Scott Hutchins

"A Working Theory of Love" by Scott Hutchins is a laugh-out-loud novel about modern relationships, picked as a Top Ten novel of the season by Publishers "Weekly" alongside JK Rowling and Ian McEwan. "A brainy, bright, laughter-through-tears, can't-stop-reading-until-it's-over kind of novel. Fatherless daughters, mother-smothered sons, appealing ex-wives, mouthy high school dropouts - damn, this book's got something for everyone!" (Gary Shteyngart, author of "Super Sad True Love Story"). Neill has got a lot to learn...Since his 'starter' marriage dissolved a couple of years ago, thirty-six year-old Neill Bassett has been learning how to be single again. Now he's learning the skills and routines that long-term bachelorhood requires - how to be less spontaneous, how not to feel too much, how to eat standing up. Since starting work at a Silicon Valley software company, meanwhile, Neill has been teaching a computer how to be human. By 'conversing' every day with a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence, his job is to help it seem more spontaneous, more emotionally convincing, more alive. The catch is that the AI programme is based on a real person, Neill's dead father. If he brings him back to life, he might end up learning more than he bargained for...The other catch is that, despite his best efforts, a good thing has dropped into his life, unmerited and unanticipated, and thrown everything out of kilter. Her name is Rachel. For her sake, if not for his own, Neill might have to learn how to be a proper person after all...Set in contemporary San Francisco, where anything goes (and regularly does), this recklessly witty, formidably funny, outrageously honest novel captures the exquisite agony of the most important relationships of our twenty-first century lives - across the generations and between the sexes. And also with computers that talk. Scott Hutchins teaches at Stanford University, California. His work has appeared in "StoryQuarterly", "The Rumpus", "The New York Times" and "Esquire". This is his first novel.

Silicon Valley: home of online start-ups, couture coffee, sexual meditation, and the future. In its midst, Neill Bassett is helping to build the world's first artificial intelligence - a computer that talks, thinks, lies, and if all goes to plan, feels bad about it too. But when the experiment swerves in an unexpected direction, Neill is forced to confront a few buried feelings of his own - for his ex-wife, for his dead father, for his twenty-first-century life, and for a very twenty-first-century woman called Rachel, who might just hold the answer to it all . . .

A los 36 años Neill Basset vive solo con su gato. Para olvidar a su exmujer, que de vez en cuando reaparece en su vida, sale algunas noches a ligar por las zonas más animadas de la bahía de San Francisco. Durante el dia habla con su padre en su oficina de Silicon Valley. O, mejor dicho, dialoga con un ordenador programado gracias a los diarios que escribio su padre hasta el dia en que se suicido. Una verdadera mina que, segun el cientifico para el que Neill trabaja, podria contribuir a crear el primer ordenador dotado de emociones. Teoria y practica del amor es una novela apasionante de amor e intriga y una mirada sobre los nuevos desafios que plantean los ordenadores y la inteligencia artificial.