Daisuke Shen: On Artificial Intelligence, the Brutality of Human Relationships, Writing the Body, and Their Debut Story Collection, ‘Vague Predictions and Prophecies’
Daisuke Shen’s short story collection, Vague Predictions and Prophecies (Clash, 2024), is a twisted, psychedelic, genre-bending journey through a multiverse populated by monsters, cyborgs, anthropomorphized animals, and everyday people. In their singular voice, Daisuke addresses the very question of what it means to be human in a world where we’re increasingly alienated from our own humanity. Part myth, part fantasy, part technodystopia, their book probes themes of love, violence, sex, loneliness, addiction, suicide, and the capitalist drive to exploit bodies for their optimal performance and profit potential. All kinds of intelligence are hard at work in the bizarro world that Daisuke has built—artificial, human, and animal. This collection is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It’s dark, and magic, and compelled me as a reader to reckon with my own inner monstrosity.
Daisuke and I recently met at a rooftop reading in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. I was thrilled to sit down with them over Zoom to discuss this rare gem of a collection, some of the tough societal questions it opens up, and the process of writing it.
Emma Burger: How did you approach writing this story collection? Did you write these as individual short stories and compile them, or did you have an overarching vision for the collection from the start?
Daisuke Shen: It was mostly the former. They were collected over a longer period of time. Some of them were added with the idea of the collection in mind, once I started working with my agent and we’d identified the different themes I’d be working with. A couple of the stories were developed once I knew that this book was going to be very much concerned with relationships.
EB: Have you always been interested in telling stories that take place in alternate realities? What is it about the fantasy realm that interests you more than reality?
DS: I never really set out to write a story in that vein. They just sort of come out that way. I’m primarily concerned with human connection and the intimacies that we inhabit. Most of the time, for me at least, the best way to investigate those things is through a surreal lens—it’s difficult often to face things on a quote-unquote realistic level, and viewing things through this different angle provides me with more space to examine them.
EB: I’m curious who your influences were in writing this collection. What do you like to read, and how do you think that influenced your writing style here?
DS: Over the years that I was writing these stories, I drew from many different influences. I read a lot of different stuff, not just speculative fiction. The Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin was a big influence of mine. I would say early on: Kelly Link, Eugene Lim, Yuri Herrera, and Scott McClanahan. A good mix of people. I like writers who are able to grapple with the really messy parts of relationships. I think that’s the thing all those writers have in common. They don’t flinch away from the really ugly parts of ourselves or the really ugly parts of what it means to love somebody.
They write a lot of characters who get into these volatile, abusive, unstable relationships. There is a point where condemnation is necessary, but at the same time, there’s a lot about human behavior and the way we act when the compass of our lives is lost. There’s something really valuable about not having to sterilize what real love looks like at the end of the day. It’s really messy and really brutal at times.
EB: I feel like the purpose of art and literature is not to condemn or pass a value judgment. It’s more to depict the reality of our relationships, which can be violent at times. Do you feel drawn to that darkness and violence within human relationships in your writing?
DS: Certainly during the time I was writing this, a lot of the relationships I’d had to that point were sort of violent in one way or another. And that’s not to say that every relationship skews into a violent place. I’m certainly not saying that those are things we should aim for. However, darkness certainly does exist within every human heart. I think it’s always interesting when you think a couple is really happy and stable, and you’re like, well, that person is a lot more secure in life than me and my friends, but then you learn these things about those relationships more intimately, and you’re like, oh, everyone is dealing with their own stuff. When we put two humans together, it’s kind of spectacular, the ways in which we manage to destroy our own lives. If we’re lucky enough, there are people who will stick around during those parts and help us rebuild afterwards.
I think that the most important thing is identifying one’s own darkness. I’m prone to giving over in terms of my obsessions or things that could make me behave in really poor ways. And I’m not ever scared of confronting those aspects of myself because if you don’t, it gives you a lot more potential to hurt people around you. The more we’re able to look at these things and recognize the gruesome places inside ourselves, the better.
EB: As a writer and just as a person, there’s sometimes a tension that exists between that darkness we’re talking about that we seek out in writing and our actual personal relationships. Do you feel like writing speculative fiction, or fiction that veers toward the surreal, allows you a healthy layer of separation between your personal life and your art?
DS: Yes and no, because I think a lot of my way of existing in this world is very much cerebral. I spend a lot of time in my head, where impossible things are always happening. I do think those speculative elements allow me to grapple more with elements of violence though, or those really horrific parts of life that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
There’s only so much that I was able to do in nonfiction before it started to feel frankly boring. My trauma became very boring to me after a while. My greatest hope is that when people read these stories and have had similar experiences or can relate to any of the characters, that they’ll be able to interact with a part of themselves that they maybe haven’t been able to in other ways. I always hope that my writing will help people feel more understood.
EB: What was your background as a writer like prior to this collection? Did you used to write more nonfiction? Did you study writing?
DS: I did study writing, but I think the fiction part happened later on in my life. For a while, people were really pushing memoirs and personal essays about the most horrible things that have happened in people’s lives. And yes, there are certainly a lot of essays that I appreciate that talk about some really challenging experiences, but at the same time, it felt like what are we doing? Consuming people’s trauma as a means of enjoyment or a type of voyeurism. Or as a writer, presenting my own trauma for the same sort of purpose. But the more lighthearted answer is that I got bored with not being able to do anything with form or structure or voice. Voice is very important to me in story writing. Being able to have fun is where I arrived at fiction.
EB: Do you have a specific writing practice, or are you just able to sit down and write?
DS: I need to develop a better one. It’s really hard. To be totally honest—and any writer who ends up reading this interview will know what I’m talking about—it’s hard being broke. It’s hard being scared of getting through the next month. Am I gonna be able to get enough work, you know? A lot of my life is consumed with thoughts about work, or having to make myself constantly available to perform work. And thus my own writing feels trite. Or like, oh, there you are, working on your little projects and ignoring your responsibilities. And it’s like no, because my whole job as a teacher, as an editor, is to help people really value their work and cherish it, and see it as something. And I do strongly believe that everybody I work with should have that passion, but I don’t know how I’m able to internalize that for myself. Perhaps if I were a millionaire. Probably my writing would get a lot worse, but maybe I’d write more.
Usually when I’m finally able to sit down and work, I need a reason for why I’m doing it. Sometimes my friends will just write together and it’s really helpful to have people to talk about your writing with, or just to feel like I’m not just writing stupid stuff.
EB: So your day job is in teaching and editing other people’s work?
DS: Yes, and I really do love all my students so much. But as any teacher or editor will know, it’s exactly because of that care that I end up having for other people’s work that’s really draining in terms of arriving at my own writing. I spend so much time thinking about other people’s writing and focusing on how to work with them and support them and their goals. So when it comes down to the last part of the day, the last thing I often want to do is write or read, which is unfortunate, because those are some of my favorite things to do.
EB: Technology and artificial intelligence play a central role in so many of these stories. How do you see AI changing what it means to be human? How do you see it changing how we relate to each other?
DS: It feels like something that I’m used to, in terms of having some sort of mediation between people. Our generation was the first to get really heavily enmeshed with our phones and with communicating with people over the internet. Having friends over the internet was very normal for our generation. And with that came this ability to process the self through avatars, or a presentation that didn’t have to contain an entire human being. Online, I don’t need to show all the really difficult parts of myself, or maybe people are only seeing my difficult parts if they don’t like me on social media. But that’s not all of who I am. But the idea is still sort of instilled, reflexively in our heads even as we try and work through it, that we know this person. Even if we don’t really know them.
EB: Your story “Damien and Melissa” explores the epidemic of loneliness, and the role of technology in addressing it. Do you see any benefits to using AI to ease some of the loneliness and alienation we’re currently experiencing in society?
DS: It’s hard because unfortunately, I don’t think there is a cure for loneliness. Maybe this is just who I am as a person, but I feel like I can be lonely wherever I am. It’s not all the time, but it’s there. You can try and run from it however you want to. You can try to replace real human intimacy with these sort of vessels, but always in the back of our head there’s going to be that real understanding that this isn’t what it seems. People are really worried about AI and to a certain degree, I am too. I think the most worrisome thing to me is how easy it’s becoming for people to give up the really human parts of us that want to create art.
I’m less concerned about whether or not AI art is good. It’s not. It’s more depressing to me that it would even be a thought to generate art via AI. Because the thing we speak our souls through is art. That part is really daunting to me. Why would people want to sacrifice that part of themselves? Just to get a degree of recognition? You can’t possibly feel proud. How can you feel proud of something that wasn’t born from you, that you didn’t spend time on, that wasn’t something you had to be deliberate about?
That’s the scariest thing to me about AI. Getting rid of the time and the dedication and joy and satisfaction that comes from wanting to learn how to do something. With writing, for example, it’s going to take me reading a lot of different stuff, researching, looking through all these different channels in order to know what I don’t like, what I do, how to use these different techniques. Relying on AI is just going to make us become very boring, very lazy people in that way.
EB: So many of your characters transcend their physical form and go through major transformations. As a writer, do you see the human body as a limitation to overcome? What is it exactly about the process of transformation itself that you find so compelling?
DS: I’m not super interested in ideas of progress that rely on technology as a solution. So in terms of the human body being something that can be transcended, things like bodybuilding are really interesting to me. That ability to push the body to its limits is something that’s interesting. It’s when we get into, for instance, that one guy who was injecting himself with his son’s blood in order to stay young that things get really dicey.
I see physicality as an uncomfortable thing. A tragic thing. I see it as a traumatic thing to have a form and to have to be inflicted with consciousness. The stories were less about wanting to exchange the physical human form for something else as they were about any form being unbearable. I think of transformation as an inevitable thing. There’s a lot of really gruesome stuff when it comes to the body in those stories, but it’s mostly born from the psyche.
EB: How does it feel now, to have this collection out in the world and in readers’ hands? Has it been received the way you thought it might be?
DS: I don’t know because I haven’t asked a whole lot about the numbers, maybe because I don’t want to know. I checked Goodreads once and then was like, I’m not checking that again. It’s kind of funny because it’s like whatever, I’ve been publishing for a while. This has been happening for a while. Even now though, when I sort of recognize that people do read my stuff, someone will come up to me and be like I’m a big fan of your work and I’ll be so confused. Like how did you find it? Where could you possibly have come across my stuff? And they’re like, you have a website, you know. Or the book itself. And then I’m like, okay, I guess that makes sense.
It’s at once something I’m really proud of, and something that’s been difficult, knowing I can’t return to the person I was when I wrote these stories. I can never write them again. I’m a different writer than I was when I wrote the collection.
EB: When we met, you mentioned you were working on a novel now. How does that process differ for you from short story writing?
DS: The novel is something I don’t really understand how to write. The short story makes sense to me because I know how to capture people’s attention and to keep the focus on something for a short length of time. With a short story, I know how it operates, or I at least have a vague idea of how it’s gonna be contained, whereas the novel is a sprawling mess that could go so many different ways.
It’s really hard for me to think about in that way. I’m not someone who outlines, and I’m not really someone who comes up with characters beforehand. So with a novel, I’m having to try to think about those things more. I’m also tricking myself into being like, the novel is just a bunch of short stories I have to write and cobble together.
I was really worried that I was going to be this boring person after the short story collection came out. My novel is going to be more experimental, maybe less on the speculative side. That said, I don’t think it’ll be a normal literary novel, even though I did set out to write it that way. I was like, I have to write a normal book.
My novel is very concerned with memory, which is another reason I think it has to work a bit differently than a normal novel would, since memory is so deceptive sometimes, or so based on emotion and personal experience. It feels like the whole exciting thing about writing is the process of discovery. Maybe we just like to break rules, which is good. That’s what writers should do.
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Daisuke Shen is the author of the short story collection Vague Predictions and Prophecies (CLASH Books 2024), and the novella Funeral (with Vi Khi Nao, KERNPUNKT Press 2023). They live in New York City. www.daisukeshen.com
