QualityLand

So you're off to QualityLand for the first time ever. Are you excited? Yes? And quite rightly so!

QualityLand is set is some distant future (hard to say how distant, but they'll need to defrost the cryogenically-preserved Jennifer Aniston to film more rom-coms when her movies unexpectedly regain popularity), and despite the book itself being pretty funny (in the vein of Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut), the world it describes is dehumanisingly shallow and bleak – and pretty much exactly what we're scrolling ourselves towards. Control of human lives is taken over by a few big internet companies and their algorithms; governments are cynically run by self-interested, partisan boobs; and AI is poised to take over as the apex sentience on the planet. The plot was a bit predictable – a little guy attempts to push back against the system and incidentally wakes others up to their own predicament as cogs in the machine – but this was thoroughly entertaining and I am excited to see that QualityLand appears to be the first in a series by Marc-Uwe Kling.

As you don't yet know your way around QualityLand, we've put together a brief introduction for you. Two years before QualityLand was founded – or in other words, two years before QualityTime – there was an economic crisis of such severity that it became known as the crisis of the century. It was the third crisis of the century within just a decade. Swept along by the panic of the financial markets, the government turned for help to the business consultants from Big Business Consulting (BBC) who decided that what the country needed most was a new name. The old one was worn-out and, according to surveys, only inspired die-hard nationalists with minimal buying power. Not to mention the fact that the renaming would also divest the country of a few unpleasant historical responsibilities in the process. In the past, its army had been known to...well, let's just say they overshot the mark a little.

“QualityLand”, the country, is the future rebranding of Germany (focus groups first wanted “EqualityLand”, but the initial “E” was dropped for the marketing of domestic goods), and it seems important to read the book in this context. Schoolchildren no longer study History, they study the Future (leading to such absurdities as a popular play called Hitler!—the Musical, subtitled “The Story of Ado & Eva” and described as “The tragic love story between two controversial historical figures”; two adults who go to see the show have no idea who Ado and Eva were, and that's some bold erasing of the past in the vein of 1984.) Yet somehow in this future, QualityLand has expanded its borders beyond those of today's Germany – it's an oft-repeated fact that QualityLand 7 is a hotbed of terrorists and religious fanatics and a character says at one point, “I'd far prefer it if my briefs were sewn by a machine in QualityLand 2 than by some little girl in QualityLand 8.” (And while I think that these ideas may be even more interesting for German readers to encounter, and while I have seen people musing that by dominating the EU, Germany today seems to have accomplished economically what Hitler failed to do militaristically, I don't know if I completely buy in to the concept that decades out from now, Germany will be more globally influential than, say, China.)

At precisely the moment when Peter arrives home, a delivery drone from TheShop turns up. Peter is no longer surprised by occurrences of this kind. They don't happen by chance, for chance simply no longer exists.

As for the plot: The narrative is roughly divided into three points-of-view. Peter Jobless (males are given their father's profession as a surname, females their mother's – leading to such ironies as Juliet Nun and Scarlett Prisoner) is a low-level scrap-metal press operator, and like every other person in QualityLand, he accepts that TheShop will send him all of the items he wants before he even consciously knows what he wants. He also accepts that he has been given a personal rating between 2 and 99 that affects every area of his life – credit rating, where he can live, who he can date or marry, his job prospects, etc. When a drone delivers an item that Peter decidedly does not want, he begins a journey that will lead him (and others) to publicly question the inscrutable computer codes that govern all of their lives. Meanwhile, there is an impending election (the current president is on her deathbed and an algorithm has set the next election date for the day of her calculated death), and POV switches to the domestic scenes of the privileged and dimwitted backbencher Martyn Chairman:

Martyn has made the best of his limited possibilities: he has become a politician. A popular, well-established choice, parliament being a kind of modern-day monastery; a place where the upper classes can get rid of their superfluous sons.

And the campaign headquarters of John of Us, the first android made specifically to run for political office:

“I'm not voting for John of Us in spite of the fact he's an android,” he says. “I'm electing him precisely because he is! Machines don't make mistakes.”

Facing off against this progressive android (who proposes such radicalisms as a guaranteed basic income for all, funded by big banks and corporations) is the populist Conrad Cook:

“There's no one in the world less racist than me. No one. But that doesn't change the fact that these Mediterranean types are all lazy, negroes are all criminals, and Arabs are all terrorists. These are facts, pure and simple. And yet, I must emphasize this: never in the history of humanity has there been a man less racist than me!”

Interspersed throughout the story are more entries in the QualityLand Travel Guide (as quoted in the first two passages above), pop-up ads, and passages from newsfeeds (complete with combative comment threads and paid trolling). This does not look like a nice world to live in, and it's not that far off from the one I find myself in today. Maybe it's because it seems so plausible that QualityLand didn't feel radically original to me, but as it does seem to be the first in a series, this volume may have been more focussed on the world-building than the story-telling. In any event, I found this read to be completely entertaining and I would very happily pick up whatever comes next.

It felt kind of low-key ironic that this was the first library book I was able to pick up after the COVID restrictions were lifted - after 17 of the last 18 books I read being ARCs I downloaded onto my phone, the first nondigital book I've read in months was one about a hyperdigital future. So weird. And what would make it even better: if it was actually interactively digital; if you could read QualityLand on a screen and have the travel guide sections be navigable; if the popup ads actually interrupted the reading and you needed to press the OK button to proceed. Maybe some day.