Little Eyes by Samantha Schweblin

The kentuki didn't move. This was fun. Suddenly she had a clear idea of what she wanted to ask. She needed to know if the person was a man or a woman, how old they were, where they lived, what they did for a living, what they liked to do for fun. She needed to judge, urgently needed to decide for herself what kind of dweller she'd gotten. The kentuki was there looking at her, maybe as eager to respond as she was to ask.

Then it occurred to her that this crow could peck openly at her private life, would see her whole body, get to know the tone of her voice, her clothes, her schedules; it could even move freely about the room and at night it would also see Sven. She, on the other hand, could only ask questions. The kentuki could decide not to answer, or it could lie. It could say it was a Filipina schoolgirl when it was actually an Iranian oil dealer. But she had to show it her entire life, transparently, as available as she'd been to the poor canary she'd had as a teenager that had died watching her, hanging in its cage in the middle of the room.

The devices are called kentukis: plastic footballs on wheels with plastic features, made to look like animals, pandas or crows or moles or dragons. They're sort of like pets, that chirp and purr and move around, but inside each of them is a real person, a "dweller" operating the kentuki from somewhere else on the earth. When someone purchases a serial code for a kentuki, they are linked at random to one of these animals, being turned on for the first time somewhere in the world. The dwellers don't know where it is they'll end up, or who their keeper will be or how they will be treated; the keepers can do whatever they like with their kentuki--even refuse to charge it so its battery dies and the connection irrevocably sundered--but they never know who's dwelling inside their new pet.

Samantha Schweblin's Little Eyes is an allegory for a connected world. Though the kentukis are the stuff of science fiction, the ethical challenges they present are real: every day, through social media and other forms of technology, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, we let other people--little eyes--into our home. These technologies can connect us in invigorating, even life-affirming ways, as an Antiguan teenager named Marvin finds when he stumbles (in the form of his dragon kentuki) into an underground of "liberated" kentukis who have found ways to communicate with each other and epxlore independently. But, as many of the characters in Little Eyes discover, it can also breed obsessions and resentments, or open us up to the scrutiny of strangers we had no intention of letting into our lives. The opening scene, for instance, describes a group of teenage girls who discover they can communicate with their kentuki's dweller using a Ouija board, but as soon as they do, he blackmails them over the videos he's been secretly recording.

Little Eyes features dozens of stories about dwellers and keepers around the world, but there's only a small handful of recurring characters: the girlfriend of an artist in Mexico who comes to resent what she senses are her kentuki's prurient attentions; an elderly Peruvian lady who becomes protective of her young German keeper; a divorced Italian who seeks out companionship from his son's hated kentuki; a Croatian who sells blackmarket kentuki connections. The most powerful, I thought, was that Antiguan teenager, who becomes obsessed with finding away for his kentuki, living in Norway, to touch the snow he's never seen. In that story, the "liberated" kentukis have somehow built a world of their own at ground level, a world of secret charging stations and painted signs that normal people don't notice, and this feels like an apt symbol for the kinds of new worlds social technology creates for us, for better or worse.

Though there's thematic overlap, I don't know that I would have otherwise guessed that Little Eyes was written by the same author as Fever Dream, a short and terrifying novel about the catastrophic effects of industrial pollution. In Fever Dream, Schewblin is content to leave much unexplained, and the terror is produced by the forces of literary ambiguity, but Little Eyes is more conventional science fiction in the sense that it is a simple thought experiment about the future, taken to its logical conclusions. Little Eyes struck me as more ordinary than Fever Dream, less existentially frightening, but perhaps more disturbing because of the plausibility of the world it imagines.

Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin

"I sat there looking at his dirty hands. He was using them to hold on to the table like a railing as he walked, and then I saw his wrists. He had marks on his skin, lines like bracelets around his wrists, and a little above them, too, maybe left by the rope. 'It seems cruel,' said the woman as she approached, watching my reaction and David's next step, 'but we have to make sure that only the spirit leaves.' She caressed his wrists, and as if forgiving herself she said, 'The body has to stay.'"

All of Samantha Schweblin's short novel Fever Dream is a conversation between two people: Amanda, a woman who is dying in a rural Argentinian clinic, and David, a little boy. David is the son--sort of--of a local woman named Carla; Amanda was visiting their small town with her daughter Nina when she took sick. Together, Amanda and David piece together a hazy account of the events that led up to Amanda's hospitalization. David, understanding that Amanda doesn't have much time, keeps telling her that some things are not important, but she labors over every bit of the story, trying desperately to figure out what led her here, and what happened to her daughter.

What kind of story is this going to be? The strange interlocutory form--the mix of things they know for certain and things they do not understand--gives a surreal quality to the story that reflects the "fever dream" of the title. Amanda recounts to David the disturbing story she heard from David's mother, Carla: as a boy, David drank from a poisoned stream that killed the family's prized horse. Understanding that David too, would get sick, Carla took him to a healer who gave David only one option to live: his spirit would travel to another body, and thus be saved, but another spirit would enter. Desperate for David to live, Carla accedes, but the David that returns from the ritual is strange: his skin covered in spots, his diction become strangely formal, and having developed a peculiar intuition and empathy for the many dying animals around their home. Carla tells Amanda that she has come to fear her unheimlich son, or ward, or whatever he is.

The truth, or a truth unfolds over the course of Amanda and David's conversation: what has transformed David is not the soul ritual but the toxic chemical that has leached into the grass. The small town is centered on a vague refinery or chemical plant known as "Sotomayor's," which is responsible for the poisoning. It's the chemicals that have put Amanda in the hospital, and which may be affecting Nina--who, in the novel's most intense moment, may be subjected to the same desperate ritual as David.

What sets Fever Dream apart is how carefully it controls the release of information; only slowly does Schweblin reveal that it's a novel about ecological collapse. In fact, it reminded me of nothing more clearly than Joy Williams' new novel Harrow, another book that seeks out new forms that might do justice to the magnitude of the world's crisis (right down to the horse!). Here, sober realities are mixed with ritual myths and surrealism. Among other things, it reveals the way that ecological collapse creates generational divides, and captures the utter fear and panic that brings some people to decide it's immoral to bring children into the 21st century world. Throughout it, David's refrain--None of this is important, we're wasting time--begins to feel like a call to pay closer attention to the things that really matter.