The Sentient Vacuum Cleaner

First it was a sentient dog in The Art of Racing in the Rain. We won’t mention Jimminy Cricket — a most memorable sentient insect from the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio, and later from the Disney TV show. This year, there were self-aware sheep in the film “The Sheep Detectives” which depicted a flock of self-aware and articulate sheep. I wrote about these recently: see my post titled Sheep.

Now this:

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is about a bereaved household where the wife

has died, leaving her husband Harold depressed and unmoored from what he had loved.

Their daughter Kate comes to help her father adapt, but her plans and his are not the same.

The center of The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is a small automated vacuum cleaner who has chosen the name Scout because it was fascinated by the character named Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Along with Scout the vacuum, the house is equipped with a grandfather clock called Clock and a refrigerator called Fridge who both worry about Harold. The appliances also are concerned because the house, the humans, the car which lives in the garage, and the appliances themselves are all under constant supervision by “The Grid,” an omniscient and somewhat hostile overlord to all humans and non-humans in the house, in the neighborhood, and everywhere:

THE GRID MONITORED EVERY one of the millions of cars on the road—every car in the world, in fact—tracking exactly where they were and how fast they were traveling and what their present mission entailed, whether it was taking a Human to an appointment or something as simple as accepting the delivery of new clothes. (p. 67)

On Harold’s wrist is a watch, which is another part of the power of the Grid: 

“Watch,” said Clock, “is interested only in cataloging the contents of the House. I do not blame him. It is his duty to evaluate the worth of things. There are accounts to be balanced. There are meticulous and fine details to be attended to.” (p. 81) 

Harold’s late wife was a piano teacher, and Adrian, one of her young students, comes to the house to continue practicing on the piano. Harold, a former English teacher, along with Kate also introduce Adrian to books like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe:

HAROLD COULD HEAR KATE reading to Adrian upstairs. He sat in his armchair and listened to the cadence of her voice. He couldn’t quite make out the words, but he knew the story so well it didn’t matter. For now, he was thinking of the boy, thinking of how it would be to hear this book for the first time, the magic of it, the kids going through the wardrobe to find themselves in another world. (p. 181)

Can we ordinary people defy the system that controls our physical and mental surroundings? Or are we hopelessly manipulated by them? Do we own our “things” or do they own us? We are left with these questions. I am also left with the question of just how I might connect the story and characters in To Kill a Mockingbird with this story and these characters.

AI summarizes the novel thus: “The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances is a 2026 speculative novel by Glenn Dixon published by Atria Books. Set in a near-future smart house, it is told from the perspective of a sentient Roomba named Scout who tries to protect her elderly owners from an omnipresent technological system”

Blog post © 2026 mae sander