We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. Little Eyes imagines a gadget (nothing fancy really, just a plush animal toy with camera and wifi implants) that creates a private but silent connection between its owner anda single, remote watcher.
The ‘keeper’, who buys the $279 electronic pet known as a kentuki, doesn’t know the identity of the ‘dweller’, who pays to observe another life from afar and who can move the felt-covered ‘big stiff egg’ around the keeper’s home a bit, like some stair-averse miniature Dalek. But fail to recharge a kentuki and it dies forever: no second chances.
If you want a spookily prescient vision of human isolation, Little Eyes more than fits the brief
For all their limitations, these sinister little pandas, moles, crows and rabbits fly off the world’s shelves.
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