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The Ten Percent Thief

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The world introduced in this book is complex while being simple in its obviousness. The biggest divide in this dystopian (while appearing to be utopian) Bengaluru is between those allowed to use virtual technology while the Analogs live outside the boundaries and do the more menial tasks and are used as examples of how low people can fall when they do not stick to the script of success.
We have several points of view, each providing a glimpse into a different aspect of how the world runs and their backgrounds and ambitions.
The thief of the title is but a single voice in all the ones we hear. There is an ultimate plan that the Analogs are hatching, and the plot builds towards it, but to me, the enjoyment of the book came from exploring the world and the way things work. There are reflections voiced by several people at different stages, and that is what the book was about for me.
I know I have been vague in the review about what to expect from the book, but I think Sci-fi and futuristic worlds are better experienced through the writing of the author and the fact that I liked my time spent there (in a manner of speaking, I wouldn't want to live there) means I can easily recommend it to fans of the genre or to anyone who finds the blurb intriguing.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

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This was the most unpredictable fantasy book I read this year. This is my first read from author and wont be the last. First, I truly excited found out this fantasy take setting at reimaging South Asia city. Apex City's description was unique, intriguing and smart. Honestly this is not most easy reading but rewarding.

The writing is good and the story is entertaining. I love how author tackled several issue and subplot. The characteristic voice kinda confusing but brimming with potential. Maybe I will reread again next time to get stronger grabs into the story.

Thank you to Netgalley and Solaris Publising for providing a copy of this ebook. I have voluntarily read and reviewed it. All thoughts and opinions are my own

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This is a very interestingly written science fiction. It's split up into different perspectives, with people who are living in very different areas of this futuristic world. What I enjoyed about it is being able to see different aspects of the world through different people, it brings out that dystopian feel.

Would recommend for anyone who enjoys dystopian fiction and science fiction.

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I'm glad the novel ended the way it did, and algorithms and productivity correspondences are exposed as malevolent. Although this is future, it's also now .. the more productive you are, the higher in rank you go with privileged accorded you ; bottom level creatures are disparaged and harvested for body parts etc. People are strategic rather than developed characters .. the transactions among them are assumed to be either deep and loving or otherwise .. so we are not focussed on their interiors or motivations except we know they aspire to climb out of being 'analogues' so they attain the world of the privileged 'virtuals' .. so it's the gimmick of the narrative trajectory we are watching ..it gives it all a sameness but that's OK, I was engaged, watching the resistance accumulate.

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I both loved this book and felt a call for change at the same time.
Made up of multiple threads we learn about a society where is you are in the bottom 10% of the population you are an analogue. Not really worth much more than to provide labour or as organ donors. At the opposite end of the scale the 1% that make up the elite have access to the best of the best (feels very similar to the way society generally works today for many things).
The someone from the bottom 10% decides things need to change.

This book covers alot of relevant and ahrd hitting themes and feels like it should be on every shcool reading list asap.

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The Ten Percent Thief is set in the future Bangalore, now called Apex city and the Bell Curve organisation uses a person's productivity to determine where they sit in society. Those who are very productive and active on social media sit at the top and have access to the best tech, those at the bottom have little to no tech. I found the story a little difficult to follow at times as there's so many characters and some character's dialogue scene felt a little long, but once I got used to the format it was easier to understand. Not sure why the title is called The Ten Percent Thief as they barely make a presence but it was overall an enjoyable read.

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the structure took a while to get into but I ended up enjoying this dystopian sci-fi with some very unique world buildings. this book is perfect for those who love sci-fi and/or cyberpunk. I'm not sure if it'll be for everyone.

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*Thank you to NetGalley and Solaris for granting me access to an early copy of this book*
I fully admit that I picked this book at the wrong time and that's why I stopped reading it, but as my mental health improved over the year I have never had a desire to pick it back up. What I read of the narrative was both too disjointed and too distant, so even though it's a book that could eventually pull me in and become very good, I just don't foresee myself picking it back up.

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It almost feels like after a horrible reading slump and being frustrated that I’m not keeping up with any of my reading plans all through this pregnancy, I’m finally feeling the FOMO in these last weeks before my due date and trying to catch up as much as I can. This time it was the turn of the very beautiful looking The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan, which got an international release early this year after being debuted previously in South Asia with a different title. I was expecting quite a bit from this book but turns out, it’s even better and I finished the book in just 2 days, to my utter surprise and delight.

This is a mosaic novel, a bit reminiscent of the profound How High We Go in the Dark, though this one takes place in a much more near future technocratic dystopia, within a much shorter time frame. Set in erstwhile Bangalore but now called Apex City, run by the Bell Corp where all citizens are rated on the bell curve, this book through the eyes of both the privileged and oppressed characters, gives us a glimpse into what this world controlled by a mega corp, optimized by algorithms, and driven by themes of productivity and conformity, has turned into.

While we get various POVs, each of different age groups and professions, we see their lives closely and what motivates them to keep going - how some of them have to work extra hard to conform and ensure that they don’t fall down on the curve, how they are ready to completely transform themselves to achieve this outcome, how utterly dependent every single aspect of life is on technology and how some of the Analogs are ready to fight back. Even though there are through lines between the stories, we don’t always meet the characters again but even in the short time we spend with them, it’s very easy to feel for them. But the beauty of this book is in how realistic and plausible the author makes this future feel - already we see ourselves living out social lives at the whims of algorithms everyday and it’s no surprise that the world envisioned in this book feels like a logical conclusion. I was captivated by the writing and the while it’s not necessarily a singular plot focused, it still moves at a fast pace building towards a thrilling end.

To be honest, I feel like I’ve not done justice to the book in this haphazard review of mine. But what can I say. I don’t have the right words in me at the moment. Just know that this book is very impressive, the futuristic world the author creates very familiar and scary and prescient, and a uniquely structured tale that is easy to read as well as hard to put down. I can’t wait to see what the author writes next.

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What would happen if the world was run on a bell curve? Most humans would be right in the middle - but some would be granted more privileges on top of the curve and others, at the end, would have nothing. Honestly, it isn’t all that much different sounding thing how things are now. However, The Ten Percent Thief placed this reality in the future, allowing the conversation to be seen from a new perspective.

Cities are owned by corporations, and your value depends on what you give to the corporation. The goal is to move to the top ten percent, where you will receive all the privileges of society. Better yet, there is no guilt because you deserve to be there. The bottom ten percent are denied technology completely.

This story is told from a variety of points of view to create a story that will leave you unable to stop reading. But it is haunting how this world is not so far removed from our own.

While reading, I was deeply struck by how mental illness and disability were constantly portrayed as a weakness. That could be sentenced to death. I don’t even think the author intended this to be a theme - just everything that was “bad” was the ablism that so many face every day. Humanity was lost because of consumerism.

I could go on, but basically, read this book!

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The mozaic style was a bit difficult to read the start but once you got used to it the worldbuilding became even better and interesting.

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I LOVED this at first, but it became very very confusing. There were too many voices. I thought it might be doing a 'Cloud Atlas' thing of setting up characters and then returning to them but it kept introducing new ones, which made it tricky to connect. It's a great premise, though, and I loved the world building.

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Originally published in South Asia in 2020, under the title Analog/Virtual, Lakshminarayan's debut is a cyberpunk dystopia about the class struggle. Set in Apex City, on the ruins of what was once Bangalore, the society depicted in the novel defines itself as a "meritocracy". Citizens are graded according to their usefulness, productivity, and social approval. The top twenty percent live in luxury, the middle seventy live well but mostly in the virtual world, while the bottom ten, dubbed "Analogs", are corralled in their own quarter, denied access to the city's virtual systems (as well as basic utilities), and subject to punishments that include being harvested for organs. The novel is told in twenty mostly-distinct stories, though some characters recur, and a running throughline is the build-up to a violent uprising of the have-nots.

There is, at points, a certain creakiness to Lakshminarayan's worldbuilding. The difference between the twenty and seventy percent, for example, feels more informed than concrete. The descriptions of Apex City's cherished values, and how they twist the people who seek to advance in its system, can sometimes feel like they belong less in cyberpunk than YA dystopia (two modes that turn out to be closer on the dial than I had realized). In one chapter, a former Analog who has clawed his way into the seventy percent is informed that his professional advancement will stall unless he can convince his colleagues that he likes the same superhero movies they do; in another, an Analog piano prodigy competes with players who use virtual aids, whose music is note-perfect but sterile. Both chapters feel as if they're courting a Black Mirror-style sense of smug superiority. In addition, the book suffers from a bit of tonal whiplash. One of the best chapters charts the development of the latest killer app, which allows people to replace their faces with emojis, but it has a strongly satirical tone that doesn't match anything else in the novel. Another chapter describes the military wing of the Analog resistance as if they were the Fremen from Dune, all glorious self-sacrifice in the face of the degenerate elite.

At its best, however, The Ten Percent Thief makes Apex City feel lived in, and its ideas about how the meritocratic system would play out are thoughtful and disquieting. The former Analog with incorrect pop culture tastes purchases a device that rewires his brain to love the things he's supposed to by triggering his pain and pleasure centers, like a high-tech, self-inflicted form of conversion therapy. Later in the novel, a more sophisticated version of this technology implants itself in the subconscious of a twenty percenter whose relationship has been judged a threat to her upward mobility, subtly decreasing her happiness with her partner in ways that are insidious and terrifying. One of the most effective chapters follows a woman on the verge of being kicked out of the seventy percent, after depression following the death of her mother impacts her productivity. As the story begins, she is placed on a probationary program whose real purpose is to push her out the door by forcing her to perform Analog activities, such as leaving the house to shop for food. The story captures both the heroine's disgust at the Analog lifestyle, and the way that Apex City has been constructed to discourage and even punish it, creating a feedback loop that reinforces the heroine's "unworthiness" to live among her class.

What ties the different stories in The Ten Percent Thief together is how they illustrate the illusion of merit as a system of control. The corporation that runs Apex City defines merit through both productivity as an employee and consumption as a customer. It's the allure of superiority—and the fear of sliding into sub-human status—that persuades citizens to destroy themselves in pursuit of both. The novel excels at conveying the fact that no one in Apex City is safe. No matter how far you rise, it's always possible for the city's algorithms to designate you as unproductive and dispose of you—as illustrated quite effectively in the chapter set in the city's retirement home, where residents are expected to "mentor" corporate projects, and quietly euthanized if their usefulness fades. Climbing out of the ten percent, though allegedly possible, is designed to be a laborious, physically and psychologically grueling process. In the face of this impeccably constructed, extremely claustrophobic system, the subplot about the revolt of the underclass can't help but feel unconvincing, if not beside the point. But then, the novel itself might be aware of this—one chapter sees an older Analog arguing to a young revolutionary that even if they manage to topple the meritocratic system, they will simply find another way to oppress some people and elevate others. The fact that The Ten Percent Thief ends without revealing whether this prophecy comes true is, perhaps, the most telling statement that this impressive, disturbing novel could have made on the matter.

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book, both for its innovative structure and the writing itself. It took me a while to warm up to it — was this really a novel I wondered, or was it a short story collection? In the end it revealed itself to be somewhere in between: a series of interconnected stories that when read together form an overarching narrative.
For the overall story the main character is the city itself—which I found reminiscent of both Black Mirror and The Space Between Worlds—but make no mistake it’s an antagonist not a protagonist. In a corporate-controlled ‘meritocracy’ the bottom ten percent are repeatedly exiled to the technology-deprived ‘analog’ realm. Some characters want to rise, or to hang onto their ‘virtual’ status. Others are ready to turn the whole order on its head.
One thing I really loved was the way that characters we’d read about as the protagonist of one story would pop up in the background of later ones. There were a few folks I got a bit too invested in, and hoped (often in vain) that their fates would somehow be revealed. Not that the ending wasn’t satisfying as it was!
Anyway, I’d recommend this to anyone willing to try something a little different. Read it for the horribly plausible world, the intriguing characters, or the thrill of piecing together the puzzle pieces.

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I really wanted to enjoy this book as some of the reviews are sensational but I didn't. I do enjoy dystopian novels but this one jumped about too much for me. The concept of social status is continued throughout the novel which sometimes adds to the story but other times it gets hung up too much on it. I feel that the author missed a great opportunity to take this book further and develop stronger characters within.

Thanks to Netgalley for this in exchange for a full and frank review.

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The Ten Percent Thief is a brilliant build up of connected stories that explores a dystopian future of class divides through technology. It is a really interesting concept as most people in the current world, independent of wealth, have access to phones, tvs and the internet. Whereas in Lavanya's world, there is an analog/digital divide that is well explored.
I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys interconnected stories, sci-fi and dystopian fiction. Really well done.

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I find that a dystopian novel based on a meritocracy is an interesting concept. The Ten Percent Thief makes no exception, the concept is interesting, yet the execution left me unsatisfied.

I would have liked to see more depth in the characters and what the people on the fringe of the social media scales do.

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I haven’t read a 5-star novel in a while, but this one fits the bill. I loved this novel. A beautifully detailed world in which class systems rely upon one’s productivity is our setting. It is broken into a class of the top 20%, the middle 70% and the low 10% (the analogs). People’s technological and social privileges are tied to their class system. So, the more productive you are, the more tools are available to continue said productivity.

As each chapter focuses on one character, it seems like a selection of short stories but they all bend seamlessly together.

Massively good and enjoyable to all who read sci-fi.

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I rarely read books inspired by the Indian Myth or anything relative to that peninsula, however, I am glad I gave this one a try.

The way the characters were introduced is done differently than how I would normally read in a fantasy book. A lot of little things were hidden by the author which eventually made it more interesting to read.

All in all a good one 👍

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A bold and intriguing science fiction novel that is a little jarring. A complex world is described (but not enough at the beginning I found) and well executed

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