The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the rest of them here.
Justin Key is the author of The Hospital at the End of the World, a science fiction novel that explores a society where the medical system is dominated by AI.
KBIA's Sabrina Pan sat down with Key to discuss how his medical background shaped the story, as well as the value of human connection. Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:
Sabrina Pan: Can you tell me about your background in the medical field? And how did you get into writing?
Justin Key: I was a writer who went to med school, so I was writing long before I became a doctor. [I] was a voracious reader as a kid, tore through all different types of books. And then, as I got older, that naturally just became an urge to create my own stories. I remember, as a kid, I used to think of authors as the most brilliant people on the planet. So, I really looked up to them for where they were able to take me through reading books. [My] first love in terms of writing was horror. But going through medical school, I've naturally gravitated towards science fiction as well, and The Hospital at the End of the World is definitely on the science fiction end of things.
Pan: How did your experience in medicine and witnessing AI in the medical field inform the way that you wrote your novel?
Key: I know, one thing going into medical school — and I think that this is true mostly across my colleagues — is we're all coming because we want that valuable physician-patient interaction, that human-human interaction. And from very early on, we're learning all this technology. But, we also were taking classes about the art of medicine and what it means to sit with a patient, what it means to give bad news even when there's all these monitors and even when there's all these metrics. That was really, I think, ingrained in us early on. And I think that why it's ingrained or stressed at such an early stage is because it can be so easy to lose sight of that. So, writing this book, I was able to still have some commentary about that, but really, I think, pull out the powerful parts about why I came to medicine and why I stay in medicine.
Pan: What are you hoping to bring to the larger conversation around AI? And how does writing fiction allow you to explore that?
Key: Writing fiction and being able to kind of imagine a future — you're able to both think about hope and also think about warnings. I was able to think, like, this is what becoming a physician and going into this as a career — this is what I would hope it would help with. This is what I hope it would be as a tool. And then, I'm also able to think, "Okay, what are the negatives of that? What are the potential pitfalls?" That's what I hope reading this book kind of brings to the conversation of, like — yes, there may be, in some ways, perfect calculations. But there's so much more that goes into the decision of what's the best thing for a patient.
Pan: What are you hoping people take away from reading the novel?
Key: I do hope that they take away the importance for that human-human interaction. Whether it's with friendships, whether it's in love, and most importantly in this book, you find that physician-patient interaction. Because I do think that, AI aside, our system is set up where, unfortunately, that doesn't have as much time as I think it should to be centered in medicine — like, the actual time of a physician sitting with a patient. And I hope that people take away — if they haven't experienced that or even if they have experienced that — they take away from this, like, "Oh, that is valuable. We should strive towards that again."
