Amazon in China: The Warehouse

The sci-fi techno thriller The Warehouse promised deep dark corporate secrets in a futuristic capitalist setting. What I got is what it might look like if Amazon were a Chinese-based company in the here and now. There wasn't anything here that was thrilling, as a majority of the book takes pains to demonstrate how grindingly monotonous life in the Cloud is. It wasn't new- I saw shades of 1984, Soylent Green and, let's face it - Disney Magic Bands. Something that unlocks your door, holds your place in line, accesses your dining credits, and hooks up to all pertinent financial information? It's a Magic Band. Nothing about that screams futuristic or exciting. People living in a complex owned by their employers, and therefore at their mercy? Nothing new about that either. Perhaps if the author had taken his head out of the sand and looked both at the whole world and backward in time (like to the Lowell Mills of Massachusetts), he would have realized this major flaw in "building" a futuristic world and come up with something more imaginative. Instead, this is just now-adjacent, with characters and a plot that go nowhere except places where you'd easily expect but don't make much sense in the narrative nevertheless. The question of energy input/output isn't satisfactorily answered either, and the relationship between energy and food, which is important in real life, is tenuous at best here.

So, no. This was not an enjoyable read.

K. Rating: 1/5