Private passions seethe between connected pairs in Guatemala and Norway, or China and France.

Its fairly rudimentary kit - smartly, Schweblin makes the spy-toys’ low-spec clunkiness a key element - allows claustrophobic intimacy to flourish alongside physical distancing.

So, yes - if you want a spookily prescient vision of human isolation both assuaged and deepened by inscrutable, glitch-prone tech, then Little Eyes more than fits the brief. But a second life can blow up like your first. ‘They were important to each other,’ thinks ‘dweller’ Emilia in Lima about the German woman she oversees in faraway Erfurt, via a fluffy wired bunny: ‘What they experienced together was real.’ Emilia, like several kentuki junkies here, feels that ‘she had two lives, and that was much better than barely having one’. They blossom into trust, lust, love, suspicion, jealousy or hate, or else combust in acts of violence that may see the hapless kentuki disconnected, slashed, stomped, drowned or even buried ‘alive’ in fits of vicarious rage.

Samanta Schweblin stitches their experiences into a global tapestry of stories, from Mexico to Croatia, Peru to Italy. While the keeper acquires an invisible housemate, the dweller becomes ‘an anonymous actor in someone else’s life’. I demand reparations for my ancestors’ fall from grace ‘Ultimately, people loved restrictions.’ And if lonely humans crave companionship, even from a factory-made surveillance device clad in tacky fake pelt, so ‘everyone loves to watch, to be a voyeur’. If you want a spookily prescient vision of human isolation, Little Eyes more than fits the briefįor all their limitations, these sinister little pandas, moles, crows and rabbits fly off the world’s shelves. But fail to recharge a kentuki and it dies forever: no second chances. 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. 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. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. We often hear that science fiction - or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer - can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come.

Little eyes samanta schweblin