Kirsty Applebaum’s dystopia The Middler was a dark tale told with exceptional style: its village sealed off in a future war was a little cosy and a little confined, its secrets all ravelled up out of its protagonist’s sight so that we advanced with her, day by day, into the unknown. Is somebody getting thrown in the river by their new best friend? There’s an air of Frankenstein about the whole thing: would you be happy to have a human-shaped automaton in suspended animation in your bedroom overnight? Would you kill time with a creature twelve times as strong as a human being, one that is relaying all your activities to your parents in a recorded feed? And if your parents thought it was a good idea, would you feel unsettled? Unsafe? Like the best science-fiction ideas, this simple idea suggests a transformed world: lonely, chilly, half-dead. Even the sales pitch has a disquieting undertone from the very first chapter: your child ‘no longer needs to play with other children, who might bully or harm or lie or covet or steal or envy’. When the latest Mark IV TrooFriend leaves the factory floor, destined to join a new family, there are campaigners picketing outside and bad stories on the news.
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