This book has been featured on a few « best recent sci-fi books » lists in the past few months and I wanted to give it a try. What would there be to lose in that case (except having one more book on my TBR which is every day more likely to topple and bury me every time there’s an earthquake)

And, spoiler alert: READ THIS BOOK.

Set in a near future Delhi, we follow Joy, a Reality Controler, as she navigates personal, political, social events rocking the city.

Oh and of course it’s cyberpunk so make the city any tech-bro wet dream, from overpowered AI, bio-engineering, surveillance, recommandation algorithm, parasocial relations, VR and metaverses, and so on. Then multiply all this by a thousand.

There’s a LOT in the world building that is just hinted and never fully developed. It’s juste part of the world that there are some events you can’t mention. That water is scarce. That the caste system is still present but has gained additional « social-tech » echelons.

I can’t not mention Ministry for the Future which I read recently. A lot of the action as well as the initial trigger for MftF and a few characters are in India or from India. And as I noted in my review, the writing by KSR felt very very gimmicky. In contrast, the city inside is much better. Not only in its depiction of India and the reality of life there (don’t ask how much time I spent in rabbit holes researching locations, food or pieces of clothing) but the way it’s written, the style, the vocabulary, just everything is 100 times better than whatever KSR has produced.

Final word

Read it.