Jessie Greengrass spent her childhood in London and Devon. She studied philosophy in Cambridge and now lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, with her partner and children. Her collection of short stories, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, won the Edge Hill Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Sight, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The High House is her most recent novel.
At Publishers Weekly Greengrass tagged nine haunting postapocalyptic novels, including:
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted ChiangRead about another entry on the list.
I can think of few writers as capable as Chiang of exploring both the practical and emotional implications of a hypothesis. His stories are fully fleshed-out,beautifully rendered thought experiments in the ethics of technology, deeply perceptive and empathetic. In The Lifecycle of Software Objects he reminds us that not all apocalypses are human ones. A company creates a marketable line of intelligent virtual pets. Their owners are invited to raise them, socialise them, teach them to speak; but eventually the pets are superseded by newer models, and then by other forms of entertainment all together. At last, the platform they run on, now obsolete, is due to be turned off. A haunting parable of humanity’s lack of compassion for what no longer interests us.
--Marshal Zeringue
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