Lydia Schoch

Title: What Do We Afford

Author: Eyal Avissar

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: June 22, 2025

Genres: Science Fiction

Length: about 42 pages

Source: I receive a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

What do we afford—and what affords us? A button invites a press. A screen beckons a swipe. A silence, a gaze, a gesture—they all offer something. But what happens when the tools begin to want? When systems record our rhythms, adapt to our emotions, and wait for our hands like patient familiars? What Do We Afford is a speculative field manual of human and nonhuman use—told through eerie reports, dreamlike system logs, and the quiet mutiny of the everyday. A subway drips with spores that remember longing. A phone glows warm with affection training. A dog learns to speak regret. A therapist becomes a corridor. Written in fragments, forums, and false diagnostics, this book asks not only what we do with objects—but what they do with us. For readers of speculative fiction, poetic systems theory, and those who have ever wondered if the smart device on their nightstand dreams of being needed.

Content Warning:

Review:

Everything can be catalogued and understood under the right circumstances.

Figuring out who or what the narrator was made it impossible for me to stop reading this piece. While it didn’t otherwise come across as a mystery, this element of the plot certainly wasn’t easy to puzzle out due to the limited number of clues that were provided and how uninterested that individual was in explaining anything that it didn’t already understand. Other readers should come to their own conclusions about what the answer is to this riddle, but I certainly had a wonderful time organizing my own thoughts about it and testing my theories as new information was revealed.

There were times when I struggled to understand what the narrator was saying due to the differences between them and humans and other living beings. Their thought processes rarely if ever overlapped with how a person would explain the same event even when they were attempting to put things into terms that our species would understand.  This was true even for something as simple as a cow deciding where to graze next or a small child trying to figure out how to get someone’s attention so she could have a snack, so the more complicated stuff sometimes made me frown and reread a passage.

With that being said, I must commend Mr. Avissar for writing a main character that was this unique. Had I encountered this tale under other circumstances and been told it was written by a sentient robot, alien, or other intelligent being that shared no human presuppositions about anything, I might have believed it to be the case. That speaks to how creative this piece was as well as how much effort the author put into imagining something that is all but completely outside of human understanding.

What Do We Afford would make an amazing film.