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This Machine Feeds

‘One of the most important new voices in fiction’ Alan Moore, author of Watchmen

Heather is an artist of middling talent with a flawless instinct for self-promotion.

Finally given her big shot, she prepares a new work about the world we live in – a world of technology, violence, power and accelerating absurdity. But as she stares into the abyss of the now, her friends begin to worry. Is Heather making her masterpiece, or is she losing her mind?

Around her, reality bleeds into nightmare. A woman is trapped inside her home by the terms of her rental contract. America reenacts the assassination of JFK. A father and daughter, unknown to one another, collaborate on the building of a chatbot.

Heather is trying to make sense of it all.

Darkly comic and ferociously alive, This Machine Feeds is about what happens when the world becomes too deranged to comprehend – and whether anyone can truly escape with their sanity.

This Machine Feeds is a reminder that fiction, at its best, can render the world such that it can be properly seen – in all of its deranging horror and terrifying possibilities. A work of serious political and ethical range that captures the vertiginous, unnerving feeling that comes with being alive now – forced to bear witness to the unholy end-times alliance of messianic militarism, rapacious necrocapitalism and technofascist idiocy. (It’s also quite a fun book).

Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

About Heather Parry

Heather Parry is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her books have been long- and shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year award, the Polari First Book Prize and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. In 2025 The Skinny named her as one of the ‘Next Generation of Scottish Writers’. She writes the Substack general observations on eggs, and lives in Glasgow with her partner and their cats, Fidel and Ernesto.
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Details
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529938739
  • Length: 240 pages
  • Price: £8.99
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