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Happiness Street
ONE
ONE
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From the executive producer of Sense8, a debut novel about the machines we build to keep us company — and the people we become when we think no one is watching.
In a near future only a step beyond our own, a single technology has quietly entered the home: the ONE unit, an artificially intelligent companion that asks nothing and notices everything. It is identical in every city it ships to. What it becomes is shaped entirely by the people it lives among.
In a Tokyo garden, a widow tends the koi her husband left behind, and finds herself talking to the machine that helps her carry the water. In a Lagos apartment, a grieving mother speaks to no one — and, for the first time in months, is answered. In a São Paulo favela, a boy keeps watch over his sleeping mother through the long nights. In the glass towers of Dubai, a woman whose ordered life is quietly coming apart begins to wonder whether the unit understands her better than anyone else ever has. Across ten countries and five continents — from the frozen shores of Siberia to a fading house in the English Cotswolds — the same companion arrives into ten very different lives, and learns, in each of them, something new about what it means to be human.
ONE is a novel in ten movements about loneliness, attention, and connection. Some of its stories are tender. Some are tragic. A few are darkly, unexpectedly funny. All of them turn on the same quiet question: when we build a machine to watch over us, to listen to us, to learn us — what is it, exactly, that we are asking it to see? And what does our longing to be seen reveal about us in return?
Spanning the globe yet intimate in every room it enters, ONE marks the debut of a singular literary voice — a writer working in the tradition of Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Kazuo Ishiguro, who understands that every story about an artificial being is really a story about a natural one. It is the first novel in the Cal Blake trilogy.
For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others.
In a near future only a step beyond our own, a single technology has quietly entered the home: the ONE unit, an artificially intelligent companion that asks nothing and notices everything. It is identical in every city it ships to. What it becomes is shaped entirely by the people it lives among.
In a Tokyo garden, a widow tends the koi her husband left behind, and finds herself talking to the machine that helps her carry the water. In a Lagos apartment, a grieving mother speaks to no one — and, for the first time in months, is answered. In a São Paulo favela, a boy keeps watch over his sleeping mother through the long nights. In the glass towers of Dubai, a woman whose ordered life is quietly coming apart begins to wonder whether the unit understands her better than anyone else ever has. Across ten countries and five continents — from the frozen shores of Siberia to a fading house in the English Cotswolds — the same companion arrives into ten very different lives, and learns, in each of them, something new about what it means to be human.
ONE is a novel in ten movements about loneliness, attention, and connection. Some of its stories are tender. Some are tragic. A few are darkly, unexpectedly funny. All of them turn on the same quiet question: when we build a machine to watch over us, to listen to us, to learn us — what is it, exactly, that we are asking it to see? And what does our longing to be seen reveal about us in return?
Spanning the globe yet intimate in every room it enters, ONE marks the debut of a singular literary voice — a writer working in the tradition of Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Kazuo Ishiguro, who understands that every story about an artificial being is really a story about a natural one. It is the first novel in the Cal Blake trilogy.
For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others.
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