that it maybe added a level of rigor to how I would think about certain issues, because with fiction you can convince yourself that you’re right. Journalism forced me to spend a lot of time listening to other people, a lot of time checking why I was asserting a certain viewpoint in an article, and it gave me a bit more neutrality. So though I find AI problematic and struggle to understand where it’s taking us, I can also see its extraordinary potential. I don’t begin projects with a clear sense of right and wrong. I try to let the experience of creating the worlds as compellingly as possible dictate where the story goes.
SZ-A: Just for fun—if tomorrow, the machine from the novel isolated us all into controlled environments, what do you think your reality would look like? Would you relive the past like Jae or escape into fantasy lands like Simon or create new worlds like Ava?
DEB: I think I would probably be most aligned with Ava. Being trapped in my past sounds pretty terrible. I hope I’d be beyond that sort of regression at this point. I think part of writing the book was me asking what I would do in that situation. And I think that Simon and Ava and to some extent Jae all have their experiences in the machine evolve and there are a lot of positive moments for them. So I would try to make the best of it.
SZ-A: That feels fitting for a writer.
DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD is a Canadian-American journalist and novelist and author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction and the winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, the 2016 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction, and 2015 Nautilus Book Award for Journalism & Investigative Reporting. His writing has been nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award and featured in Best Canadian Essays, and his photojournalism has been exhibited in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. His work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Pacific Standard, Salon, CityLab, and The Paris Review, among others. He has reported from India, Cuba, Rwanda, Colombia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan. His new novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, released on January 28, 2025. Find him on Instagram @denibechard.
SHEHRAZADE ZAFAR-ARIF is a British-Pakistani freelance writer based in London. She is an editorial assistant for interviews and craft essays at CRAFT. Her work has been published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Fiery Scribe Review, The Japan Society Review, the Croydonist, and the British Council’s Voices magazine, among others. Her short story “Portrait of a City on the Brink of Destruction,” published in Peatsmoke journal, is nominated for Best of the Net 2025. She is currently working on her first novel through Curtis Brown Creative’s novel-writing programme. Find her on Twitter @ShehrazadeZafar.
