A coffin is brought in by ambulance, and the last human doctor worries vaguely that this might be one of those “portentous visitations” he’s heard so much about. Ten years later Dr Harry Rayne is one of the last humans left on the planet, squatting in a coffee outlet of a vast automated hospital, tending to the spiralling remnants of tribal survivors. An arrival from a failing Mars colony, a medical AI gone rogue and the siren call of a virtual nirvana all threaten to snuff out the final dregs of mankind. Harry and his trusty hand grenade venture forth on their ward round to save the day. Cheerful Screaming is a complex and multilayered sci-fi Swiftian narrative, set in an automated hospital, in a world where every faculty of mankind has been outsourced, and AI have decided to keep the economic engines of the world burning without having to deal with the messiness of human involvement. We follow our protagonist, Dr Harry Rayne, as he undertakes the sprawling ward round of the St Bezos Hospital, struggles against the alien minds of the silicon denizens, and tries desperately to keep the few surviving humans on the thin path between hopelessness and the enticements to chemical and digital nirvana. The novel is built on a world of comically bleak prescience and with an appetite to chew on big questions facing a species throwing itself into an early grave. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, gruesome, and dark with an underlying message that speaks to an ultimately hopeful view of what might be achieved by thinking life. Written by a doctor-poet working in London’s busiest hospitals, this cross pollination of “This is Going to Hurt” meets “Black Mirror” questions what might be lost if we yield the reins of humankind and medicine to artificial intelligence. Dr Low was shortlisted for and published in the 2025 Hippocrates Prize Poetry Anthology, and has a background in medical physics and bioengineering.
