The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances: A Guest Post by Glenn Dixon

Cozy sci-fi meets quirky dystopia when sentient appliances take matters into their own circuits when their homeowner’s livelihood is threatened by a mysterious, omnipotent force. Read on for an exclusive essay from Glenn Dixon on writing The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances.

 

In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.

There were a series of questions I asked myself before writing my latest novel. Among them: What if the main character in your novel were a Roomba vacuum cleaner? What if every piece of technology that you own, even the smallest of kitchen appliances, were sentient? Would a story like that be so far-fetched, or is that a nearer future than I realize?

The Roomba in my story is called Scout. She’s named herself after the young girl in To Kill A Mockingbird because she wishes to brave, she wishes to know right from wrong. And when the elderly humans who own the house run into trouble, she (and her friends Fridge, Clock and Auto – a self-driving car parked out in the garage) must work together to save their humans from an ominous and all powerful force called the Grid. One reviewer called the book Animal Farm for the 21^st century.

So how did I as the author, come upon this idea? Well, a piece of advice I heard once was: “write the book that you yourself would want to read.” That sounds easy but I went down a rabbit hole in figuring that out. I spent quite a lot of time going back to the books I loved when I was young, I mean really young. I’m talking about books like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the whole Narnia series really) and, of course, The Hobbit and The Little Prince. There’s a magic to those books, and I wondered how I could ever come close to conjuring up a story as charming as those ones.

And then it came to me, I remembered a short story I read called The Brave Little Toaster (I can almost see some of you smiling at that mention). The original first appeared in the August 1980 edition of Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine, just the kind of thing my young mind was reaching out for in those days. And that’s what sparked it all. In this age of artificial intelligence maybe I could write a novel with characters who remind us of the beauty that real people bring.

After that, it unfurled relatively easily. Some of my favorite scenes are those in which the appliances gather in the kitchen, long after their humans have gone to bed. They have late night discussions about all sorts of things: philosophy and poetry and even what it might feel like to actually be a human. The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is available now and I’d love for you to go and read about the adventures of these appliances.

Scout, I know, would be happy to meet you