Scrapped (谁将报废) by Lü Bu Wei (吕不伪): Review

[douqi]

Scrapped (谁将报废, pinyin: shui jiang baofei) by Lü Bu Wei (吕不伪) is a near-future sci-fi thriller set in the year 2208, where society has somehow contrived to become even more stratified by wealth than it is now. Much of the labour, including creative labour, is being done by robots. There are a few holdouts — small businesses, artists and artisans who value the 'human touch' — but this is decidedly not a mainstream or profitable position to take. Working-class humans have to scrabble for work that will pay them enough to survive to work another day; wealthy humans (whom we never meet an actual example of in this book) are presumably kicking back and enjoying these fruits of civilisation. Human life itself is also highly stratified in another way. All babies in this universe are now gestated in 'baby factories', but some are much wanted babies whose parents pay painstaking attention to each stage of their development, while others are factory-gestated, factory-raised and factory-socialised at scale and in an impersonal way to serve as a source of cheap labour. The novel doesn't go into the details of how this takes place, but does make it clear that these children are viewed as distinctly expendable. It's also not clear precisely how 'second-class humans as a source of cheap labour' meshes with 'almost all work is done by robots now', but one plausible explanation is that they started with the second-class humans first, then pivoted to robots as the technology improved (and indeed, most of the working-class human characters we meet in this book are in their late twenties, suggesting that they may have been the last big batch of factory-raised 'cheap human labour' who came of age just as the robots were beginning to take over the jobs they would otherwise have done).

These world-building details are sprinkled throughout the novel, which is really the story of Wanxu, a household robot owned by Lizhi, who ekes out a living as a designer of theatrical sets and props. Lizhi, one of the aforementioned holdouts, refuses to use any machine assistance in her work, and insists on doing everything by hand. In accordance with her programming, Wanxu does her best to be an exemplary household robot, but Lizhi seems continually dissatisfied with her, and the fear of being scrapped looms almost permanently over Wanxu's head. She simply can't work out why Lizhi is so displeased with her, or why Lizhi often looks so sorrowfully at her. Lizhi also insists on doing eccentric things like asking Wanxu to eat with her (robots don't have a digestive tract), taking Wanxu on trips away from the city, and telling Wanxu endless stories about her ex-girlfriend, who is no longer around. One day, Wanxu finds a discarded robot at the recycling centre and inexplicably (because nothing in her programming should, in principle, allow her to do this) brings it home. Things escalate from there.

I found this a gripping, fast-paced read, with plot twists and reveals seeded in at just the right time to keep me turning the (digital) pages because I wanted to find out what was going on. Wanxu and Lizhi's shared and separate plights cohere very well with the dystopian world-building — there's some good thematic consistency going on here, and the author is thankfully never didactic about it. It's also an incredibly sad book, and not sad in an uplifting, cathartic way, but in a sort of heavy, resigned, hopeless way (thanks, late capitalism). It has a tragic ending, but that's clearly signalled from the first chapter, and the oppressiveness that hangs over the entire book makes it feel inevitable. I think it would stand up to a reread, especially since the final reveal colours so much of what comes before, but I'm not masochistic enough to attempt that so soon after finishing the book.

I read the Chinese original of the novel here on Changpei. The whole book is available for free, and it's also a very reasonable length (only 115k words!)

Comments

[superborb]

This sounds fascinating, but also... really depressing...

[douqi]

It is really bleak, which is why I abandoned my original plan of reading an equally depressing contemporary baihe right after and broke out my emergency trope-y (and well done) urban fantasy baihe.