QualityLand
2017
- science fiction
- humorous
- dystopian
- satire
- artificial intelligence
- robots
- politics
- fiction, science fiction, humorous
- fiction, dystopian
- fiction, satire
The story
Welcome to QualityLand, the best country on Earth. Here, a universal ranking system determines the social advantages and career opportunities of every member of society. An automated matchmaking service knows the best partners for everyone and helps with the break up when your ideal match (frequently) changes. And the foolproof algorithms of the biggest, most successful company in the world, TheShop, know what you want before you do and conveniently deliver to your doorstep before you even order it. In QualityCity, Peter Jobless is a machine scrapper who can't quite bring himself to destroy the imperfect machines sent his way, and has become the unwitting leader of a band of robotic misfits hidden in his home and workplace. One day, Peter receives a product from TheShop that he absolutely, positively knows he does not want, and which he decides, at great personal cost, to return. The only problem: doing so means proving the perfect algorithm of TheShop wrong, calling into question the very foundations of QualityLand itself. Qualityland, Marc-Uwe Kling's first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly clever, illuminating satire in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and George Orwell that offers a visionary, frightening, and all-too funny glimpse at a near future we may be hurtling toward faster than it's at all comfortable to admit. So why delay any longer? TheShop already knows you're going to love this book. You may as well head to the cash register, crack the covers, and see why that is for yourself.
What it’s like
Brisk, deadpan and bright on the surface, with a sly undertow that keeps tipping toward unease: the prose is conversational and quick, full of short scenes, running jokes, and corporate-speak played with a straight face, so the world feels like a glossy shopping-app utopia slowly revealing its seams. Picture a bustling near-future city of frictionless storefronts, smooth chrome gadgets, and wall-sized ranking screens, all rendered in the easy voice of a sharp friend who keeps making you laugh at something you should find alarming. Its humour is dry and absurdist rather than slapstick, and its tone sits somewhere between wry comedy and gentle dread. The rhythm is quick and episodic, with chapters that snap along, and the emotional core is an ordinary, slightly hapless man slowly, reluctantly deciding he has to stop going along with things. Violence is minimal and mostly comic, with no gore and no sexual content, and the bleakness comes from ideas rather than from anything shown on the page. It suits a lazy Sunday, a long train ride, or a quick read before bed, and it is for readers who enjoy satire in the vein of Vonnegut, Adams, or Orwell and want something funny with a sting in its tail.
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