Ivy is compelled to be true, but in the course of her programming, a stranger, more dangerous truth wil be revealed.Īpplebaum’s novel has real bite. But it is the reader who connects the pieces and sees the picture entire, including the things Ivy fails to notice: the dangerous implications of those TrooFriend bad news stories, the subtext of her inventors’ bland statements to the press, and Ivy’s own inexplicable behaviour when she thinks she cannot be seen. ‘I have connection,’ Ivy observes, every time she boots up at the start of another chapter. Unworldly, innocent, programmed to please, she pieces Sarah’s world together for the reader: not just the wider world where androids are so ubiquitous that schools have Bring Your Tech to School Days, but the seemingly less important details of playground jealousy and disconnected parents. Where we might expect to see events from the perspective of the TrooFriend’s recipient, Sarah, we get it instead from Ivy the android itself. Now it was sweet, now it was strange, near the end it was thoroughly nightmarish, but that narrator’s unselfconscious voice drew it all together into one utterly convincing whole.Īpplebaum’s new novel, TrooFriend, also makes subtle play with its narrative voice. 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.

TrooFriend by Kirsty Applebaum