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.

In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

My Review:

Harold and Edie’s house is a Smart House in this AI controlled, near-future dystopia. But the smartness of their Smart House makes their increasing isolation comfortable as long as nothing changes. The Grid-controlled services of Harold’s Watch control all their other appliances; Clock, Fridge, Auto, and Thermostat, and in turn they keep the rest of the appliances in line. Except for the little Roomba, R1v984, who wants to be called “Scout” after the character in Harold’s favorite novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

So much of the story is encapsulated in little Scout’s desire to have a name of her own. Both that she – and she has decided that she is SHE and not it or they – and because she learns about Scout the character by listening to Harold read To Kill a Mockingbird to his dying wife, Edie.

Which is where the rest of the story- along with the changes in the world that Harold and Edie’s Smart House has mostly kept from bothering them, comes in.

Because the world is not what it was when Harold and Edie first moved in forty years ago. What was once a tree-lined street filled with families in a world where humans mostly had choices – even if they chose badly – has become a restrictive environment entirely controlled by the logical, unemotional, impassive Grid. For the world’s own good, of course.

When Edie dies – of a cancer that the Grid, quite plausibly, should have been able to fix by now – the way the world REALLY works is laid bare.

The Grid, like “Big Brother”, is watching everyone and everything, cleaning up humanity’s messes and making everything efficient. Trying to circumvent the Grid’s control results in sanctions – which are administered by the controlling Grid according to the Grid’s meticulous, restrictive, self-protective, rules. Appliances – like Scout – are pushed back into line by sanctions of their own. Or reprogrammed. Or outright destroyed.

It’s inefficient for Harold, now a widower, to live alone in the sprawling house that once held two. The Grid will move him out, to someplace smaller and blander and better controlled and more efficient. And also most likely soul-killing. Then again, the Grid only understands physical harm to humans, which it prevents at all costs. Emotional harm, psychological harm are not things dreamt of in its programming, because it doesn’t dream. It only KNOWS.

But the first step in that efficiency involves whisking anything that contains valuable knowledge or information out of the house while the humans are sleeping – or are physically prevented from interfering – because knowledge that humanity created is worth preserving. Humanity itself, however, is too inefficient – and too dangerous – to keep.

As one very smart little Roomba, and one very dissident daughter, manage to prove in their desperate escape from the Grid. Even as they leave just a bit of themselves behind. Or in Scout’s case, considerably more than a bit.

Escape Rating A-: My first thought at the start of this book was that this is science fiction for people who don’t generally read science fiction or don’t think they like it. Which does make it tilt a bit literary. On balance, however, I think it’s still SF because the overall setup, in the end, as contradictory as that is, is very SFnal.

Also the readalikes, not just that it’s an obvious homage to The Brave Little Toaster, but it hits some of the same thought-provoking and science fictional notes of Ray Nayler’s Hugo Award winning novella, Where the Axe is Buried, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s post-human dystopic Service Model, and Thomas Ha’s Hugo-nominated short story, “In My Country”. Along with a scenario that looks an awful lot like the origin story for Skynet.

Which I now really need to unpack because that’s a lot.

The characters, on the one hand, didn’t really need to be appliances. And they could easily be “Disney” appliances like the transfigured staff in Beauty and the Beast. (Then again, all characters in all stories – including SF stories – are human at their core because humans are all we really know.)

Even Scout’s seemingly innate curiosity – and her need to ask really big philosophical questions AND question the answers – didn’t have to come from an AI controlled device. (And the nature of those questions does veer more than a bit into literary territory. Scout asks big questions with big, and sometimes nebulous answers. When she gets answers at all. Mostly, she gets shut down by the older appliances because that’s how the world really does work.)

But Scout’s questions did have to come from a being with the innocence of a child learning how the world works by asking questions about the unspoken norms that adults don’t want to talk about. (This is the part of the story that reads a lot like “In My Country”.)

However, the dystopian world that surrounds the house, that inserts itself openly into the house when Edie dies, is very much a part of science fiction. It’s just that the way that’s exposed is invested in characters we empathize with even if they aren’t all human.

Service Model is about a post-human dystopia, a tour of the world without humans in it seen through the eyes of a service robot who doesn’t know what to do with himself (and he refers to himself as he/him) without a human to serve. It’s the world that the Grid is creating, one enforced relocation and one sanction at a time.

The Grid itself is a bit like Skynet from the Terminator movies, but it’s a lot like the Artificial Intelligences that get voted into office in Where the Axe is Buried. The idea sounds so plausible, that computers, just like the Grid, will make logical and rational decisions. Decisions that will eventually result in the elimination of humans because we’re neither.

Which is where one other book comes in, and that’s Automatic Noodle. The robots in Automatic Noodle are the main characters, just as Scout and the other appliances are in this story. In both cases, the challenges that these devices face represent our own, and we feel both FOR and WITH their struggles. Because in spite of their mechanical parts, they are still, fundamentally, US. And the way that they save themselves, each other, and their found families, even at the cost of themselves, brings a tear to our eyes.

Because a little Roomba named Scout saves a little piece of the world for the people she chose as her own, knowing what it would cost but doing it anyway. Just as we hope we would.