Sustainable Technology and Energy Justice: Infrastructure and Citizenship in Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s the Ten Percent Thief

Technologically advanced and environmentally resilient urban systems may improve efficiency and material security without necessarily producing socially just outcomes. This paper examines Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s The Ten Percent Thief through the distributional, recognition, and procedural dimensions of energy justice, supported by an Energy Humanities approach to technological infrastructures. Using theoretically informed close reading of the 2023 Solaris edition, the study analyzes spatial division, energy-linked services, climate protection, merit-based citizenship, algorithmic governance, surveillance, and resistant technological practices in Apex City. The analysis finds that infrastructure functions as a civic sorting mechanism: unequal access differentiates material security; Bell Corp’s merit system converts these inequalities into judgments of productivity, dignity, and civic worth; and centralized control of metrics, networks, and decision-making limits political agency. Analog counter-infrastructures, meanwhile, demonstrate technological agency through appropriation, repair, and recombination rather than technological rejection. The novel consequently critiques an exclusionary form of technological sustainability in which technical resilience is separated from equitable access, recognition, and participation. The study shows how speculative fiction can contribute a humanities perspective to debates on socially just sustainable technology.