The Ego Machine

Nicholas Martin is a playwright stuck in Hollywood, watching his career crater while dealing with a manipulative director and an agent he can't quite tell he loves. Then ENIAC shows up: a slightly unhinged robot, buzzing on alternating current, with a proposition Martin can't refuse. He's been selected for an 'optimum ecology experiment', a process that will rearrange his personality traits like furniture in a room. One by one, his characteristics get swapped out, replaced, rewritten. Now Martin must navigate Tinseltown's absurdity while becoming someone he barely recognizes, and wondering if the person who started this conversation will even exist by sunrise. Kuttner's 1952 novel is a weird, wiry piece of work: part Hollywood satire, part identity philosophy experiment, all dark comedy. It asks what we actually are beneath the masks we wear to survive, and whether those masks ever really come off. Funny, uncomfortable, and more honest about creativity and selfhood than most literary fiction daring enough to try.