Sweet Harmony

"Sweet Harmony is a novella, currently digital-only. The title character, Harmony, lives in the near future where everyone is completely infused with nanotech of some unspecified sort. By paying a bit for upgrades, you can give yourself that little boost. If you need a good hair day, if you need to be a little sharper, if you want nice, even teeth, if you want to be a bit fitter or more clever… hit the button! Set up that monthly withdrawal, and wham, you’re that little bit better. Harmony is a completely ordinary person. The book walks us through the addictive nature of subscriptions and microtransactions and how easy it is to get caught in a cycle like this. We see the dangers of it – of selling a little bit of yourself to distant corporate overlords, one piece at a time, who are going to act like they’re working in your best interest. But at the end of the day, the instant you can’t make a payment is the instant that your teeth fall out. Again, Sweet Harmony doesn’t really linger on how the technology works or why; it looks at the day-to-day experience of living in this tech-infused space, and what that means to you psychologically. And, also, what it means socially. In a world where you can have all of these benefits at the click of a button, what does it say if you’re someone who doesn’t ? What is it like to have these optimisations on tap and then lose them, or lose them and then have them again? It’s really powerful and incredibly scary. Sweet Harmony is only a few years old, but already we’re starting to see things like Elon Musk brewing up brain implants. Right after, there was a story revealing what happened when people with cochlear implants lost their hearing when their software was no longer supported. Technology is amazing, it’s wonderful, it’s powerful, it can make all of these changes, but there’s a risk in being forced to outsource part of yourself to a greater system that doesn’t care about individual wellbeing in the way that it should. This was an ongoing, very interesting conversation that I was having while putting The Big Book together. Early cyberpunk was ableist; it was so suspicious of technology that any sense of a ‘cyborg’ was wrong. If anyone needed or wanted modifications for any reason, a lot of that cyberpunk fiction made it seem ethically dubious, assuming there was an intrinsic loss of humanity that came from adding anything cybernetic. Sweet Harmony is much more balanced: you can see that this technology does help people. It’s important, it can make a really positive change in people’s lives. It’s not the tech that’s bad, it’s the system in which the tech exists. There’s no judgment here about having nanotechnology that can clear up your skin – much less fix a heart problem. The judgment is reserved for the corporations that attach that benefit to a subscription model to ransack your savings. That nuance is important, and I think Sweet Harmony handles it well."