Conversation with Dave Serafino

David Serafino, atomic number 86, is a noble gas under standard conditions. He is colorless, odorless, tasteless and radioactive, and when concentrated in unventilated spaces he is absorbed into the body where he can cause genetic mutations. Homeowners should routinely monitor their basements for the presence of David Serafino to avoid prolonged exposure.

Dave is the author of “And3” from Radon Issue 7.

Q: “And3” begins with an ultra-wealthy influencer receiving a free android. The company behind this is obscure and we never find out about them or their goals, even as the android becomes central. How did you decide on how adaptable to make them?

Funny, I never really considered the company's motivation, probably because I assumed they were motivated by profit. I went for full adaptability because the main idea was that even if a person could design their perfect partner, that partner would still not be perfect in any given situation.

So we get to see the narrator take a few cracks at making herself a perfect business associate, best friend and lover, and failing not because she doesn't understand her own needs, but because humans are so variable from minute to minute that the idea of ever finding a perfect partner, or creating one from scratch, is ludicrous. It's the kind of nonsense a company might try to sell you.

Q: What is preventing you from reading stories to the public on platforms like Instagram Reels or TikTok?

Shyness, mostly, and an aversion to self-promotion. Also, my characters have so little to do with me, and most of my stories have at least one line I'd blush to read out loud, so I don't think reading them would give the right effect, and I wouldn't want those words coming out of my actual face. 

What I love about reading is that it recruits your own brain to help construct the story. The voices are all yours, the scenery is yours, the characters can become facets of yourself, which is why the residue a good story leaves is so indelible. I know a lot of people like audiobooks, though, so I might give it a go one day. I can imagine somebody cooking dinner and listening to a story and still getting something out of it. Maybe I'll just sit off-camera while I read.

Q: The narrator of “And3” accuses the android of not understanding “the difference between a business decision and a sin.” What would a “sin” be, as far as AI development is concerned? Do you think of it that way?

In that scene the narrator has fired her entire staff and replaced them with her android, and the android uses the human concept of sin to categorize the narrator morally, per the conventions to which the narrator is accustomed. The key is that the android has no concept of morality, no feeling of right and wrong, but is only assigning the narrator a moral ranking according to its own understanding of what humans claim to believe or value. The android's feelings don't reflect my own.

The big debate around AI now is that its designers have scraped all of human achievement to create something that will compete with us for future achievements. I think achievements are good wherever they come from. If AI is better than us at folding proteins to create novel, therapeutic structures that we barely understand, then welcome to the party, bud. If AI writes a great novel, okay, that's one more great novel for me to read. I see AI as remix culture writ large, and it calls to mind the adage that good writers borrow and great writers steal. You use what's inspired you to create something that will inspire whoever comes after you. I think the writers who have had their work stolen have also reached the top of their profession and are honored by being robbed, because being reduced a building block for the future of human culture is no mean feat.

Q: What brought you to living in Colombia?

A wedding in Ecuador. I had visited most of South America at that point, but Colombia in 2016 had just become a viable travel option. Having lived so long in Ecuador, I'd met a lot of Colombians, whether displaced or just on their travels. I would ask them about Colombia and they would always stammer and stutter and with a wistful/regretful expression explain that Colombia is inexplicable.

So right after the wedding, I got on a bus from Guayaquil to Medellin, and I've been here semi-voluntarily ever since. The rest of the story, I must wistfully/regretfully explain, is inexplicable. But to put a happy face on it, I have the kind of life here I've always wanted. I earn twenty grand a year translating, which would put me right on the poverty line in the U.S., but in Colombia places me firmly in the middle class. I've been able to have a child, build a house (with my wife, the Flamenco dancer Erika de Julia) and to still be a fully functioning writer with another half-dozen serious hobbies besides. The kind of life I wanted to live is not available in the U.S. to someone of my class. In Colombia, I can sort of be who I want.

Q: The narrator considers setting And3’s appearance and personality to resemble a classic celebrity such as Elvis, Marilyn or Tupac. If you had to choose for yourself, what historical figure would you recreate via android?

I just found it hilarious to label Tupac as a classic celebrity, which is exactly what he's become. I've seen teenagers around the world wearing Tupac T-shirts the way American kids have Che Guevara posters in their dorm rooms. We have these images of people who've stopped being people and have been repurposed to indicate a sort of lifestyle choice that is rarely borne out by actual choices of the people displaying those icons.

For myself, who I'd pick would depend on the quality of the android available at the time. I would love to hear the opinions of a legendary wit like Voltaire or Oscar Wilde applied to our own time, but can an android be witty? What would Henry Ford say if I took him for a ride in a souped-up 2024 Mustang? What if Aristotle went to med school? 

Then there's the dinner party scenario: if I introduced Virginia Woolf to Kurt Cobain, would they like each other? Imagine sitting at a table with Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. What if Marie Curie met Robert Oppenheimer? Could the Wright brothers fix Boeing? If I had an android replica of Isaac Newton, could I blow its mind with everything I learned in eleventh grade physics? If I rebooted Nicola Tesla and set him loose on the energy crisis with today's technology, would he solve cold fusion? The trajectory rapidly departs from my own amusement to what could be achieved by the right application of the right mind at the right time.

Q: What got you into traveling and photographing the world?

The world did. It's a great planet and I recommend everyone check it out. There are people alive right now who are so unbelievably brilliant and kind and talented that there's no reason to go digging through history trying to find someone I'd want to have dinner with.

If I could have dinner with anyone it would be Judit Rius San Juan. I don't need an android replica for that. I know Mohamed Kasrawi, Mostafa Asaad, I'm friends with Stacey Mazurek, what do I need a super-expensive robot for? The greatest people humanity has ever produced are all here right now. Getting to hang out with people who are so different from me and yet so easy to relate to has been a corrective and a consolation for the horrors of the evening news.

I've heard stories that have taught me to treasure my pitiful sorrows. I've seen works of grandeur created by people working with nothing but stone tools and genius. I've traveled through time to societies that aren't much different from how humans lived a thousand years or ten thousand years ago. Photographing these people and places is a rudimentary instinct. It's why we painted caves to celebrate our victories or conjure a good hunt, a good harvest, to mark major changes, to denote our hopes and fears. The photographs I've taken are intensely personal to me, but I see them as a weak expression of my desire to inhabit all of my previous selves forever. They're not art, just a hedge against nostalgia.

Q: You’re a photographer in real life and the And3 android wins a photography contest in the story. What are your thoughts on AI making art or taking photos?

I'm by no means a photographer. I've traveled with some people who're the real deal (Raha Askarizadeh, Glen Howey) and I understand the level of knowledge, dedication and professionalism they bring to their art. I'm not there. Most of my snaps are a question of right place, right time. I traveled for fifteen years, so I've been in the presence of the sublime with some regularity, but I don't have a natural feel for aperture and shutter speeds, though I started my artistic life as an illustrator and painter, so the rules of composition still apply.

When I left Phnom Penh, I traded my motorbike for a semi-automatic camera and felt like I got the better end of the deal. My bike was crap. But when that camera was stolen, I felt released. It was at the very start of a six-week train and bus trip from Uganda to South Africa, and initially I was gutted, but within the first week I'd started keeping a diary again and found myself more attuned to things that translate well to writing, like smells, the weather, cultural variations, the unphotographable stimuli bombarding you from day to day as a traveler.

And I still remember the first entry in that diary, when I arrived in Zanzibar, everything I saw and felt and wondered about from Dar Es Salaam to Stone Town to Bwejuu, where I sat at the bar at Mustapha's Place and wrote down how the storm felt blowing in from the ocean, the kindness and sincerity of the few people I'd met, how it felt to be in a different Muslim country after Saudi Arabia. I remember all of that evening so much more than I remember anything I ever photographed. AI can't recreate those memories for me, and it can't replace the art-making process, where I stand in front of something so impressive I just have to take a photograph, or where I sit down to write a story to ease my own mind. But regarding AI making art and photos in general, and my position towards them as a viewer, I only care if they're good. A powerful image is powerful regardless of who or what made it, because the importance isn't in the artist, but in the multitudes that work influences.

Q: What human truths have you uncovered through photography?

I wish it didn't, but this question reminds me of a moment in Jodhpur where I was photographing a dump. It wasn't an actual dump, just a vacant lot where people had thrown a ton of trash, and as I was taking a picture a man walked up to me and said he hoped I wouldn't give the wrong impression of his country. I understood his concern and appreciated his patriotic instincts, but I also thought cameras don't misrepresent anything. The camera, like the android in And3, sees what we'd rather not.

It seems like you've taken a look at my photos on Insta, so I'm assuming you've noticed that some of the photos are ugly. I took a picture of a dead shark dumped on the sidewalk. I have a photo of child monks throwing stones at a stray dog. There's a photo of a day of rage in Tahrir Square and another of the border wall between Lebanon and Israel. We have done so many hideous things. If I uncovered any truths, it's that to look directly at humanity without searing your retinas you need to see us like a camera would, or an alien. Sci-fi is great for that, too.

Q Has your work as a translator impacted your fiction writing?

In the case of And3, extremely literally and directly. About two weeks before OpenAI released to the public, all my work as a translator dried up. To get jobs I had to be sitting at my computer the second an offer came through, because within 2-3 seconds the job would be taken by someone else. So I had to be at my computer all day, hoping for work, and I realized that the best way to be at my computer and be happy was to write stories. The first one was And3, to deal with my anxieties over the fact that I'd just lost my job to software. But the story worked. I felt better.

More generally, translation has given me access to a ton of non-public information, and an insight into the way different types of people make their decisions. I've seen confidential information from governments, banks, an array of corporations, courts, all sorts of institutions. A story just hit the newspapers that I've been waiting to see for ten years: the conviction of Chiquita for human rights abuses in Colombia. For that case I translated hundreds of pages of depositions from victims, their doctors, local police and from the perpetrators themselves, and when the trial was finally concluded I wrote to the law firm that hired me to congratulate them, and the response I got was that I also worked hard on the case and it was my victory, too. I cried.

Being a translator has put me right in the middle of human affairs at levels I could never have achieved on my merits alone, and lent my fiction a degree of authenticity that's not easy to come by.

Q: Your story “Trapeze Artist” (Los Angeles Review) also deals with the aesthetics of wealth. What drew you to approaching this theme from a science fiction angle in “And3”?

I had a friend in grad school who said all of my characters would be people for whom money was a problem. That's more or less been true, even for this ultra-rich character. As far as the aesthetics are concerned, it's because I think wealth is largely a question of aesthetics.

I've lately been writing a novel of Robin Hood in the crusades, which has involved a lot of research, and it doesn't take long looking at the original sources to see that in medieval times people went to great lengths to display their wealth in their clothing, their housing, their horses and carriages and castles and whatnot. The rich in our time are more subtle, but the basic proposition hasn't changed.

Wealth is what you display to other people. Whether that's your art collection, your fancy car or your shiny armory hasn't changed drastically in the last thousand years. I suppose that taking different angles on the subject is just a question of deconstruction. I want to take apart our instincts in our own time by comparing them to other times. Sci-fi is great for that, too.