DYSTOPIAN
QUALITYLAND by Marc-Uwe Kling Translated by Jamie Lee Searle (Orion £14.99, 352 pp)
QUALITYLAND
by Marc-Uwe Kling Translated by Jamie Lee Searle (Orion £14.99, 352 pp)
In Qualityland, needy delivery drones sulk if we don’t give them five stars, our handsets tell us who to date and rate, a giant online shop anticipates what we want before we know it.
And we can’t complain about its choices because that contradicts the algorithm and threatens the whole damn show… This brave new world is revealed in a series of pin-sharp, unsettling and scathing vignettes that follow the fortunes of Peter Jobless, a robot-scrapper with a rebel streak, and John of Us, an AI politician whose logic and honesty threaten to scupper his career.
But Peter discovers that the system, whether consumer paradise or digital hell, has one aim only: to transfigure customers into product.
Armed only with a joke vibrator, he starts to fight back and readers are confronted with an unsettling version of their own reality.
Brilliant satire and a great read that is currently in production as an HBO TV series.
TENDER IS THE FLESH
TENDER IS THE FLESH by Agustina Bazterrica (Pushkin £12.99, 224 pp)
by Agustina Bazterrica (Pushkin £12.99, 224 pp)
Sitting comfortably? Not after even the tiniest nibble of this gut-churning, brilliantly realised novella. When a nasty virus poisons all animal meat, people reject the vegan option and look to another abundant source of protein: so-called special meat, or humans.
Marcos, slaughterer by trade, has a quite understandable existential crisis, and we are spared no detail of the horrendous, nose-to-toe butchery process, nor of its effects on its workers as the specially-bred victims are diced and sliced.
When Marcos is gifted a prize piece of living flesh (i.e. a person), he breaks every rule by not eating her and is on the path to redemption until, well, a twist. Much, much more than a horror story, here is a no-holds- barred, red-blooded take on meat-eating, consumerism and human nature itself.
And you’ll give the lady fingers in the vegetable aisle a wide berth for some time.
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