Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

The netizens are mostly urban youth, content to live in their wrists and get by in the gig economy. They’re not working-class, they’re the hollowed-out middle class. Often very nationalistic. They’ve taken the Party line, and they don’t see how much they have in common with the migrants. They’re the precariat, do you know that word? No? Everyone’s precarious now, you should know that word. You’re the precariat. For us here, it’s the withouts. The two withouts, the three withouts, there are all kinds of variations on the withouts, but the main without is a hukou registration where you actually work.

“Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club. I think you probably need boys and girls together at that age more than any other. Anyway I hated them.”

“Maybe feudalism never really went away. Maybe it just liquefied to money and bided its time.”