An Emergency Brake is Becoming the Only Option

Chen Qiufan, trans. Ken Liu, The Waste Tide

Head of Zeus, 480pp, £6.99, ISBN 9781784977924

reviewed by Calum Barnes

‘What we excrete comes back to consume us,’ Nick Shay remarks pithily in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, one of the pre-eminent texts of waste literature. Nuclear waste is the ‘underhistory’ of the American 20th century. Waste Tide, the recently translated first novel of Chen Qiufan, is the underhistory of ‘The Chinese Century’ and 21st-century capital: the disposal of electronic waste and consumer technologies.

Chen Qiufan belongs to a new generation of Chinese science fiction writers that has only recently gone mainstream in both China and across the world in translation, many of them brought to us by the indefatigable author translator, Ken Liu (whom we have to thank for Waste Tide). The most prominent of these voices is Cixin Liu, the author of The Three Body Problem series, a majestic, best-selling, century-spanning cosmic saga about earth being invaded by an extra-terrestrial race, lauded by both Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. As wet dreams of utopian technocracy, imagining how intergovernmental institutions would manage a planetary crisis, this is hardly surprising. In interviews, Liu has always been reticent to dwell on his novels’ relations to contemporary politics, let alone make any criticism of Chinese state policy. This is symptomatic of an uneasy relationship between the state and the arts and, in particular, science fiction (originally Cixin Liu’s stories had an educational function, to promote the wonder of science).

Chen’s Waste Tide is a crosscurrent to this state-mandated cultural optimism, a story of the underpinnings of China’s modernity. Whilst Liu follow the travails of scientific and political apparatchiks anguishing over strategies to save humanity, Chen aligns with a humanity composed of pliable, docile masses, asking how they can resist and shape history and transcend their status as pawns of privileged political actors.

Opening with an act of eco-terrorism, it diverges from Liu’s technocratic proclivities by highlighting grassroots activism as a primary vector of social change. On Silicon Isle, a vast e-waste recycling site based on Chen’s native Giuyu in the Guangdog Province, Scott Brandle,a representative of TerraGreen Corporation and ‘economic hitman’, a globetrotting negotiator for the free flow of capital, has arrived, hoping to get a cut of its profits for his multinational paymasters.

The plot sets up a conflict between the so-called waste people — the inhabitants condemned to the drudgery of dismantling the electronic waste into recyclable components by hand — and the transnational capitalist class. In revealing moments, Chen delineates the political economy that governs his fictional universe, the complexities of corporate shell companies, and a cleverly imagined dissolution of the European Union, but all this is narrated through rudimentary genre tropes: a future as a degraded version of the present in which a few ordinary people confront the immense, impersonal forces of corporations represented as Scott Brandle and the Chinese bosses, which escalates into a final confrontation. The leitmotifs of our coming century are all here: the rearranging geopolitical order, the growing catastrophe of climate breakdown, and drastic and growing inequality.

The book’s aesthetics owe a debt to the cyberpunk of William Gibson, with piteous waste people scavenging in the putrid detritus of capitalist excess, getting high on digital narcotics, and modifying their bodies with hand-me-down tech––excess masses wallowing in excess material. Like the waste people recycling discarded electronics for their own entertainment, Chen recycles well-established tropes of Western science fiction, peppering with Western cultural references. Just as the West outsources its waste, so Chen recycles its cultural models to narrate his story of neo-colonialism.

In The Waste Land, surely the ur-text of waste literature, TS Eliot locates the possibility of cultural regeneration in the mythic ordering of the detritus of modernity: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Chen gives this a cyberpunk twist, with technological fragments shored against the ruins of consumer capitalism. Mimi, the wastegirl, embodies this notion by accreting e-waste to make of herself a transhumanist assemblage that fights on behalf of the waste people.

A recurring tension throughout is how to reconcile cyclical indigenous philosophies with the progressivist narratives of capitalist history. Science fiction has long been a privileged site for such antinomies, for the clash of the spiritual and the material. One need only recall the centrality of the I Ching to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, his imaginative rendering of an America after a Nazi victory in World War II. In Waste Tide, the mystical element is represented palliromancy, an ancient divination technique used by centuries of Silicon Isle fishermen that allows them to foretell the future by reading the tides, stirred by the souls of those who have drowned in their waters. These beliefs are seen as no less rational than those governing notions of capitalist progress. Kaizong, Brandle’s interpreter, born in China but raised in America, muses with a sense of estrangement on how ‘everything he had once believed in––science, logic, philosophical materialism––had crumbled in this farce.’ And yet, in the end, catastrophe wings out: the Gotterdämmerung, a final confrontation during an apocalyptic typhoon, brings no justice for the waste people.

Dystopian narratives rest on linear temporality; they posit the future as the inevitable terminus of our present, the final stop on a train line. The best the novelist can offer are levers to pull when the railroad switches appear. There is a tension between Marx’s view of revolutions as ‘the locomotives of history,’ with its implication of inexorable linearity, and Walter Benjamin’s musing that ‘perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.’ Such speculations inhabit Waste Tide, which might at first appear a work of realism, with its crisp evocations of grime little different from the present, and little apart from VR sets to suggest it is the interim future in the antechamber of the collapse of late capitalism. But the looming spectre of climate catastrophe overlies the whole thing, and suggests an emergency brake is fast becoming the only option.

Waste Tide is a luxuriantly realised, immensely satisfying genre novel which, unlike the work of Cixin Liu, adds a vital social conscience absent from the Chinese science fiction translated into English thus far, chronicling gross inequality and environmental degradation wrought by a global capitalism that sacrifices swathes of humanity and natural resources for profit. ‘That’s the price that must be paid for economic development, everyone said. It was a cliché they had learned from TV,’ Brandle observes early on. At the same time, the solace of the familiar form feels a little cheap when contrasted with the gravity of the issues under consideration. Much like China’s recent transition to capitalism, this dystopian fiction has the air of exhaustion of an imported form ready to be consigned to history, the excretions of a culture soon to consume us. Novelists can no longer simply imagine the logical endpoint of our economic status quo; they need to grab the emergency brake.


Calum Barnes is a writer and bookseller based in Edinburgh.