Apex City is a meritocracy where your performance ratings can propel you into the luxury of the top 20% or alternatively, if you fall into the bottom 10% you will be banished outside the city walls to life with the "analogs", who have little food, no electricity and only the most basic existence.. A tourist railway runs through the analog city so that children can be shown how squalid their lives will become if they don't optimise their performance. How can the analogs rebel, with no access to power, weapons or the internet? A decorative tree appears near the railway - what's it for? Terrific struggle - can good overcome evil? A good read

About 50% of the way into The Ten Percent Thief, I had to go and check on Goodreads as to whether this book actually had a plot or if it was just supposed to be a collection of short stories.

The premise of the book is really great - a society of Virtuals who are heavily reliant on technology and use metrics to weed out the lowest 10% and banish them to an Analogue existence outside the city walls. There is a bit of an over-load of new phrases, companies and technologies which, to be honest feels a little cringey at times. These don’t seem to be subtly added woven into the world building, but instead feel like an onslaught at the beginning and this doesn’t really let up as we get further into the story.

Each chapter is a different perspective and reveals the darker side of the Virtuals’ lives and the Bell Curve which governs them. Some of the stories I was really hooked on, some didn’t seem necessary. My main issue was that even though some of them were great, once that chapter was done we didn’t really see that character again, although a few of them have token cameos in other chapters. Due to this technique, there were a lot of characters introduced and I didn’t feel that I really got to know any of them properly. Then if they were referenced later on, it lost a lot of its impact as I struggled to remember who they were and which story they belonged to. The exception to this rule was Nina, but that was only because they kept describing her as ‘the girl that played the piano’ in other chapters!

The book does have a slow burning plot about the revolution, however although we are fully invested in the fact that the Virtual world deserves to crash and burn, the characters of the resistance, even the ‘The Ten Percent Thief’ are very under-developed. I think if the book just focused on a limited amount of perspectives, it could have really developed those characters more and inter-woven the stories so that we felt the narrative thread all of the way through the story.

Overall, The Ten Percent Thief is a great premise but it’s a narrative mess with too many characters and a lack of strong plot to guide it. Thank you to NetGalley & Rebellion – Solaris for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Rebellion Publishing for an advanced copy of speculative fiction telling of a future with haves, have-nots, and a society that is rotting from within.

Science fiction as a genre always seems so hopeful about the future. Humans seem to edge right to the point of extinction, suddenly join together and a beautiful future is made on Earth or more likely in the stars, a grand federation of planets. What is good for one is good for all. As I get older I look at this kind of science fiction with a much more cynical eye. Class war is already affecting every person on Earth. I can't even get my neighbor to stop watering his lawn during a drought. Grass being green was more important to him and his social status than water for drinking. The attitude of I have mine, it might not be much, but it is more than what you got, so I'm the better for it. If I can get yours, I will have even more, and I will be the better for it. This is why books like The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan speak to me, and seem not just science fiction but a nonfiction look at things to come. A future where people still argue about their place in society, their toys or lack of and the resources that are becoming scarcer and scarcer as the Earth around them dies.

The time is the future, and not that far from now. The city of Bangalore has collapsed, and been reborn as Apex City, a vast mega-city for the haves, the wants, and those denied. Apex City is based on a caste system the Bell Curve, with the top percenters, the upper class and the lower being judged in social media and, conformity, and other ways for their positions in society. They are known as the Virtuals, as they have all the benefits of technology, with the top enjoying real plants, air and more. At the very bottom are Analogs, those cast out of Apex City into a world without resources, power, water, even food. The Virtuals always weed out the bottom of their society regularly keeping things on an even keel. However rebellion is slowly building and a spark has been lit, a tree seed has left the confines of Apex City, and planted in the Analog world, a tree that will grow into a revolution.

A really good book that is told quite uniquely, which helps in building the world in which the novel takes place. The book is told in about twenty or so short stories and vignettes, featuring both Virtual and Analog characters. This allows for a more encompassing view of this future, and looked at from all sides. Lakshminarayan is able to capture the different points of view of a lot of characters, making them all read differently, and using them to tell a grand big story. The different views might be a tad confusing, but once the third story is reached readers should be locked into the idea and want to know more. Lakshminarayan has some great ideas, and a lot of skill on portraying what she sees is the future. In many places this reads more like contemporary news articles or profiles, rather than fiction. A dark future, but maybe even a little hopeful. I almost hate typing that, but it is true.

Recommended for readers of books on possible futures that don't involve fleeing into space, such as authors like Kim Stanley Robinson. I look forward to more books by Lavanya Lakshminarayan as this is a very well written look at the future, that is looking not as bright as many writers once thought it would be.

A great book, I loved the concept and the execution really fit with the whole futuristic and dystopian vibe. I didn’t connect to any characters but this isn’t a character driven book. It’s about ideas and themes rather than the people. The story does connect together but I found it disjointed overall. It reminded me of Black Mirror/Love&Robots from Netflix.
Thank you for this ARC from NetGallery.

I am not a fan of science fiction but always like to read it from time to time to challenge my comfort zone. This book reminded me why I’m not a fan, but I will give a fair and honest review.

For those readers who love imaginary dystopian urban landscapes and social structures, this is an incredibly well-imagined and highly detailed world, right down to the names and descriptions of futuristic technologies and the language people use. That said, I wonder whether the liberal use of the hashtag and @sign for this future world’s social media will date it to the 2020s for future readers.

Plot and characters - this is where I struggled the most. Describing a divided society of the 90 percent with access to the best technologies and the ten percent “have-nots” forced to salvage from the detritus of old technologies such as cassettes and Walkmans in a series of vignettes, there is no plot as such, only descriptions of tensions and the threat of rebellion in what threatens to be an unfair war. Characters are defined by their position in the bell curve - ten percenters, seventy percenters and the top twenty percent, with the latter two groups being controlled, monitored and motivated by their access to the very best immersive technologies. This, unfortunately does not lead to interesting, engaging or memorable characters. The ten percenters come across as more interesting, authentic and creative, but we’re they engaging enough to sustain my interest throughout the story? Sadly not.

Whilst I appreciated the detail of thought and imagination that has gone into the creation of this dystopian story, it didn’t work for me. But then again neither did Lord of the Rings, so this might just be a case of the wrong book for the wrong reader. With thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy.

So much imagination and thought went into this book to make it sound plausible and frightening. Unfortunately, the story jumped around so much between character and drowned in tech that the impact of the story was lost. As the story is based in the future, none of the tech names were familiar so it was very much like reading a long list of initials. A brilliant plot idea but, for me, failed in execution. This will, however, appeal to those readers who enjoy high tech sci-fi.

I’ve had Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual on my TBR for a couple years, after seeing it recommended on a list of underrated speculative fiction from outside the US, UK, and Canada. But between prices being higher than domestic work and the lack of social media chatter, I never quite managed to move it to the top. So when I saw it was being released in the US under a new title, I knew I had the perfect chance to check out The Ten Percent Thief.

The Ten Percent Thief is a mosaic novel taking place in the dystopian successor of Bangalore, following its purchase by a meritocratic tech company and rebranding as Apex City. The twenty different chapters feature about that many perspective characters, although central figures from one chapter regularly make cameos in subsequent ones. There is a sense of progression from start-to-finish—primarily in the development of revolutionary activity among the “Analogs” at the bottom ten-percent of society who have been banned from making use of Apex City’s technology—but the novel is as much dystopian slice-of-life as it is anything else.

While The Ten Percent Thief may not have a driving plot or a small cast to focus the story, it offers plenty for fans of stories driven by theme or world. It’s no hard sci-fi dystopia—the tech is so advanced it may as well be magic, and little time is spent exploring its limitations—but it’s dedicated to showing every corner of Apex City and how the techno-meritocracy affects the lives of people from every social class. Perhaps it’s an exaggerated picture, but it’s not too many steps past plausible, with sharp satire of the horrifyingly calcified inequality forming in direct consequence to surface-level meritocratic societal organization.

The social prejudice and legal obstacles barring Analog advancement are perhaps the longest-running theme, but the course of the story sees it touch on censorship, groupthink, pregnancy discrimination, environmental myopia, social anxiety, and more. There’s a lot here, and none of it feels forced—every bit follows neatly from the organizing principles of society.

Different parts of the novel approach the themes in different ways, and I would group them into three general categories: Analog stories, character-focused Virtual slice-of-life, and zoomed-out Virtual society pieces. Personally, I found the Virtual slice-of-life chapters to be far-and-away the most effective. Lakshminarayan delivers heart-wrenchingly intimate portraits of Virtuals terrified of losing their place in society—or of trying to climb to the next rung on the societal ladder—that lay bare the world’s horrors while simultaneously generating a remarkable emotional attachment to relatively privileged figures only glimpsed for the space of a chapter. A novella with just these chapters, even without the connective tissue from the rest of the book, would be a must-read.

The connective tissue, on the other hand, is merely adequate. The Analogs are planning Revolution, and we see plenty of steps along the way, not shying back from even the most callous and cynical moments. It’s a fine story, but not particularly remarkable--I'm not at all convinced that the Virtual chapters don’t do a better job explaining the Analog world than the Analog chapters do.

Finally, there are the wide-lens Virtual society chapters, which get more frequent in the second half of the novel. These hit their themes hard, with more than a few moments of morbid hilarity. But they lack the pathos of the slice-of-life chapters, which can make it difficult to cut through the dizzying jargon to focus on the story itself. And because they don’t limit themselves to one perspective, the actions can sometimes feel disconnected, with the inner monologue cut away and the key developments viewed only from the perspectives of side characters. Furthermore, the zoomed-out view of society leads to more emphasis on the technology than on more personal interactions, prompting questions about Apex City’s technical limitations that the novel doesn’t seem especially interested in answering. Don’t get me wrong—these sections are plenty readable and certainly have their own virtues, they’re simply more uneven and not quite as powerful as the slice-of-life chapters.

All told, it's a novel that's absolutely worth your while, even if it has its ups and downs. The worldbuilding is more interested in the personal fallout than the tech details, but it delivers a chilling and often all-too-plausible portrait of a city that values production to such an extent that it organizes its whole society around staying out of the bottom 10%. There's enough overarching plot for readers who want to feel something has changed over the course of the book, but this is not a plotty book. It's the intimate, slice-of-life sections that really shine and are worth the price of admission all on their own. Not every chapter is a wild success, but there's more good than mediocre and very little bad.

Recommended if you like: theme-heavy books, dystopias, slice-of-life.

Overall rating: 16 of Tar Vol's 20. Four stars on Goodreads.

I ate this book up today. Started it a little before noon and finished it a little after 9. I spent this day wandering through the world of Apex City- formerly Bangalore- and experiencing the ins and outs of its dystopian future.

The Ten Percent Thief is described as a "mosaic" novel. Each chapter is a story that digs a little deeper into the world of Apex City and its two populations- the wealthy and powerful Virtuals and the poor and oppressed Analogs. Many of the stories that unfold are complex and nuanced. The world-building is interesting and the flow of the book tells a story without a ton of narrative.

The end of the book isn't as strong as the beginning, but on the whole the book is really good.

The only story I really didn't like was the one about the woman who has uploads a program into her brain that tries to break her and her boyfriend up, otherwise the stories are by turns interesting, amusing, and horrifying.

I really, really enjoyed this book.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book as the topic isn't really the kind of thing I would normally read. My usual go-to I s some kind of thriller mystery, with a variation on the usual theme of missing person/murder and who did what.

Its actually a collection of sort of connected short stories, all involving residents in the same time and place, where now the city is divided into two halves based on their productivity and merit to society. The Digitials have access to technology and water and are striving to make the elite 20% with access to the best opportunities, travel and property ownership. Meanwhile the unproductive are demoted rot analog, a poor side of town where they don't have access to basic amenities and can only enter the salubrious digital side to work. If you fail there, there is the dreaded "Vegetable Farm"

I was hooked from the first story, both for the way the stories draw you in, wanting to know more about the good and the bad. And for the fact that when you look a little more its not a million miles away from our current society with the well off wanting to travel more and own better property and tech, and the less well off just wanting enough to live a good life and have things a bit better than they have through no fault of their own.

I'd recommend this book to anyone. The fact its short stories made it an ideal read for the train each morning and I was always hoping I could squeeze one more in before my stop.
5 stars!

I could not relate to this book at all. The concept of a society being decided on meritocracy sounded a good topic, however I could not come to grips with it . The story has been well written but there is follow upon characters as they are really disjointed short stories and I prefer to get to grips with characters., this may suit a person who follows social media where short sharp relationships form the basis. .The write up of those that have and those that have not in aspect of technology really appealed to me and although there was sound ideas of what the two societies were like and how the people improved I did not get a strong feeling of even a possible reality which is what I like in this genre.
I am sorry to say that this was not a book for me but I feel that it is a book that like Marmite you obviously like or dislike with no real in between.

Enjoyable science fiction dystopia, told through interlinked short stories- some barely a few pages, others longer and able to build more character whilst threading the long term plot throughout.

The end is perhaps a little obvious from the off, but that didn’t matter to me - it’s the journey that I enjoyed. Great world building, complex concepts introduced and allowed to build, and a satisfying resolution.

Glad this has been translated and brought to wider attention.

Wow this book really gets you thinking. It’s set in the not too distant future where the haves (the Virtuals) live within a protected bubble - literally - where their whole existence is about maximising their time, health, talents for the better good of the corporation who own the city. The Analogues live outside the bubble and don’t have access to the ‘perfect’ world on their doorstep. However the reader’s sympathies are quite quickly drawn to the Analogues and their fight to live despite the difficulties of extreme weather, no digital help, no access to healthy food and no healthcare. This book is a wake up call to us now. I liked the use of different chapters to highlight the various characters’ lives which all coalesced as the book reached its dramatic climax. I understand this book was first published in India but it has a freshness which felt as if it had only just launched to the market. A great imagination combined with good writing - thank you Lavanya Lakshminarayan.

Set in what was Bangalore, now known as Apex city, in the not-too-distant future. Society is divided into separate classes with the people at the top having access to the most advance VR technology, and those at the bottom having barley any electricity. The citizens of Apex city are kept in line by a system of merit. Those with the highest productivity, talent and culture are promoted to the top. Those who are deemed less valuable are demoted and deported. A kind of modern take on the Orwellian thought police.
This book explores a lot of modern ideas. Like how technology keeps people in line and the threat of losing it can be a form of control. How society values some forms of merit over others. Or how always striving for productivity has a dehumanising effect.
It's written as a series of loosely connected short stories with each chapter following a different character. The characters are very varied in terms of age, occupation and social status. This paints a clear picture of all the aspects of Apex city from a diverse set of perspectives. The only downside to this style of narrative is there is no single protagonist that you follow all the way throughout the book.

So, interesting ideas if you come at it from a philosophical perspective.

"The Ten Percent Thief" by Lavanya Lakshminarayan is a mosaic novel set in a dystopian future where cities are run by companies and is told as a series of loosely interconnected stories. We witness the state and eventual fall of Apex city, formerly Bangalore and a consumerist heaven/hell, depending on who you ask. There you can be either living as part of the system as a "Virtual" citizen or - if you fail or refuse to be part of the productivity machine - you live as an "Analog", in precarious existence without any of the conveniences and security of modern society (like running water, sufficient nutrition or a perspective for the future).

Using stories instead of one narrative is a bold and confident approach that really relies on inspired and strong writing, and wow, does Lavanya Lakshminarayan deliver! The way she wields words, phrases and ideas is a joy to behold and I just enjoyed the ride. Not only does she have a way with words, her observations reveal razor-sharp insight into the pitfalls of our current society. The way our consumerist society, aided by social media, not only shapes, but also creates a world with a constant need to for self-optimization in order to consume even more.

The stories are told from the perspectives of Analogs as well as Virtuals and paint a rich and detailed picture of a society that is so clearly destined to fail as it veers more and more away from what humans actually need to thrive and becomes a victim of its own hype. There is a dark and twisted humour ever present that does a great job of pointing the finger just where it hurts.

I also noticed that music in all its different forms is a recurrent theme that follows several of the narrative strings and I had a strong impression that the author has a close connection to music herself.

My favourite story must be Analog/Virtual with its hysterically funny depiction of a woman who has to do her own, actual grocery shopping - an activity mostly unheard of for Virtual citizens. Living through that experience with her is just a bit of incredible writing and I felt like I wanted to highlight every other sentence.

I am so very happy to have picked this up and will keep an eye out for whatever Lavanya Lakshminarayan puts out next. (Honestly, I find it hard to believe that this is a debut!)

I have received an advance review copy via NetGalley from the publisher and voluntarily provide my honest opinion. Thank you very much!

I'm probably not the target audience for this. I'm more interested in the literary end of sci-fi/dystopia. This book foregrounds world building and lengthy descriptions of tech rather than character and story so if that appeals it might be good for you.

For me it's a DNF - shame because I love the premise.

Apex city, a near future dystopia, where your position on the Bell curve determines your access to luxuries. If you are amongst the top 20% life is perfect, you have technology, electricity, running water, holidays. The bottom 10% live a hard, broken, and cruel existence. Something has to change, vive la Revolution!....I loved the concept, not so keen on the delivery. Maybe I wasn't the target audience.

This had such an interesting premise, but it had too much world specific jargon that was just a changed version of Instagram etc. that was jarring to read. I got half way through but there was no plot driver and an ever changing cast of characters with no central point of view. This just lost momentum and my interest. I am sorry. I wanted to love this but it just became self indulgent and aimless. It had interesting intentions but no emotional connection. If it had suck to a central character or been dual narrative it would have been great.

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to read it and sorry it didn't connect with me.

I really wanted to enjoy this book but I found it hard to get into. The changing perspectives were difficult to get used to. The central premise - corporations taking over entire cities and forcing capitalism on a population under the guise of a meritocracy was interesting. I may just not have been the right audience for the narrative. I may try and pick it up again in the future.

I usually prefer character-led novels, rather than being engaged by plot or world-building, so I wasn't sure how The Ten Percent Thief would work out for me. It's comprised of lots of separate stories, with different POVs (some first-person, some third-person), and whilst some names reappear as the narrative progresses, we don't revisit anyone's viewpoint. However, I found myself really engaged with the world presented. This book gets very dark in tone, and is made darker still as it seems so plausible. This plausibility made this a very interesting and quietly terrifying read. I'll definitely be thinking about certain aspects for a while to come.

This one sadly wasn’t for me…. I do love a dystopian novel but I just couldn’t gel with this one. Perhaps I will give it a go another time. A DNF at 8%. Don’t let that put you off though!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.