Santa Cruz’s Liza Monroy peers into the future and sees a complicated AI romance in ‘The Distractions’

Sci-fi and speculative fiction writers serve an important function in today’s ever-morphing techno-sphere. They are the ones who help the rest of us anticipate where we are going. To the degree that anyone is surprised by the ongoing technological nightmare of the 2020s — disinformation overwhelming truth, screen engagement warping the brain, social media’s malign effects on teens, online rage and lies consuming democracy, on and on — it marks a failure of the imagination of writers, technologists and artists.

Now stepping up to the challenge of writing about the future is Santa Cruz novelist Liza Monroy, whose new novel, “The Distractions,” deftly mixes the romantic comedy with the dystopian tech fable. Of course, time will have the final say, but from the perspective of sitting at the century’s first-quarter mark, it’s remarkable at how eerily plausible Monroy’s vision seems. The bad news about this vision is that tech’s voracious colonization of daily life is only getting started and that today’s smartphone-in-every-pocket world looks quaint if not downright primitive by comparison to what Monroy sees as our shared future. The good news? Well, I guess many of us will be dead. 

Monroy comes to Bookshop Santa Cruz next Wednesday, Jan. 15, to discuss her new book and her ideas about future tech with fellow novelist Malena Watrous. Set in a quasi-recognizable near future, “The Distractions” (Regalo Press) features a social-media environment called Reel that functions as a sort of metastasized Instagram, tiny bee-sized drones that follow you everywhere recording your daily life and anticipating your needs, AI robot babies, algorithms that serve as companions and many more creepy but beguiling tech conveniences and shortcuts. It’s a world where privacy and anonymity, actual meat from the flesh of animals (as opposed to the lab-grown simulacrum) and the third-person pronouns “he” and “she” are all essentially extinct. 

Monroy’s past work as a writer would give you little indication that she was interested in this kind of speculative fiction. Her first novel, “Mexican High,” was fiction, but largely based on her own experiences living in Mexico. She’s also published a memoir called “The Marriage Act,” which was focused on relationships, love and marriage.

She first began conceptualizing “The Distractions” almost a decade ago, in a different tech world than today. She said that she assumed that many of her ideas were further into the future than they turned out to be, and that the weirdness of the real world began to make her world ever more plausible.

“When I first started [writing],” she said, “there was no ChatGPT. There was no real AI in the daily parlance. I think I was still on Facebook. There was Twitter. It was a different time. And, as I was writing the book, oddly, things that I was writing about started to manifest. It was a very strange feeling. The strangest one was, the main character doesn’t leave her building for two years. And when I first started drafting that part of it, I couldn’t figure out why she doesn’t ever leave her building? That’s a crazy thing, right? Who would just stay inside and have everything delivered to them? And then the pandemic happened, and DoorDash and Amazon quickly became a part of daily life.”

“The Distractions,” which will be officially released Tuesday, takes place somewhere between the end of the 21st century and the beginning of the next one — roughly 50 to 100 years from now. It focuses on a young New Yorker named Mischa Osborn, a tech worker who, while presenting at a conference in Las Vegas, meets a charismatic social-media celebrity in “realspace,” i.e., the real material world. His name, neatly acronymed, is NAL, and the two of them meet in classic meet-cute manner at a Starbucks-like place called Cafelandia when they both and simultaneously order the last “Crispysqueeze Glonut,” a doughnut filled with pink/orange/purple luminescent jelly. 

Pro tip: Before diving into the narrative, I suggest spending some significant time with the glossary that Monroy provides at the beginning of the book. Much of the novel is written in the vernacular of the time, which features a lot of jargon and brand names, which makes sense. Think, for example, of a more-or-less straightforward account of life today. It would be peppered with terms like download, text, app, TikTok, etc. that would be bewildering to a reader from, say, the 1980s. The glossary teaches us that “mobi” is a self-driving car, a “PIC” (Personal Intimacy Companion) is the preferred term for a significant other, and that a “SterilAire Facedrape” is a sophisticated kind of mask that protects against everything from smoke to viruses … uh, super cool that face masks are going to be a huge part of our shared future. 

At the center of this book about the future is an obsession of the present — artificial intelligence. The most salient part of AI in “The Distractions” are “eyelets,” small drones that follow users everywhere like Tinkerbell, can be customizable to do everything from recording your experience on social media to getting your coffee order processed, and are often named by their users, as if they are tiny friends.

“I would look at these various social problems,” said Monroy who has written as a journalist for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Lookout. “Take a simple one, like traffic, and I’d try to find what would solve this problem in a technological way and I envisioned these lines of self-driving cars, very well-spaced, all going the same speed. Or, what if lab-grown meat took off because of climate change, and there were no more factory farms?”

At the heart of the story, however, is a romance. And “The Distractions” contains a lot to ponder on the nature of relationships, celebrity and influencer culture, online dating and intimacy in an always plugged-in world. It poses questions about curated image versus reality, surveillance as a means of stalking, love in a world where an increasing number of technological gates separates people from each other.

 In the end, Monroy hopes her book will provide the same kind of enjoyment that a, say, Jane Austen novel would provide, despite the radically different settings.

“I would sure hope so,” she said. “I think it is ultimately about a romantic love obsession, and what that leads the character to do, which is destructive. My work all tends to come back to that theme, even as I try to get away from it.”

Liza Monroy, author of “The Distractions,” appears Wednesday, Jan. 15, at Bookshop Santa Cruz, in conversation with writer Malena Watrous. The event begins at 7 p.m. and it’s free. 

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