QualityLand

Read Time: 1 Minute

QualityLand, by Marc-Uwe Kling. Where you can only talk in superlatives – hence the subject line for this review! Where machines don’t make mistakes. A world where who you are is governed by algorithms who know you better than you know yourself… or do they?

This book takes a long, hard look at who we are as a society and how much we give over control of our information to big business and shines a harsh, bright light on it all. Part satire, part science fiction, and part history lesson, it’s hard not to see how this vision of the future could one day be true.

Our poor, hapless protagonist, Peter Jobless, doesn’t fit into the utopian world of the future. He loses his girlfriend, who creates clickbait headlines on the advice of a computer. He lives with broken, malfunctioning robots… and he just can’t rid himself of a pink dolphin vibrator “The Shop” says he wants.

If you were to mix Jennifer Government (Max Barry), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), and 1984 (George Orwell) you’d get something like QualityLand… just maybe not as funny.

Superbly narrated by Patricia Rodriguez, I couldn’t fault her quality or style at all. The voices Patricia gave to the cast of characters were fantastic.

All up, it’s very poignant and timely, and it really is something people need to listen to and get a sense of how much we’ve given up already.

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