Slowly dismantling the world
with Marlowe Kessler
About the Book
In the failing mill town of Novastroem County, the future arrived the way it always does, cheaply, and a little too late. Now the machines that promised to make life easier are being pulled offline under a recall no one can trace, and Della Voss, the last repair tech for miles, is watching a decade of her work go dark.
Della has never asked her units what they've seen. That isn't the job. But when a neighbor's decommissioned helper surrenders a recording it was engineered to erase, she's forced to confront a horrifying fact: for years, the small machines in every kitchen and hallway have been keeping what their owners threw away: Grievances, confessions, the slow arithmetic of a marriage. A strange death that was never quite explained.
As the shutdown accelerates, Della must decide what's worth recovering and what's better left unpowered — before the company erasing the county's memory reaches the one machine holding hers.
Spare, humane, and quietly suspenseful, The Undoing of Small Machines by Marlowe Kessler asks what we owe the versions of ourselves we've already outgrown, and whether anything we build to forget for us ever really does.
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About the Author
Marlowe Kessler writes near-future stories about ordinary people living at the edge of technologies they didn't ask for and can't quite escape. The work sits between literary and speculative fiction — quiet on the surface, restless underneath, more interested in the moral weather of a choice than in the machinery that caused it. A former systems analyst, Kessler has a lasting fascination with the small failures that cascade into large ones, and with the strange intimacy of the tools we build to keep each other at a distance. Recurring themes include memory, inheritance, and what people owe the versions of themselves they've already outgrown. Kessler writes from a drafty house at the end of a dirt road, usually before dawn, usually with coffee going cold nearby.