This was good science fiction. Not the best I 've ever read, but good storytelling and writing skills that service an interesting plot that might especially hook newcomers to the genre.

The Ten Percent Thief is a novel made up of interlinking short stories set in Apex City - formerly Bangalore - a futuristic, high-tech "meritocratic" dystopia where the population is split into privileged Virtuals and disadvantaged Analogs.

I wasn't familiar with the idea of a mosaic novel before picking The Ten Percent Thief up, but I really enjoyed how most of the short stories stood on their own, whilst also contributing to the overall plot. Despite the dystopian setting and underlying plot of revolution, there was still a lot of humour to be found from chapter to chapter.

Yes, there was little to be enjoyed in the way of character development, but if you enjoy strong, satirical world-building, this is the book for you.

I requested a digital copy in order to sample the prose on my phone (since I don't have a eReader) before requesting a physical copy for review. My review will be based on the physical ARC I read (if I qualify)

Thank you to #NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing the advance review copy of this novel by Lavanya Lakshminarayan.

Finally, a sci-fi preview to read! This is why I signed up for advance review titles. This novel was very interesting, as it’s a fairly new author who is much-lauded by the sci-fi community, a female (not many female sci-fi authors, let’s be real for second) and it was originally published in India, where the teribble caste system is still in use. And this novel deals with an ‘advanced’ society that uses a caste system, how about that…

Overall I was very much drawn into this story, as it deals with many issues/tropes common in many sci-fi settings, but seeing how a new ‘fresh voice’ author deals with various plotlines and bits of story was very interesting. Highly recommend this one for any sci-fi fans out there.

This review has been posted to Amazon.co.uk, Netgalley.co.uk and Goodreads, as well as my own site Frankthewriter.wordpress.com

This was great - it opens with a theft of a tree from the ten percent, and follows the system and eventual collapse of Apex City. The story is told from multiple points of view, all linked, and the different characters are sometimes in the background of other stories. It's a clever look at how technology and elitism could shape society, where the idea of doing anything physically or analog is shocking, but where there is also no room for failure. One character's productivity drops after her mother dies, and she's downgraded because there's no space for depression, she must perform to retain her place in society and the amenities she's used to. Another strives for perfection in music, but is perceived as being held back by not having access to the full range of technology to support her - and eventually discovers that the AI distracts her instead.

It's a really clever concept, but it does lack a thread holding it all together as it doesn't tell one single story and there's no main character. I'd have liked to know more of the ten percent thief herself, or some of the other people who are featured, and thought that might have pulled it together a bit more tightly. But I did enjoy it, and it's definitely got a lot to think about.

A look into our possible future where the world is divided into virtual and analog societies. A place where social media rules, perception means more than reality and decisions are made for you. Independent thought is for the outcast analog society. However, they have not been the lazy layabouts portrayed, waiting for harvesting. They have been watching and waiting and planning how to even everything up. Many parallels to our present values, makes you think

I loved the idea behind this book. A near future dystopia based in what's today Bangalore but has become 'Apex City' - a city run/owned/whatever by Bell Corporation. The premise is that your place in society depends on where you fit on the Bell Curve - with the top 20% having a life of luxury, the next 70% striving to move up and fighting against demotion, and the bottom 10% consigned to a technology-starved role as so-called 'analogs'.

The idea, as I said is great. At times, the pace and delivery are great. The problem is that a big bunch of great ideas are thrown together without a linking thread running through them. It's just a heck of a mess.

I was about halfway through before it hit me that I didn't actually have too much of a clue what was going on. I would meet a new character, get the impression they were important, and then a few pages later, they were gone, never to return.

Some of the characters are great. Some I forgot almost instantly.

10% didn't make sense. It's counter-intuitive for a Bell Curve to only pull out such a small proportion. There's also a mass of other communities that are touched upon but never developed

I'd have loved this if there were fewer characters and they linked together in some stronger way. It's a mass of loose ends and unfinished stories.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers. I'd love to read this author again but I'd like a much more integrated story next time.

With thanks to

This may evoke a number of emotions for some readers. I don't it will resonate with many readers, but for those that like it, they will probably like it quite a bit.

Thanks very much for the free ARC for review!!

10/10: ‘The greatest gift of art lies not in its beauty or its horror, but in the manner of its creation. It has the power to bring people together. It urges us to recognise in each the other. It makes us more than Analogues. It makes us human,’

I absolutely loved this story. In a world that’s becoming more and more about tracking what you do, how active you are and so much of our data, in many ways this dystopian future isn’t completely unreasonable.

The story follows multiple viewpoints as the bottom part of society rises up and destroys much of the tech that was used to separate the Virtuals from the Analogues. These viewpoints also include people who are in a precarious position where they were removed from the analogue society but watched to make sure they don’t have any sympathy towards the society they were born into.

In some ways, I always find I benefit from not reviewing books as soon as I've finished them, as even whether I can actually remember much about them a week or two later can tell me a lot about how much the book in question affected me. In the case of <I>The Ten Percent Thief</I>, time has not necessarily been kind to it - I finished it a couple of weeks ago and life got in the way of me writing a more timely review, only to find I can't recall a lot of detail of it or its characters.

The book itself is set in a future version of Bangalore, one strictly divided between the haves and the have nots, in this case where people are graded on a very strict bell curve. If you're in the top 20%, life is extremely luxurious but you're permanently worried about slipping down, while the middle class of this society fear not just the loss of luxury but being cast out of the virtual world completely. Outside the city, the people are cut off from many of the necessities of daily life, with some even being literally recycled. It's a fairly heavy-handed metaphor and tends to overpower the characters a little at times.

As for the characters, I discovered after downloading it that this is a mosaic novel, so it follows the experiences of a number of different individuals, some of whose paths cross along the way. The downside of this is that it's not always massively easy to care that much about those individuals as you don't see a great degree of character development happening (or if it does, it's off page). Chalk this book down to another one where I'm happy to have read it, I didn't throw it aside partway through (which happens more often than you'd think) but I was left somewhat feeling 'is that it?'.

<I>I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. This is my honest review of the book in question.</i>

We are the future of the human race.

Welcome to Apex City, formerly Bangalore. Here, technology is the key to survival, productivity is power, and even the self must be engineered, for the only noble goal in life: success.

Everything is decided by the mathematically perfect Bell Curve. With the right image, values and opinions, you can ascend to the glittering heights of the Ten Percent – the Virtual elite – and have the world at your feet. The less-fortunate struggle among the workaday Seventy Percent, or fall to the precarious Twenty Percent; and below that lies deportation to the ranks of the Analogs, with no access to electricity, running water or even humanity.

The system has no flaws, and cannot be questioned. Until a single daring theft sets events in motion that will change the city forever...

This was an interesting read, a series of interconnected short stories, each from the perspective of a different person. I liked that I got the different perspectives, but it lacked a central character and therefore didn't have anyone the reader could connect with emotionally. It was a disjointed read and a lot of the stories did not have an adequate ending, they ended abruptly or without any closure. Others seemed rather pretentious.

Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this book in return for my honest review.

The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan is a mosaic dystopian sci-fi story.
In this book are multiple points of view, countless characters, and places where we can observe this new and fascinating technological world. The Ten Percent Thief is a unique book, complicated, funny, and horrible at the same moment. Lavanya Lakshminarayan is a genius author.
Thank you NetGalley and Rebellion, Solaris for an eARC!

I absolutely loved this book.
Imagine a future world, when following an ecological disaster Bangalore (and other major cities), is divided into two “tribes”.
The Virtuals, who have all the technology at their fingertips, and live in a great city, and the Analogues, who are outsiders, living alongside the city in poverty.
The Virtuals all aspire to reach the top twenty percent who have the most privileges and are constantly monitored to ensure that they are performing to their full potential.
The Analogues are viewed as the rejects from Virtual society, every year the bottom ten percent of Virtuals are sent out of the city.
It might seem that the Virtuals have the better life, while the Analogues are constantly suffering, but through the medium of interconnected short stories, one soon realises that they all have their own pressures and insecurities.
The narrative arc connects all the stories together, and brings a compelling climax.

Thanks to Netgalley and Rebellion Publishing for the opportunity to read this book.

The Ten Percent Thief takes the tired trope of a future dystopia and the society split in two, the have and have nots. In this book, it’s a future blighted by climate change, and Apex City society is divided into the Virtuals, a merit based population constantly striving to be in the top percentile, or face exile to the half of the city where the Analogs reside in misery.

The book is structured as a series of short stories that tell the reader how the Virtuals live, and how a revolt is being planned by the Analogs. The satirical tone of some of the Virtuals stories was annoying to me, and the rebellion by the Analogs just superficial and, to me, poorly written in some parts. For me, the book just didn’t hang together as a whole.

My thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for providing me an ARC of the book.

The book is structured as a collection of short stories describing a future Banglalore, renamed Apex City, where the city is split into two parts, one for the ultra-wealthy who embrace technology, and one for everyone else. Overall, this is a difficult read in part due to the structure, and in many ways the world building felt unoriginal and in many ways predictable and dull.

The writing also had issues, and it made it difficult to engage with the characters, the world, or the text at all. Overall, an interesting concept, albeit not new, that is poorly executed.

I was disappointed with this book. I found it difficult to engage with until about page 50. Up to then it was confusing without a thread. The story picked up after that but the ending also got confusing. I tired of the constant references to the media outlets, Socs, etc.

Not for me I'm afraid.

Thanks to NetGalley, I got to read an advanced copy of The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminrayan. It was bloody marvellous! A tapestry of short story-style chapters focusing on different characters, all set in a dystopian future where people live in a meritocratic society, split into undesirable “analogs” and privileged “virtuals”. I’d love to see a TV adaptation of it! Definitely recommend this one when it comes out in March ❤️

The end game of forced distribution ‘performance management’ systems

+++ Thanks to NetGalley and Solaris / Rebellion Publishing for ARC review copy +++

In The Ten Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan conjures up dystopian future with a societal structure born of corporate HR and unfettered Artificial Intelligence.

The future version of Bangalore is split into Virtuals (tech connected, fully fledged citizens) and Analogs (tech deprived outcasts living outside the comfort of protected bio-domes.)

The Virtuals constantly strive to demonstrate ‘productivity’ which determines their place on the BellCorp ‘curve.’ High performers are rewarded with greater status and privileges, whilst the bottom 10% may be cast out into the Analog world.

The book explores the perspective of a variety of loosely connected characters as they struggle to exploit, survive, or destroy this toxic meritocracy.

There is much to ponder and enjoy in this book: the limitations of forced distribution performance measurement systems; over-reliance on technology and spoon-feeding of information; the chilling ubiquity of AI in future societies. However the storylines I enjoyed the most were the human tales of loss, ambition and love.

I recognised the chilling BellCorp HR messages wrapping brutal and uncaring messages in faux concern. The ‘curve’ was also analogous to the quantification of class, with (top) 20%ers living in luxury but ever wary of sliding down the social pecking order.

At times I felt there was too much clumsy explanatory dialogue, and many of the story threads did not resolve themselves or reinforce other threads in a satisfying way. The story captured my attention with its clever (and topical) concepts, but would have benefited from a stronger central thread driving the story.

Overall an interesting thought experiment, but shy of a few characters for readers to really care about.

Apex City was formerly Bangalore, and after some unspecified disasters, has become a futuristic city where every decision is made based on mathematics, image, values and opinions. Technology is integrated into your very person, scanners, comms devices, augmented holidays and more. If you are at the high end of the Bell curve, have worked hard, proven your productivity, cultivated the right image, you can make it to the ranks of the Twenty Percent. You have all that you could desire, and more. Fail to make it, and you drop to the ranks of the Ten Percent, and risk deportation to the rank of Analog, outside of Apex City, with no electricity,running water, humanity and worse still, no technology.

The system is perfect. Until a revolution begins in the Analog world, that threatens to bring Apex city crashing to the ground.

This book is set in a future dystopian world, where image and people's perception of you is literally everything. You have to look perfect, act perfect, be perfect in order to come out on top. It features an extremely divided society, those who have everything, and those who really have nothing. Those who have it all purposely keep those without down, rather than uplifting them.

It had the potential to be a really great read, with the world created being very unique and complex. However the approach was somewhat disjointed and left you struggling to engage. The method used, a series of characters, each telling their own story to build up the world could have worked, but it fragmented things a bit too much, and instead left us with no key character to resonate with. Some of the stories and snippets of the world we see are really engaging and you want more, and then suddenly it cuts off to the next. Other stories leave you confused, as you don’t know who the protagonist is, what they are up to, and why we should care.
Overall it is an interesting read which had potential, and I am glad to have read it, but not one which had me on the edge of my seat.

*I received this copy from NetGalley for review but all opinions are my own.

A scathing look at the near future that is at once both bitingly funny and heartbreakingly sad. I loved it, especially the anthology-like approach that really gave a thorough view of Apex City and it’s inhabitants, with different stories bringing out different aspects of Bell and Analog society that may have been lost in a more traditional telling. Highly recommended.