Well, it looks like Western capitalism will last through the end of the year, after all. But with more malls opening daily to serve Shanghai’s fast spenders and speculation of a “double dip” recession on the horizon, real life looks startlingly similar to Chan Koonchung’s vision of the near future as laid out in The Fat Years, his first novel to be translated into English. Currently based in Beijing, the Hong Kong-born Chan has had a long and varied history in media, including working as a screenwriter, film producer, journalist and magazine editor, trades that have served him well in learning to tell a good story.

In The Fat Years, the year is 2013, and China has shot to the top of the world happiness index. The nation is enjoying a period of unprecedented prosperity, officially called its Golden Age of Ascendency. Since 2011, the West has fallen into an economic catastrophe that makes 2008 seem like a blip on the radar, but China has escaped unscathed. People walk around Beijing in a state of mild euphoria, shopping and dining to their hearts’ content. Old Chen, a writer living the good life, believes he’s experiencing a “small-small high,” but he can’t begin to explain why.

He has, after a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth in writing, reached a point where he’s happy to amble from one Starbucks to the next, occasionally meeting up with friends to watch old Communist films and sip Chateau Lafite ’89. He’s rattled out of his routine by a number of acquaintances, including Little Xi, a disillusioned lawyer and advocate of liberal causes, and Fang Caodi, a traveler with a wide perspective on life.

These two stubbornly resist society’s general cheeriness, and unlike everyone else, they can’t forget a few crucial days of near-anarchy that came after the global collapse and before China’s new Golden Age. We follow these two and other misfits as they try to uncover the source of their unease.

Paging through The Fat Years, the characters’ inner thoughts and positions on current events are so in touch with the current zeitgeist that at times, the book feels like reportage. With its frank discussion of sensitive issues, this novel is unmissable for anyone interested not just in what Chinese intellectuals say in lectures and on television, but also in the debates they pursue behind closed doors.

The Fat Years is positioned as science fiction, a genre that’s better known for taking us on escapist journeys to other worlds than for delving into present-day reality. But adopting a few sci-fi conventions is one of Chan’s only attempts to make his work seem like anything other than an incisive satire of the here-and-now. The Fat Years is as much of an escapist fantasy as Animal Farm is a thriller about livestock management.

Chan toys with our ideas of science fiction by placing seemingly unbelievable events just over the horizon. But between the book’s 2009 publication in Chinese and today, the government has already adopted many of the policies that the book describes.

By blurring the lines between present / future and fact / fiction, The Fat Years makes us sit up and wonder—what kind of absurdity are we failing to see in the world we already live in?

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