AE OSWORTH: “I can, in fact, write 419 pages out of spite.”
Reading A.E. Osworth’s debut novel We Are Watching Eliza Bright is like entering an uncanny valley. There is only the narrow, fictive distance between today’s sociopolitical climate and the world of Eliza, and a narrower distance still between what is online and off—a boundary so tenuous that it all but collapses by the book’s end. The book opens in an imaginary city that resembles both Chicago and New York, in a world that resembles both the Marvel universe and our own, whose super-suited and Homerically named characters are, and are not, the protagonists. They are their in-game avatars.
A collective voice narrates: “We are watching Circuit Breaker get the punch to the back of her head that she deserves,” and in the same breath: “We are watching Eliza Bright, who is controlling this avatar from her apartment in New York City. Both are true.” This in-game sequence is simply “a skin on top of our reality,” the narrator explains, “just as real as meatspace.”
The book’s fictional world evokes our own immediate past: the political and cultural milieu of the US on the cusp of the 2016 election. Online (and, as now we understand, off), a loose collection of individuals—young and cis and straight and white and male and angry—was building an empire of exclusivity, one meme at a time. They scoffed at the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters and photoshopped feminist games critic Anita Sarkeesian’s face onto pornographic images. Eventually, they coalesced—gamers, rightist Redditors, MRAs, the alt-right and their ideologies—in shared opposition to the phantoms of the “cultural left.”
A.E. Osworth calls them “the weaponized nerd population” or “the Reddit manosphere,” and they are primary narrators in this novel, which begins, in earnest, in “meatspace” (physical reality), with Eliza exhausted after a Red Bull-and-heavy-metal-fueled weekend of coding. Recently promoted at the game startup Fancy Dog, she is tasked with developing code that enables sexual activity for the VR upgrade to their massively multiplayer online role-playing game, . After a 72-hour crunch inputting the new feature—“an update we’ll all later call the sex patch”—she signs onto the server
