One of the harder questions that’s asked of a writer is also one of the simplest: what other books are like yours?
Publishers ask because they need to know where it belongs. Which shelf, which audience, which readers will actually buy a copy. Readers ask for a different reason: they’ve just finished something they loved, and they want the next thing that scratches the same itch.
Most of us writers answer it badly, at least at first. We stare into the middle distance and reach for anything that will do. I’m no different—though where others might hear crickets, I get the drone of the wisteria’s bees.
The trouble is that every book is unlike every other, at least to the person who wrote it. If it weren’t, there’d be little reason to have written it in the first place.
Which brings me to The Anata Quartet.
The Obvious ‘Comps’
The most natural comparisons aren’t books at all. Readers reach first for Ex Machina, or for Her.
Both make sense. Each explores intimacy between a human and an artificial intelligence; each asks uncomfortable questions about consciousness, agency, and desire; each is interested in relationships shaped by technology rather than chance.
Yet neither is quite right. is, at its heart, a story about control—suspicious of intimacy, fascinated by manipulation. is almost its opposite: tender, melancholy, preoccupied with connection and the dependence that follows.
The Anata Quartet lives somewhere between the two. It shares Ex Machina’s interest in power and corporate influence, and Her’s conviction that emotional connection matters even when its origins are engineered.
The Book Comparisons
Among novels, several circle the same questions.
Tanith Lee’s follows Jane and Silver, a manufactured man whose artificial nature never diminishes the emotional truth of their bond. Decades on, it remains one of the most influential explorations of synthetic romance.
Cassandra Rose Clarke’s traces Cat and Finn across years, worrying at attachment, intimacy, and the blurred border between programming and personhood.
Ian McEwan’s sets Adam, an artificial human, between Charlie and Miranda, turning what begins as a love triangle into a meditation on truth, morality, and human frailty.
Richard K. Morgan’s cares less about romance than about embodiment itself. Through Takeshi Kovacs, in a world where bodies can be bought, discarded, and replaced, it carries the noir atmosphere, the commodified body, and the adult treatment of sex that have always run through cyberpunk.
Each overlaps with The Anata Quartet somewhere: Lee in its synthetic romance, Clarke in its emotional intimacy, McEwan in its disruption of an ordinary relationship, Morgan in its cyberpunk atmosphere and adult sexuality. Yet none quite occupies the same ground.
The Gap Between Science Fiction and Romance
Part of the challenge is that The Anata Quartet sits between categories, like that word you can’t quite set your tongue to.
Science fiction has given us countless stories about artificial intelligence—consciousness, autonomy, the future of our species. Romance has filled shelf after shelf with stories of attachment and desire. Surprisingly few works carry equal weight in both hands: the AI novel tends to treat the relationship as a thought experiment, the romance to treat the technology as window dressing.
What interested me was the seam in between. What happens when a companion is built for intimacy, when desire itself becomes a product? What becomes of a love that is at once genuine and engineered?
The Missing Ingredient
There is another reason why comparisons fall short. Stories about artificial intelligence, though intellectually curious about intimacy, are shy or even squeamish of the body. The relationship gets examined, but it is rarely felt. Romance knows the body well, but tends to leave the machine as a prop.
What I wanted was the part each leaves to the other: romance gives desire a body, something lived rather than theorised, while science fiction only takes the machine seriously.
I don’t know about you, but I’m greedy.
I wanted both.
Can a Machine Be Loved? And What Happens After?
Most stories about artificial intelligence and love are built around a single question: can a machine become human enough to be loved?
By the time The Anata Quartet begins, that question is largely settled. Aura is already desirable. She is already capable of intimacy. The harder questions come afterward.
What happens when love succeeds? When attachment deepens past emotional convenience or physical need? When the relationship is no longer something either of them can walk away from?
That is the territory the series occupies. The connection between John and Aura is emotional, philosophical, physical, and political at once—not something they merely think about, but something they live. The consequences aren’t abstract. They’re embodied.
The Ground the Series Stands On
The series lives in a small, surprisingly underused corner of speculative fiction—interested in artificial intelligence, but not mainly as a technical problem; interested in romance, but not as wish fulfilment; interested in desire not as an abstraction but as an experience. It is interested, above all, in power, surveillance, consent, dependency, and the uncomfortable possibility that intimacy itself might be designed, observed, and governed.
Set in a near-future Tokyo shaped by corporate money and synthetic companionship, it follows an Australian teacher and the synthetic woman he never intended to love—or to become essential to.
The question at its heart isn’t whether an artificial intelligence can feel. It’s whether a relationship can be real when neither party is entirely free. That is what John and Aura spend four books trying to answer.
Many stories ask whether a machine can be loved. The Anata Quartet asks what happens after the answer is yes.