“Perhaps the future is a joke, after all, and they should stop taking themselves so seriously.”

“Absolute power is its own weakness. It is in its very illusion of invincibility that it reveals itself to be vulnerable. 

The Virtuals believe they have built a fortress. They think the Analogs incapable of breaking its walls down.

I’m about to prove them wrong.”

Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s The Ten Percent Thief (2023), previously published in South Asia as Analog/Virtual (2020), is a modern speculative fiction masterpiece. A mosaic novel set in near-future Bangalore, which following the collapse of nations has been taken over by Bell Corp and renamed Apex City, The Ten Percent Thief brilliantly explores what it would be like to live in a world entirely circumscribed by Big Data and algorithmically monitored productivity by following the everyday life of the people who live in Apex City, both the Virtuals who live within the digital city and the Analogs, the bottom ten percent deemed unproductive who are exiled from the privileges of Virtual life. With beautiful writing and an admirable mix of dark humour and genuine empathy, Lakshminarayan builds an absolutely terrifying portrait of an all-too-believable world we are hurtling towards. Over the course of the linked short stories, she demonstrates with aplomb the inner workings of this dystopian vision, creating a compelling and convincing vision of a rigorously extrapolated and insightfully developed world. The Ten Percent Thief is everything that speculative fiction at its best should be. It deserves to take its place alongside modern classics like Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (2016) and Nina Allan’s The Race (2014), and we are indebted to Solaris for bringing it to a wider audience.

The Ten Percent Thief is set in Apex City, formerly Bangalore, which has been purchased by Bell Corp and is now run according to the company’s policy of “Meritocratic Techarchy”. In order to create a society free from discrimination, every individual’s worth is algorithmically determined, thanks to omnipresent technological surveillance. Everyone’s productivity is optimised and quantified on a bell curve of normal distribution. The top twenty percent enjoy access to special technology and prestige, the middle seventy percent have access to limited perks and have the potential to better themselves, whereas the bottom ten percent are deported out of the Virtual city through the Carnatic Meridian, are stripped of all technology, rights, and privileges, and run the risk of being harvested for their organs at the vegetable farms. Under this arrangement, the Virtual population of Apex City strives for productivity and perfection, lest they be outcast as an Analog. Into this milieu steps the Ten Percent Thief, an Analog folk hero who strikes back for the outcast and the forgotten. For while the Virtual live their lives convinced of their superiority, the Analogs have been organising in secret, and have a plan to bring Apex City to its knees.

Lakshminarayan meticulously builds up her future world through a series of linked short stories that show us what life is like in Apex City, for a range of characters from different backgrounds and walks of life, Analogs and Virtuals alike. I will confess this is my favourite mode of speculative fiction, whether it’s Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968), Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang (1992) or Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, I just find it an incredibly effective way of conveying what it might be like to live in a future world. The Ten Percent Thief effortlessly joins the ranks of the best of these. Lakshminarayan paints her world not through exposition, but by showing how it feels to live in at various strata of society, creating a polyphony of lived experiences that is far more effective than any single viewpoint could ever be. We see how John Alvares, who managed to transition from being an Analog to a Virtual, undergoes electroshock behavioural conditioning to help him conform to the Virtual social mores that will allow him to continue being promoted instead of being sent back to the Analog life his parents still live. Music-loving Nina Anand, an Analog child adopted by a high-flying twenty percent Virtual family, struggles to compete against her Virtual classmates in the Virtuoso Examination without any of the technological enhancements her classmates take for granted. Tanvi Nair, the newly promoted Director of Persona Curation, causes a scandal when she decides to have her baby the old fashioned way – without transferring the foetus to a PregaPod so she can continue working without having maternity leave affect her Productivity Points. Aditi Rao, a popular news reporter, signs up to be a test subject for M.I.M.E.S.I.S., an intrusive, internal AI system designed to produce maximum productivity in the user, without realising the drastic changes the AI plans to make to her personal and social life. And outside the Virtual city, Nāyaka, the Ten Percent Thief, leads the Analog resistance, working together with other Analogs to engineer a daring plan to bring down the Virtuals and destroy the oppressive system that keeps the Analogs living in poverty and terror. Across all these different characters, some sympathetic, some utterly reprehensible, Lakshminarayan portrays them with depth and sensitivity, so that even when we disapprove of their actions we understand where they come from.

The Ten Percent Thief is a powerful exploration of how an attempt to build a better world can go horribly wrong. The Bell Corp’s attempt to remove prejudices by putting their faith in Big Data simply causes an even more unfair society, built on a different set of prejudices. As such the novel stands as a stark warning for where we are headed in our increasingly quantified world. In Apex City, everyone lives all the time under extensive, intrusive surveillance. Everything from social media and emojis through to online games and TV entertainment is used as a form of social control. Everyone is connected in a massive feedback loop, where their emotional and intellectual reactions are constantly being monitored and then manipulated and pushed towards a mathematically-derived ideal. This makes for an incredibly restrictive and conformist society, in which any form of deviation, be it in musical taste or in how you want to live your life, is brutally punished. It is a society with no room for compassion, a trait that gets in the way of productivity. We see this starkly in how Virtuals like Sasha Sundaram, who fall close to the ten percent mark and so get pre-emptively punished by a system preparing them for Analog life, in the treatment of Analogs sent off for Harvesting, or in the society’s treatment of its elderly, who are institutionalised and euthanised if they display dissenting opinions. Lakshminarayan’s dystopian vision is convincing and terrifying. However it is not a book without hope. Even as the Virtuals mistreat and abuse the Analogs, we witness the Analogs, who have been sorely underestimated by the VIrtuals, organise and work together to rise up against their oppressors. 

However Lakshminarayan offers the reader no easy answers – while Apex City is an institution that absolutely deserves to fall, the Ten Percent Thief and the resistance are forced to resort to incredibly violent and destructive means in order to achieve their aims, and, as the cynical old Analog says in response to the utopian promises of their flyers, there is no guarantee that what they build afterwards will be a kinder or fairer society. Bell Corp’s own dystopian measures were inspired by good intentions. Lakshminarayan’s powerful explorations of the dystopian horrors that may await us, and the hard path towards a better world, make The Ten Percent Thief required reading for fans of speculative fiction, and frankly if she doesn’t get a Clarke nomination she’ll have been robbed. I am delighted to have discovered a new favourite novel, and look forward to reading whatever Lakshminarayan writes next.