Hilarious, chilling and ... prescient? Welcome to QualityLand: the greatest and most advanced country in the world.
Everything in QualityLand is geared towards optimizing your life. QualityPartner identifies your ideal mate, earworm personal assistants get you where you need to go and android drones know you need a six pack of beer at the end of a long day even before you crave one. Humans, robots and algorithms co-exist, everything is seamlessly corporatised, stratified and monetized. Your very name reveals much of what we need to know about you and your profile discloses the rest.
Peter Jobless is a down and out metal press operator, dumped by his long term girlfriend when she is alerted to a better option on her QualityPad. But Peter has another problem - he seems to be the only one noticing that his fellow Qualityland robot citizens are experiencing an existential crisis. There is a drone who's afraid to fly. A sex droid with erectile dysfunction. A combat robot with PTSD. Instructed to destroy these malfunctioning A.I., Peter starts to suspect the technology that rules us all has a flaw, perhaps a fatal one. Not only that, these robots might be his only friends...
About the Author
Marc-Uwe Kling is a German author, songwriter, and stand-up comedian. Qualityland spent months on the German bestseller lists, has sold more than half a million copies to date internationally, and is currently in production as an HBO series. Kling lives in Berlin.
Industry Reviews
"Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Vonnegutian slapstick in a free-wheeling satire spliced with black humour and some gloriously wicked social commentary."
Guardian
"This brave new world is revealed in a series of pin-sharp, unsettling and scathing vignettes... Brilliant satire and a great read that is currently in production as an HBO TV series."
Daily Mail
"As the carrier for a slew of satirical ideas about the state of our internet-enabled society, Marc-Uwe Kling's international bestseller is full of zing from first page to last... a dystopian comic yarn comparable to Black Mirror, Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K Dick"
The Times
