Why You'll Love This
Near-future Delhi reimagined through influencer culture, surveillance capitalism, and two people too distracted by the apocalypse to figure out their own lives.
- Great if you want: South Asian sci-fi that treats online culture as serious subject matter
- The experience: Cerebral and slightly sprawling — more ideas than momentum
- The writing: Basu's prose is sharp and satirical, heavy with layered cultural specificity
- Skip if: You prefer plot-driven SF — this lingers on ideas over story
About This Book
Near-future Delhi is drowning in content—livestreams, curated realities, influencer empires—and Joey is one of the people keeping the whole spectacle running. As a Reality Controller for a rising celebrity, she has more cultural power than she realizes, and almost no idea what she actually wants. When a reclusive stranger named Rudra gets pulled into her orbit, both of them find themselves tangled in forces much larger than either anticipated. Basu captures something specific and uncomfortable about this moment in history: the exhaustion of living inside systems you didn't choose, the slow creep of authoritarianism, and the strange intimacy of people trying to figure out their lives while everything around them accelerates.
What makes this novel worth your time is Basu's voice—sardonic, precise, and deeply embedded in South Asian urban life in a way that rarely appears in speculative fiction. The prose moves fast without feeling thin, and the near-future worldbuilding earns its strangeness by staying grounded in recognizable anxieties about media, class, and family. At under 250 pages, it makes every scene count, delivering a story that feels simultaneously local and globally resonant.