Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse - Paperback

by Brenda Shaughnessy (Author)

In this dystopian tale of a near-future society increasingly threatened by all-consuming AI, a scientist mother and her disabled son rebel against the corporate larceny of their selves, by an award-winning poet ("Stirring. . . . Wildly inventive and sharp to an edge" --Los Angeles Review of Books)

In this story of the scientist DR. MEM and KITSUNE, her nonambulatory, non-speaking son, the pair fight CORP, a mega-company developing the most powerful AI robot ever conceived. What MEM learns is that CORP seeks "To give the robot something real. / What it can fake but not make: / mercy, compassion. Trust and love." That is, CORP hopes to harvest and own not just their employees' personal data but their thoughts, memories, and their sensory experiences, in order to build a robot that will contain all that is and ever was human, and replace the need for humans themselves.

This swift drama, which unfolds in a libretto/ script format, with dialogue in Shaughnessy's accessible and blistering verse, shows how MEM and her coworkers fight to save their individuality from being vacuumed up. A Greek-style chorus reflects on the state of a world where "taking leave of our senses" becomes a serious and quite literal threat, as MEM struggles to fulfill her singular role in fighting the high-tech of corrupt capitalism. At the center of this all-too-relevant speculative drama burns MEM's most powerful weapon against the forces of AI darkness: a mother's love.

Author Biography

Brenda Shaughnessy is a poet, mother, daughter, and teacher. She works at Rutgers University-Newark, and lives in West Orange, NJ. She was educated in NYC and Santa Cruz, CA, having grown up in Thousand Oaks, CA after an infancy in Wollaston, MA and Okinawa, where she was born at Kadena Air Base Hospital, United States Air Force, in 1970, to mother Mitsuko Higa, daughter of Yoshimoto Ushi and Higa Denko, of Yomitan.