I’m always on the lookout for new science fiction reads where excellent world building and techno-scientific futurism combine with prescient geopolitical issues of our day. So, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the English translation of Chen Qiufan’s novel The Waste Tide. Ever since the award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin took the Western reading world by storm, thanks in no small part to the astounding translation by Ken Liu, science fiction fans have looked to China as a hotbed of bleeding edge stories. Several of Chen’s short stories have been available in English, such as his poignant eco-future tale “The Smog Society,” and with The Waste Tide readers outside of China now have access to a novel-length encounter with his formidable imaginative powers.


What makes The Waste Tide particularly appealing is that its story hinges on an intercultural dynamic of techno-culture. In our intercultural moment, when the CFO of Huawei is arrested in Canada as an act of tech-centered geopolitics and China and the U.S. are tangled up in matters of trade and telecommunications, AIs and soybeans, Chen’s portrait of a future China shaped by the production, circulation, consumption, and waste of tech devices couldn’t be more germane. By featuring an international range of characters, The Waste Tide deftly balances its China specific elements with global intersections such that readers can access the story and perceive their own implication in the novel’s events even if they pick the book up without knowing a lot about contemporary China. It’s a story that fits Kim Stanley Robinson’s suggestion that science fiction is a key genre today because we live in a world that resembles an SF novel that we’re all writing together.

For a final buzz note, Chen creates some dazzling human-machine interface scenes that make The Waste Tide a significant contribution to cybernetic/cyborg science fictions. I found myself rereading these scenes because at first they advanced the thrilling pace of the plot unfolding, but at second glance they’re imbued with carefully crafted nuance and the uncanny recognition of our own deep integration with the digital signals we send and receive through handheld amalgams of rare metals and toxic plastics.