The End Of Fiction As We Know It?

The state of Arizona recently passed a law making it a felony to possess sex dolls modeled on children. Protecting minors from sexual predation is, of course, essential to the values of most of us. But the implications of this law are worth more consideration than they appear to have received from the state legislature or governor. 

At a time when it’s hard to keep pace with technology—hard even to know what to believe about the latest revelations, the interface between reality and imagination is increasingly blurred. For generations, humans have been free to use their imaginations without much fear of penalty, safe from consequences unless they acted upon their inner visions. 

In the case of fiction, our minds have wandered without restraint into a world of pretend. Suppose I were a warrior or an ancient goddess or even a wronged nobody. How I would punish those opposed to me. As a child I cheerfully gunned down a legion of baddies in my playtime without reproof. And as an adult, how many times have I visualized what I would do to this or that screen or literary villain. 

But what if a synthetic facsimile of that bully or that femme fatale takes tangible form? Are they things or are they something more? Can I smash them to pieces or molest them as I would any other possession or, as with the child sex dolls, are there legal and moral considerations? Could it be that there are psychological ramifications for human aggressors willing to assault an entity that looks and acts exactly like a human but isn’t? 

Of course, we are already familiar with surrogates depicted on various screens, whether human actors or computer concocted entities. But technology will surely give us much more tactile power at some future date to star in our own private dramas in which androids or holograms or some other creation will be summoned by a human, rather like a genie of old, and used or abused as that human sees fit. Who will protect the child dolls then? 

As a writer of fiction currently working on a story about androids, I think we are entering legal and communal territory we cannot yet fully appreciate. My fictitious androids are adult in appearance, and submit themselves to whatever uses their human companions dream up. But will that be an innocent enough viewpoint in the future? Will AI hit back at robot abusers? Will rights activists find a new cause in fembotphilia or fembotphobia? Will human moral distaste prevail? Or ultimately, will the courts have to decide what, in this changing world, can be safely transferred from imagination to an increasingly hard-to-define reality?

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