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Imaginative. A Black Mirror type novel about a new gadget that resets the way people connect with each other. It's a electronic stuffed animal/pet with a camera (like a Roomba) that's controlled by an unknown partner, who can follow the owner around their house and see everything in their lives. The owner's only control over the pet it is to lock it up so it can't move or recharge, or destroy it and sever the connection.
The book slowly unravels how the gadget is used, and the relationships between multiple owners/voyeurs.
It's pretty transparently about the questions of privacy, exposure, intimacy and voyeurism in the age of the internet, but never quite answers the basic question of why anyone would let one of these pets into their homes. (Though I guess that's the point. Why do we let Alexas into our homes? Is it because of a failure of imagination? If there was an actual person on the other end, listening to every word we said, would we still let them in?)
This didn't hit me as much as the author's other work, Distancia de Rescate (Fever Dream), which I loved, but it has the same smoothness and minimalism in the writing, that manages to convey whole world's/characters with deceptive ease.
The book slowly unravels how the gadget is used, and the relationships between multiple owners/voyeurs.
It's pretty transparently about the questions of privacy, exposure, intimacy and voyeurism in the age of the internet, but never quite answers the basic question of why anyone would let one of these pets into their homes. (Though I guess that's the point. Why do we let Alexas into our homes? Is it because of a failure of imagination? If there was an actual person on the other end, listening to every word we said, would we still let them in?)
This didn't hit me as much as the author's other work, Distancia de Rescate (Fever Dream), which I loved, but it has the same smoothness and minimalism in the writing, that manages to convey whole world's/characters with deceptive ease.