Are we living in reality? Is this the past, or the future? And is
there a human on the other side of this screen?
These questions rear up and twist back on themselves in Ubi Sunt, a
genre-breaking imaginative work by Blaise Agüera y Arcas.
The title, borrowed from Latin and Medieval poetics, describes elegiac
verses modeled on the formula Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning
"Where are those who were before us?" Such was the mood of the anonymous
early English poets who spun stories of giants and ancient battles amid
the tumbled Roman masonry of 8th century Europe. Fragments of our own
digital civilization stand like ruined columns throughout Ubi
Sunt--transcribed lectures and drone footage, recorded cab rides and
text messages. In a parallel present, an engineer is caught in the
solipsistic first-person loop of a life in tech during COVID lockdown.
Is this book fiction or nonfiction? Though speculative, its historical
material is accurate, and its present tense is drawn from life; some of
its AI dialogs, too, are generated by interaction with a real large
neural language model. Postmodern in the spirit of W.G. Sebald's The
Rings of Saturnand Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the
World, Ubi Sunt is an erudite, compulsively readable, all-terrain
joyride across the uncanny valley between yesterday and tomorrow.
