Publishers Weekly
★ 02/25/2019
Anglophone readers will cherish the opportunity to experience Chen’s sweeping, complex, and deeply emotional near-future dystopian vision via this thoughtful rendition by Hugo-winning translator and author Liu that maintains the story’s essential Chinese character. Guangdong Province’s environmentally devastated Silicon Isle, ruled by three powerful clans, is the destination for the electronic garbage created by a world addicted to body enhancements. The rubbish is processed in hellish conditions by the migrant workers considered by the rich natives to be subhuman “waste people.” Chen Kaizong, a Silicon Isle–born but America-trained translator, reconnects to his heritage and clan family while accompanying Scott Brandle, a visiting representative of TerraGreen Recycling, which wants to automate the process. Meanwhile, waste girl Mimi, on the run from the henchmen of the Luo clan after having been connected to the mysterious illness of the clan leader’s grandson, becomes the central figure in a rising rebellion. Liu’s careful handling of multiple Sinitic languages, as well as naming conventions that connect to class, education, and geographical origin, maintains the flavor of the setting and preserves the integrity of Chen’s focus on interacting subcultures and the social opportunities available to those capable of linguistic code switching. Chen’s story is extremely relevant to the current moment of throwaway culture, increasing income disparity, and technological advances progressing at such a rate that morality and ethics have trouble keeping up. Readers who crave gorgeous imagery and a thrilling narrative that also explicitly wrestles with big questions will be overjoyed. Agent: Eddie Schneider, JABberwocky Literary. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
"An accomplished eco-techno-thriller with heart and soul as well as brain. Chen Qiufan is an astute observer, both of the present world and of the future that the next generation is in danger of inheriting." – David Mitchell, New York Times bestselling author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks
"Thrilling...fresh." —The Washington Post
"Something startlingly new... an action-packed story that's full of moral complexity. This is the futuristic vision that everybody needs right now." —Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky
“The pinnacle of near-future science fiction.” —Cixin Liu, Hugo Award-winning author of The Three Body Problem
"Chen weaves a stunning tale of greed and deftly exposes all the hidden contours of the human heart." —Maggie Shen King, author of An Excess Male
“Filled with wonderful invention, compelling characters and a whirlpool of story, Waste Tide is an urgently-needed, thought-provoking wild ride of a novel. I couldn’t put it down.” – Lavie Tidhar, author of Central Station
"Viscerally gripping action... sheer excellence." —Kirkus (starred review)
"Already an award winner in China, this book is likely to draw comparisons to Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and is a provocative addition to the growing corpus of Chinese speculative fiction and near-future and realist sf as a whole." —Library Journal
“A complex and provocative exploration of the interactions among social class, corporate ambition, cultural identity, environmentalism, and human potential, with enough buzzy ideas to power a couple of novels, and enough violent melodrama to keep the reader plummeting along.” —Gary K. Wolfe for Locus
"A sci-fi blockbuster with mob bosses, robots and a powerful virus...downright prescient" —Shelf Awareness .
"A chilling sci-fi novel about class war and trash in near-future China, and the people the world’s economy leaves behind... Pressingly relevant." —The Verge
JULY 2019 - AudioFile
Narrator Ewan Chung tells a story set in the future in China. On Silicon Island clans fight for supremacy in the booming electrical- waste-recycling industry. Listeners hear the tales of different members of the various caste systems as they navigate this harsh and deadly environment. Chung's performance is hamstrung by the text itself. Because this audiobook has been translated from several Chinese dialects into English and because some of the words are still in those disparate Chinese dialects, the book sounds a bit too formal. When Chung delivers Chinese words and phrases, he is amazing. The flow between them and the English is seamless. However, the story itself is written with too much exposition, which forces Chung to sound robotic as he explains technical jargon. A.R.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-02-03
Cutting-edge, near-future science fiction from China: With a setting based on a real-world Chinese town that recycled electronic waste from all over the world, Chen's (aka Stanley Chan) first and so far only novel, originally published in 2013, comes to vibrant life in Liu's deft and informative translation.
To Silicon Isle, a vast waste dump where electronic devices and components are manually recycled, desperate workers flood in from all over China despite the extreme toxic hazards and attacks by fanatical environmentalists. Ruthless local clans enforce long hours and wretched wages. Luo Jincheng, head of the most powerful clan, despises the migrant workers and treats them with particular brutality and contempt. He refuses to do business with Scott Brandle, a mysterious American nominally representing TerraGreen Recycling, a global corporation hoping to reap vast profits from automating the processing. Brandle's interpreter, Chen Kaizong, a young Chinese-American who speaks the local dialects, hopes to find his roots; instead, he finds Mimi, a waste girl viciously abused by Luo's thugs, who dreams of earning enough money to buy her family out of poverty. Her one friend, or perhaps exploiter, is Brother Wen, an electronics genius building devices and weapons out of junk and secretly assembling an army of the downtrodden. What nobody anticipates are the active remnants of biological warfare experiments discarded in the trash, with horrifying and tragic consequences. The author patiently engineers these ingredients and personalities into a nightmarish conflict while showing a particular talent for writing viscerally gripping action. The moral dilemmas he presents are all too familiar, with seemingly little to differentiate villains, victims, and victors. China itself, of course, takes center stage, as the past—with its rich cultural backdrop, paramount loyalty to family and clan, and reverence for tradition—confronts social upheaval and the accelerating importance of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Chinese science fiction, once an unknown quantity in the U.S., is making its way to the forefront through sheer excellence.
