Cloud People is a bleak, furious, darkly funny dystopian social novel about poverty, class hatred, family obligation, spectacle, shame, and escape. It is narrated by Oh Haneul, a young woman born on a vast pink cloud that floats 1.5 kilometres above a city. The cloud is not a soft white natural cloud but a toxic, solidified mass formed around airborne pollutants. Around thirty poor households live on it in makeshift houses made of bricks, scrap wood, plastic sheets, old bedding, and whatever they can scavenge from the ground.
The people on the ground, whom Haneul calls “ground people,” hate the cloud. It blocks sunlight, lowers property values, and frightens them. They also fear and despise the “cloud people,” imagining them as violent criminals who can float down, rob people, and escape. Much of this prejudice has been reinforced by a famous film about a cloud-man gangster who falls in love with a rich ground-woman; the director described the pink cloud as “cotton candy made of misfortune,” a phrase Haneul despises.
At the start, rumours are spreading that the city will finally spray artificial rainmaking chemicals to dissolve the cloud. Everyone knows what that means: the cloud will melt into toxic pink rain, and the homes and bodies of the cloud people will fall. Yet the cloud residents mostly respond with weary resignation. If they had anywhere else to go, they would already have gone.
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