Turkish author Murat Mentes’s (b. 1974) speculative fiction novel Dublörün Dilemmasi (2005) [The Dilemma of the Double] depicts the lives of two friends who invent a technology that allows people to take on the appearances of others. The invention turns into a business when they get hired as stunt-doubles for real-life situations. The novel tackles the existential dilemmas of Turkish youth who struggle to define their identities in a society where an idealized image of the West has long served as the roadmap to modernity. In this paper, I focus on the novel’s presentation of an encounter between the two friends and French philosopher Jean Baudrillard at a lecture in Istanbul and argue that the text’s allusion to Baudrillard serves two purposes. First, it problematizes the Occidentalism of Turkish society illustrated by the philosopher’s reception in Istanbul as a fetishized superstar Western intellectual. Drawing from sociologist Meltem Ahiska’s analysis of Turkish modernity, I define Occidentalism as the discursive and practical engagements with an idealized, imaginary notion of “the West.” I argue that the lecture scene depicts how Baudrillard, as a critic of the commodification of Western culture, turns into an object of desire, situated in the networks that tie knowledge production, capital, and power. Second, the scene allows the young characters of the novel, who has access to multifarious cultural registers due to their liminality in global knowledge production, to formulate a critique of Western critical theory. The text argues that Baudrillard's own relationship to the world is mediated by a theoretical language that translates life into abstract terms. Theory thus becomes the discursive space where the instability of meaning that marks contemporary world is acted out. Reading Mentes’s novel in conjunction with Baudrillard’s discussions on hyperreality and theory-fiction, I argue that the text mobilizes Baudrillard to illustrate the dilemma of the intellectual who cannot but address the Western philosophical tradition to discuss the crisis of modernity in the Turkish context. The ultimate dilemma of the intellectual is to either hold onto his anxiety over authenticity or accept inauthenticity as his ontological condition. The novel demonstrates that the second path allows the non-western intellectual to situate himself in a global cultural network in order to create new forms of expression. This paper contributes to discussions on Turkish speculative fiction by investigating how contemporary authors use the genre to tackle questions of modernity, identity, and representation in a globalized world.