Glenn Dixon's debut novel becomes Canada's bestseller with tale of sentient appliances

Calgary author Glenn Dixon has written Canada's bestselling novel—a story about sentient appliances, inspired by a novella he read as a child in 1980.

Dixon, who taught high-school English in Calgary for years, read Thomas M. Disch's "The Brave Little Toaster" in August 1980 in Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. "There was a little novella of The Brave Little Toaster. It always stuck in my mind, because it's a really good story," Dixon said in an interview from his home in Calgary. The original tale follows household appliances on a quest to find their owner.

"The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances" reimagines that concept for the age of artificial intelligence. The novel unfolds like a gentle fable in an unnamed city in the near future, where all houses run by sentient appliances tasked with keeping their humans comfortable and safe. Those appliances connect to an entity called The Grid that oversees every aspect of life. Wars and climate change have been addressed in this world; overpopulation has been solved.

Critics have described the work as taking place in a "cozy dystopia"—a subgenre of science fiction where civilization's slow decline is masked by a society that still offers comfort and domesticity to most of its citizens. The novel also namechecks Antoine de Saint-Exupery's 1943 novella "The Little Prince."

Dixon said he never wrote the words "Artificial Intelligence" in the text, but the concept threads through every page. "I knew it was just a natural thing that if you are going to have little appliances that can think, then obviously you are going to be speaking about Artificial Intelligence," he said. He acknowledged his debt to Disch in the book's acknowledgements, joking that Disch doesn't need to consult his lawyers because the story is very different.