Here's something vibrant and original and interesting but I'm not quite sure if I'm disappointed with it or not. If I am, it's because it succeeded at doing what Sumit Basu intended it do, which sounds acutely counterintuitive and probably is. After all, most of the book concerns itself not with reality, but with an imaginary veneer lacquered over reality to hide it while pretending to be it. And, in doing that, it may be the most wildly futuristic look at now that I've ever read.

The closest comparison I can conjure up is William Gibson's work in cyberpunk. He was writing at a time when the future was about to be explored in wildly new technological ways and he vividly imagined how that might happen. Of course, he was often just as wrong as he was right, because we're not living in an identifiably Neuromancer-esque world, with its virtual reality hidden behind doors that only open to an especially skilled hacker. Or are we? Sumit Basu suggests that we kind of are. It's just that none of it is a conglomeration of chrome and neon.

We're in New New Delhi in the near future, which is insanely busy and clearly somewhere where things happen. It's a south Asian counterpart to Los Angeles, complete with the massive wealth disparity that comes between the beautiful people and those who merely dream of joining them while they pump gas and deliver pizza. Basu textures this with Indian culture, but it's not hard to translate into recognisable forms. The companies that run everything are families here, but they do the same job.

Where Gibson described his near future with sparse poetry, dropping the exact right word here and the exact right word there to keep us off balance, always experiencing something recognisable to us but in a slightly different flavour, Basu goes for full on immersion. For the longest time, I wondered what the plot of this novel was, because everything seemed to be scene setting, densely done as impressionistic info dump. The book isn't long but the chapters are and they're told in the present tense, as if we're an unwitting passenger driven by people who know but won't tell us.

There are always ten things happening at once and we're not sure which ones we should be focusing on. It's a brain freeze in prose, overstimulation as a designer drug trip. We can't help but feel that little of what we see is actually important in itself, but it all adds up to a powerful image that we can't quite see yet and there's something important going on underneath that we can't quite catch a glimpse of at all. It's as if this New New Delhi is an immense Alice in Wonderland, constantly stealing our attention with something weird and wonderful, but we're supposed to be watching the White Rabbit, who's always... hang on, where did he go now?

This feeling is manifested in the main character of Joey, because she's a technological illusionist, whose job is literally titled Reality Controller. Her former boyfriend Indi is a professional celebrity, a Flowstar, whose life is broadcast as performance art, and it's her job to shape that art, to ensure that everything he does is optimised for the time and the place and the current narrative she wants to follow; which, of course, may need to change direction on the turn of a dime. What this means is that Indi is a big public figure, but we don't really know much more about him at the end of the book than we do at the start, a meta story arc telling us mostly what Joey wants us to think. Fortunately, we're here to watch Joey not Indi.

I found this whole structure fascinating and eerily contemporary, with a whole slew of comparisons that might all be parts of this new whole. Imagine a reality show contestant, but where the drama conjured up behind the scenes is the work of people he employs, not the writers of a particular show. Imagine an influencer on YouTube, but one who never switches off their cam and becomes a constant companion to our life. Imagine a Karshashian-style celebrity, but who has her own dedicated 24/7 channel that looks a lot like Bloomberg. Imagine The Truman Show, but where Truman Burbank knows he's living on a TV set.

However, sixty-odd pages in, I still hadn't figured out a semblance of where the story was going. It felt a lot like an exercise in immersion, a highly successful one at that but only that. That one character, Joey, became two, because we're clearly supposed to be watching Rudra too. But, a third of the way through the novel, Joey isn't happy with her job, though she's really good at it, while Rudra has visited a family funeral and found himself oddly unwelcome. I should add that the story does indeed just about manage to extricate itself from the ADHD nightmare of distraction that Basu buries it in, and it does resolve to satisfaction, but it doesn't ever seem to be the point.

The point always seems to be the worldbuilding, which is magnificent, if that's your sort of thing. Diving into this book felt like diving into a swimming pool, because we find ourselves immediately submerged, with the world we know gone. Of course, this particular swimming pool is also a rabbit hole because we don't come up for air, we stay in Wonderland and explore. What I think I found most amazing is that the tiniest references, apparently there only to deepen the texture, are telling because we see everything as a version of something we know. It's not the same, but it kinda sorta is, just in different shades. And, given that this is a dystopian near future, it ably pierces whatever bubbles we live in about our present.

The question really comes down to what you want out of a book. If you want a richly imagined world, an avatar to our own, you may not find better than this. If you dug cyberpunk but find it dated because it's stuck in 1984 with payphones and mirrorshades, you may have a blast with this because it does the same job, one small alien step away from things we recognise. But, if you want a focused plot that takes a set of characters from here to there, you may find yourselves lost and confused quickly and eventually a bit disappointed.

And that's where I am. I loved the dip. The details may have faded but the sheer immersive experience is branded on my brain. I went somewhere and it was wild. But I've sobered up and when I think back on what I did there, I'm a bit fuzzy. Maybe it was all a dream. Or a nightmare. Or a hallucinogenic trip. The ride was everything. The destination didn't matter. ~~ Hal C F Astell