Far From Brooklyn

“Waste Tide,” by Chen Quifan

Eco-sci-fi. Set in what seems to be a nearish future, on an island whose economy is based trash-sorting, where scavengers pick through trash for plastics and metals for recycling.

As is often the case with science fiction, I found the invented world interesting. Where sci-fi generally falls short for me is in characterization – so much energy has gone into creating a world there just isn’t anything left for the hard work of creating credible characters.

That wasn’t the case here – Chen does a decent job building out his cast. But somehow the storylines didn’t do a lot for me. That is, the characters were decently drawn but not, for me, compelling. And then he began mixing some quasi-magical realistic elements into the plot and I… eh, I folded about a quarter of the way through the book.

I have to say I was disappointed that I didn’t connect with this book. It had a lot of heat around it, and I was expecting something challenging and different. But to me it read like a fairly standard dystopian crime novel (rival family groups control the island’s waste-sorting operations). It was bland, basically.

Meanwhile, the invented world is not really much of an invention; in China and elsewhere, there really are mini-economies based on garbage picking, depressing as it is to say so. It addresses serious environmental issues but… that’s not what I read fiction for.

The novel was translated by Ken Liu, and his note at the front of the book was, in its way, as interesting as the book itself, digging into the concept of topolects vs. dialects.

Photo credit:  Muhammad Numan on Unsplash