By Kate Fathers
Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s The Ten Percent Thief is an Orwellian story for the Facebook age.
Set in an undefined future where the Bell Corporation has reshaped Bangalore into the meritocratic Apex City, the story explores the lives of its divided citizenry. At the top are the Virtuals, who use technology to optimise their productivity in the hopes of becoming part of the elite ten percent. At the bottom are the Analogs, who are punished for their unproductivity with bad food, worse housing, and cassettes in place of cutting-edge tech. Investigating this class divide is the novel’s main focus, Lakshminarayan unveiling every glory and horror of a world that, in an age of AI artists and Smart refrigerators, feels frighteningly possible.
The Ten Percent Thief is an ambitious book, tackling big ideas and complex themes with surprising playfulness. It bounces between narrative styles, includes text messages and quotes from in-universe texts, and turns pop songs into proverbs. Its cast is large, ranging from influencers and orphans to rebels and AI, and while a Winston Smith would have made the story more intimate (and the climax more affecting), each brief character snapshot is vibrant and engaging.
But the real showstopper is the technology. Lakshminarayan builds on our current relationship with technology and social media, imagining a future of untold convenience and curation that is all in service of a corporation. Helpful AIs suggest ditching your algorithmically inferior boyfriend. The Bell Biochip tracks your eating habits “to ensure maximum productivity”. Lakshminarayan’s technology is ingenious and insidious, presenting a veneer of ease and progress that is really all in service of a corporation. And it’s harrowing to realise that she asks readers not how much autonomy they might be willing to give up for convenience, but how much more.
The Ten Percent Thief doesn’t only explore a possible future; woven into that exploration is the building Analog revolution. This could have been a simple, and even derivative, conflict, but Lakshminarayan beautifully infuses the powerful Analog narrative with moments of private Virtual rebellion. Every character is trapped in a complicated and unjust system, and peeling back the layers of that system is one of the joys of the novel.
The Ten Percent Thief is bold and creative, and Lakshminarayan expertly packages a warning that will only get more relevant with time. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, because remember, “Persona is Prime”.
THE TEN PERCENT THIEF by Lavanya Lakshminarayan is out on March 30th, 2023
