, a cyberpunk story from the award-winning author of , touches upon the dangers that exist within the developing gray areas as technology advances. The novel follows the newfound friendship of aspiring artists Enka and Mathilde, who meet in art school and become fast friends. Enka’s growing obsession with Mathilde and her burgeoning fame fuels chaos even further, as a new piece of technology on the market could allow for creating a permanent link between the friends, enabling them to share everything.
Nicole Ransome: Immaculate Conception is a cyberpunk-ish listen about the evolution of a newfound friendship between the main protagonist and her schoolmate. What was your biggest inspiration in creating this story?
Ling Ling Huang: There are a couple of seeds for this book. The first is very personal—my best friend and my boyfriend had an affair for 11 months. Much of this book was processing and trying to understand the choices she made, which hurt me, even though she loved me. It was also an examination of my love for her, the fact of its continuation in the face of betrayal, and a look at the systems that compelled us to compete with each other.
Another seed for this book began with a quote by Tristan Harris: “With technology, you don’t have to overwhelm people’s strengths. You just have to overwhelm their weaknesses.” I wanted to write a book about love being tested by technology, how it would or wouldn’t overwhelm the weakest parts of the people involved, and what would remain of their identity and love afterward.
Immaculate Conception is set within an art school where there is an intersection of art and technology. In the age of artificial intelligence tools and the digitization of art, in what ways do you feel Immaculate Conception addresses some of the positive and negative aspects emerging in creative spaces from these advancements?
In Immaculate Conception, I created what I called the Stochastic Archive, an application where anyone can upload and copyright their generated artwork. I was shocked when, a few months later, very similar technology came into existence and became pervasive. AI has been touted as being something that will democratize education and the arts, and it does that in my novel, but the result isn’t necessarily good. If everyone is an artist, does that mean no one is? And how does that affect the people who make art for their livelihood? How does that affect their expression, does it make their art more or less honest?
All technologies that promise agency, empathy, and growth can just as easily be used to exploit and degrade our autonomy. AI is clearly here to stay, and this book is, in some ways, a call for creators and consumers of art to establish an ethics of making. So many applications and technologies were started to bring humans closer—the device I invented in does the same, promising a new level of empathy: complete knowledge of the other person. But even connected by the device, there are times when Mathilde and Enka don’t know each other at all. In real-life interactions, constant recalibrations and adjustments are being made. We accommodate one another, compromise, etc. It can be exhausting, but it’s a reminder that we are all different people in different circumstances: no one is completely knowable.
