3 out of 5

The back cover copy: What if you woke up one morning and everyone in the world lost their hair?

The blurb after this goes into some things you might guess, and just asking myself this question, I can’t say I thought of anything too grabbing beyond those guesses. Someone else asked me what the book was about, and I explained that same setup: everyone goes bald. This small sample size provided a consensus take: okay, so what?

As a balding dude, I have a complex about my hair. It’s more important than I want it to be. And maybe that was a factor in buying this book – show me a bald utopia! – alongside reading some recommendations from trusted sources. But set that aside and go in cold, and I was definitely not very compelled by this premise. Furthermore, Bald New World’s future setting of media-soaked technology-guided cyberpunkness is pretty tired, and I could’ve done without the Brave New World title riff. Impressed yet?

Bear with me.

A story does and doesn’t emerge. Nick Guan is a filmmaker, partnering (and friends) with occasional filmmaker and fulltime wig manufacturing powerhouse Larry Chau. There are some wig-maker rivalries, and a bit of sabotage sends Nick on a runaround of who-can-you-trust conspiracies. This happens… like halfway through the 200 page book, and is not uninteresting, giving a sense of urgency to later chapters and providing for some truly tense standoffs, but it also doesn’t feel like the point. There’s a bit of unrealness to the way Peter writes this part, and the conclusion is both quite massive and underwhelming.

Still bearing with me?

The thing is, despite this – despite my not generally liking books that are just sort of scattershot world-building, which Bald New World is – Liu’s short novel is often incredibly gripping, because it’s not written to wow us with future world ideas, like mind-controlled cricket fighting, but rather to explore the effects of living in that world. Sci-fi very obviously often comments on our lifestyles, but I find that that’s often done from a top down perspective, with Brave New World being a good example; Bald New World is on the ground, looking up. Guan is a human being. Being bald happened; his life happened; all of these things are part of his world. Liu does an amazing job of dropping his future ideas in there and using a mix of context and tropes to avoid expositing how they work. And so he can spend time on Nick’s musings over his failed marriage, and his insecurities; the themes of dehumanization, common to books which present image-obsessed futures, gain more traction when balancing the very surface example of the “Baldification” with the crucible of experiences Guan goes through throughout the book. The pacing is also important to this, as we get to “hear” the character be quite normal, his thoughts very relatable, before being taken for a ride that gets frankly quite extreme at points, really pushing us to question how we might feel or act in similar situations.

When the story does emerge, it provides a catalyst to juxtapose the narrator’s mentality in the first half versus the second half, but the offhand presentation – events are swirling around Nick; he reads like a passenger and not a driver – does somewhat set us up to not expect anything wholly revelatory. So it’s not a book that left me with much to contemplate; there’s no punch to the gut in the text. However, given what seemed like a humdrum premise, I was not expecting to be so invested in the character, and Liu’s sneakily tight writing style – fitting much in between the lines – is a skill maybe the authors of those punch-in-the-gut books could pick up.

A worthwhile, very promising read.