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This Machine Feeds

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This Machine Feeds

By: Heather Parry
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Heather, a young performance artist with middling talent but flawless instincts for self-promotion, becomes an emblem of our times. As she prepares a work that promises ultimate revelation, her sense of the real begins to disintegrate.

By smashing apart the circuit board of late-capitalist life, we can now, at last, witness our ecosystem of surveillance and exploitation. In the sparking cables and blinking lights, we see clearly the humming madness beneath the surface of every image. And the violence of a world that insists on value in constant visibility.

Taking its reader on a cultural hell-ride – from reenactments of JFK’s assassination to cherished friends that turn into pillars of salt – This Machine Feeds answers the question that howls in all of our chests: how can I be sane in insane times?

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

© Heather Parry 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027

 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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Critic reviews

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).
Shockingly good, in the way the world decayed and spread its roots throughout the ephemeral and ethereal.
In This Machine Feeds, Heather Parry has created both a mirror to the world we live in and a window into the future that is fast on its way here. With her brilliant prose and envious handle of tone, Parry asks: What exactly is wrong with humanity? And the answer seems to be: Everything. Incisive, probing, acidic.
I loved Heather’s dazzling This Machine Feeds. Utterly original, tremendously thought-provoking and full of mischief. I was put in mind of Kurt Vonnegut at his most daring, brought bang up to date.
A ferocious critique of a culture stagnating in the wake of unbridled technological advancement – This Machine Feeds is incisive, sickening and darkly comic. Parry reasserts the importance of art at a time when we seem to be forgetting it.
This Machine Feeds is everything I've come to expect from Heather Parry: dark and twisty, occasionally twisted, irreverent and unrelentingly playful. It’s peppered with characters and scenarios so unlike anything I've read before that they're now hanging out rent-free in my brain. Heather Parry has an uncanny talent for peeling the lid off society to reveal the sinister mechanisms beneath. An important voice we should all be listening to.
Heather Parry is innovating a new fiction for the twenty-first century. This Machine Feeds explores the nebulous connections between tech, power, politics and art with virtuoso ease. An existentially necessary read for our times.
How does Heather Parry make the intellectual so visceral? I am in awe. We may be hurtling towards a corrupted future, but This Machine Feeds is a timely reminder that it takes a human to make art this alive. Equal parts nightmarish and necessary, I came away wanting to change the world.
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