QualityLand

Kling, Marc-Uwe. QualityLand (also Qualityland). 2017. Jamie Searle Romanelli, translator (from the German). Grand Central Publishing (formerly Warner Books), 2020. As part of Hachette Book Group,[1] the physical location of GCP would be New York City.[2][3] In UK, Orion, available through The Guardian, as of May 2023, here.[4]

Mentioned by Rachel Cordasco in "The SF in Translation Universe #7" entry, SFRA Review 50.1 (Winter 2020): pdf at link.[5] Described as a "German dystopian satire" sending up "21st-century consumer-driven technology-obsessed capitalism by taking such innovations as driverless cars, wireless-adapted glasses, and a gargantuan online store (TheShop) to their extremes," in, we will somewhat pedantically add, the standard satiric move that Y. Zamyatin called "reductio ad finem": extrapolating to the limit, and often the grotesque.

Reviewed briefly by Kirkus[6] and The Guardian, with The Guardian review noting that this satire — not exactly a novel — is "Set against the backdrop of an election run-off between a far-right demagogue and a low-polling android [sic] advocating universal basic income," and notes that "the plot turns on the Kafkaesque travails of a scrap-metal merchant, Peter Jobless, who struggles to persuade TheShop, 'the world’s most popular online retailer', to take back a pink dolphin-shaped vibrator delivered in error."[7]

H.C. Newton on a 9 January 2021 blog post on "The Irresponsible Reader" site gives as a second paragraph of "Book Blurb," apparently Newton's

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…[8]

The publisher's extended blurb has as a paragraph important for the interests of this wiki:

In QualityCity, Peter Jobless is a machine scrapper who can’t quite bring himself to destroy the imperfect machines sent his way, and has become the unwitting leader of a band of robotic misfits hidden in his home and workplace. One day, Peter receives a product from TheShop that he absolutely, positively knows he does not want, and which he decides, at great personal cost, to return. The only problem: doing so means proving the perfect algorithm of TheShop wrong, calling into question the very foundations of QualityLand itself.[9]

Since the annotation is already running long, the Initial Compiler will make it longer with noting his and his bank's thrice-repeated attempts one time in the last third of the 20th century to give to a large oil company the US$50 he owed them when their system misread his check for $70 as one for $20. The banker he worked with finally told him to keep the $50 since the corporation in question was adamant in its/their insistence that neither they nor their System were subject to such error, or perhaps error generally.

Apparently updated review in The Guardian on-line, as of May 2023, here.[10] notes development by Mike Judge; the Internet Movie DataBase refers one to IMDb-Pro (which requires a subscription), which indicates "development" as far as optioned for a TV series, with writers listed as "Mike Judge | Marc-Uwe-King (novel)," with the log-line, "It's the story of humanity's struggle against the tyranny of convenience."[11]

RDE, finishing, 21Oct21; 8May23