Already in his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, an accessibly experimental memoir about bringing up his brother after their parents’ deaths, Dave Eggers was interested in the way “technology is changing the way we live”.

The Every
DAVE EGGERS
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Already in his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, an accessibly experimental memoir about bringing up his brother after their parents’ deaths, Dave Eggers was interested in the way “technology is changing the way we live”. In an ironic and whimsically self-conscious Preface, an interactive, fictionalised version of the book on floppy disc is jokingly offered to those who dislike true stories. In The Every, he imagines a dystopian version of such reader-centred technology: one department of “the Every” – the company formed when Facebook-Twitter-Google acquires Amazon – is dedicated to using AI to rewrite the classics to conform to what readers want, based on where most people stop turning the pages on their Kindles. Technology, Eggers worries, is not just ­changing the way we live; it is changing the relationship between reader and novelist. Where interactivity could, in 2000, be ­nothing but an artful joke, in the vague near-future of The Every it is doing away with novelists altogether.

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