Tell The Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams

If Apricity’s cryptic, oracle-like prescriptions and Pearl’s uneasy role in delivering them fascinated you, QualityLand takes that feeling and dials it up. Peter Jobless keeps receiving products TheShop’s algorithm “knows” he wants—much like Apricity’s one-line fixes that nudge Pearl’s clients—and his attempts to opt out become a witty, biting exploration of free will in a data-driven world. Like Rhett resisting Apricity’s path to contentment, Peter pushes back against a system that claims it understands him better than he does.

If you liked how Tell the Machine Goodnight moves between Pearl, Rhett, and the clients shaped by Apricity’s guidance, Little Eyes offers a similarly prismatic view. Schweblin’s kentukis—cute, networked creatures—link strangers across the globe, and each short, intimate chapter captures the same uneasy mix of curiosity, loneliness, and control that runs through Pearl’s consultations and Rhett’s refusal to be “fixed.” The result is a worldwide chorus of consequences from a seemingly simple technology.

Pearl keeps asking whether engineered happiness is the same as a good life, especially as Rhett charts his own painful path; Never Let Me Go presses on that same bruise. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow up inside an institution that scripts their futures, and their small acts of love and defiance echo Rhett’s resistance to Apricity’s tidy answers. It’s understated, intimate, and philosophical—the kind of book that lingers the way Apricity’s one-line recommendations do.

If the allure for you was how Apricity’s single-sentence advice ripples through ordinary lives—Pearl’s clients changing careers, relationships, and routines—The Measure delivers that same soft-speculative charge. Mysterious boxes arrive, each with a string revealing the length of a person’s life, and a web of characters must decide who to love, what risks to take, and how to live. Like Apricity, the premise is elegantly minimal, but its moral and emotional fallout runs deep.

If Rhett’s interior struggle and Pearl’s conflicted caretaking drew you in, The Echo Wife offers similarly rich psychological layers. Evelyn Caldwell discovers her husband has built a clone of her—the “perfected” partner—forcing Evelyn to confront who she is and who she’s willing to be. As with Apricity’s unsettling fixes and Pearl’s doubts about administering them, the science here is a mirror for the characters’ minds, yielding tense, personal stakes rather than gadgetry for its own sake.