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
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.
