TELL THE MACHINE GOODNIGHT

(Borough Press £12.99) IT’S 2035 and the inhabitants of a future America live, well, pretty much like you and I do — addicted to screens and obsessed with measuring personal happiness.

For that they have a handy machine called the Apricity, which, after taking a simple saliva sample, informs the user what steps they need to take to be happy — get divorced; eat tangerines; change the position of their desk at work.

Pearl is an Apricity technician and saleswoman, yet her own life is not so happy — her husband lives with another woman while her teenage son Rhett is anorexic and has dropped out of school.

Desperate to help him, she surreptitiously checks his Apricity reading, and takes his happiness into her own hands.

Williams moves awkwardly through a cast of supporting characters whose disparate stories bolster the novel’s interest in familiar themes — the simulated reality of online life; our queasily intimate relationship with technology — but she never really exploits their narrative potential.

And while she has written a sci-fi novel that cleverly never feels like one, I found it a bit of a slog.