A Working Theory of Love

Scott Hutchins

- 4.0 • 2 Ratings

- £6.99

- £6.99

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins is a recklessly witty, outrageously honest novel about sex, love and artificial intelligence.

'Tremendous, big, clever. Every once in a while a novel comes along and speaks to a generation ... has much to say about what it means to live, love and lose in the twenty-first century' Guardian

Silicon Valley: home of online start-ups, couture coffee, sexual meditation, and the future. In its midst, Neill Bassett is helping to build the world's first artificial intelligence - a computer that talks, thinks, lies, and if all goes to plan, feels bad about it too. But when the experiment swerves in an unexpected direction, Neill is forced to confront a few buried feelings of his own - for his ex-wife, for his dead father, for his twenty-first-century life, and for a very twenty-first-century woman called Rachel, who might just hold the answer to it all...

'Electrifying. Clever, funny and very entertaining' The New York Times

'Worthy of Chuck Palahniuk ... Hutchins's satirical take on 21st-century existence is sharply observed' Independent

'Touching and extremely funny, Neill Bassett is a disenchanted bachelor for the Noughties generation. Brilliantly achieved' GQ

'Inventive, intelligent, hilarious. One of the pleasures here is Hutchins' terrific grasp of the zeitgest' San Francisco Chronicle

'Terrific. Throughout, Hutchins hits that sweet spot where humour and melancholy comfortably coexist' Entertainment Weekly

'Mixes the everyman likeability of Nick Hornby with a splash of the offbeat intellect of Douglas Coupland' Metro

Scott Hutchins teaches at Stanford University, California. His work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Rumpus, The New York Times and Esquire. This is his first novel.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 13 AUG 2012

In Stegner Fellow Hutchins's ambitious debut novel, the writings of Dr. Neill Bassett, who committed suicide in 1995 and kept extensive diaries for two decades, form the basis of a linguistic project to create the first software program to process natural language. Though the doctor's son, Neill Jr., is not a programmer, he's the only native English speaker at Amiante, the tiny three-man tech firm taking on the task, and his job entails humanizing the program so that it responds like a real person rather than a computer. During the course of the project, the emotionally distant Neill, a divorced 36-year-old living in San Francisco who thinks of himself as "an experienced practitioner at the art of falling apart on the inside while appearing catatonic," becomes involved with Rachel, a 20-year-old member of a cultlike group that employs questionable methods to engage its members. The relationship never sizzles because Rachel remains a cipher, but Neill's interactions with the software, which becomes more and more a stand-in for his dead father, and a rival software developer's provocative end-use plans for a successful Bassett-like program, create intriguing ethical dilemmas and force Neill out of his indifference. Neill's unusual "one-on-one" with the program is revelatory and exciting.

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