This is my third and last finalist round review for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for SPSFC#5. I’ve already reviewed two of the finalists in earlier rounds, and my team has reviewed all of the finalists. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is FrostByte by N.S. Chaudhury. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

What do you fight for, when you lose yourself? A high-profile murder, a life stolen and illegally returned, all tied to a mystery that threatens to upend multiple lives.

The night Hania Fatik was murdered in cold blood, she died believing her death to be a permanent one. However, fate had a different plan in mind when Hania wakes up in a body not her own, in a city also not her own. Now, faced with an uncertain future as an illegal resurrect, Hania must learn to navigate a life she didn’t want, while trying to investigate the abrupt ending of the one she did.

The night a strange woman passes out in his store, Ayan Shihab realizes his wish to protect his loved ones and stay under the watcher’s radar is over. Holding the secret of his illicit activities close to his chest, Ayan finds his life is thrown into chaos when he’s forced to care for his unwelcome guest, dredging up demons from his past he’d rather forget. Now, he must do everything in his power to avoid getting purged for harboring an illegal resurrect, help his houseguest figure out the mystery of her murder, all while trying not to get anyone else killed.

Can Ayan push himself beyond his limits and take unprecedented risks to protect the ones he loves? Will Hania learn to let go of her long-held prejudices and rely on people she considered beneath her?

FrostByte is the first book in The Frostieverse Trilogy which blends together the neon tech-heavy cyberpunk with the colorful culture and food of South Asia.

If you enjoy morally grey anti-heroes, unreliable narrators and uniquely crafted worlds, then you’ll love N.S. Chaudhury’s NA, Desi Cyberpunk epic.

My Review

This is a really cool book, one that I’m so glad I had the chance to read. In basic genre terms, it is a mystery (except there are a ton of mysteries in here, and they thread through each other), plus a thriller, with fights and chases and adventures, and above all, it’s a cyberpunk sci-fi novel, with unique and fresh takes on resurrection and mortality, cyberspace and virtual combat, designer drugs, ubiquitous nanites, hacking and netrunning. On an orthogonal and (to me) even cooler axis, it’s a wonderful expression of Muslim South Asian culture, with foods, customs, clothing, language, and social structures and classes worked into a futuristic world, one that seems a lot like a neo-Pakistan of maybe fifty years from now, but as far as I could tell, the country in the book doesn’t share Pakistan’s specific geography or politics. That cultural setting is so, so cool, and it’s one that I’ve never seen in this kind of book. I’m fully aware that might be just an indictment of me as a reader, but I really think FrostByte has so much to offer as a window on a world American readers don’t often see represented in books. I am the richer for reading it.

The action is interesting and varied, the plot twisty, and the characters vibrant and different and flawed and prone to doing things you don’t expect. This book absolutely deserves to be a finalist in this year’s competition.

Plot and Characters

We follow four main characters, with two of them primarily serving as point-of-view characters in various chapters. One is Hania, mega-rich patrician who is brutally murdered at the start, but who is clandestinely resurrected outside of normal legal channels through use of a bootleg recording of her souldata, which include thoughts, personality, memories, and skills. She’s resurrected into a new vat-grown body, and much of the book follows Hania’s efforts to solve her own murder. She is assisted by a crew of misfit semi-criminals, with Ayan being the other main POV character. Ayan is a hacker and netrunner with a complicated past, although he’s currently living with the cover of being a shopkeeper and generally benevolent member of his lower-class enclave. Ayan is supported by a fixer and mother figure with mad skills named Naz who has a ton of complexity all her own, and by an impetuous glory-hound young man, Key, who creates a lot more trouble than he intends, and often more than he is worth. Most of the chapters alternate between Hania and Ayan, but there are a couple points where we seem to be in 3rd-person omniscient also, with thoughts from multiple characters in a single scene.

I don’t want to dive too deep into the plot beyond the setup that’s given in the blurb above, but there is a lot of plot, and it is rich and complex and twisty. Boy, is there a lot of it – the book is 680 Kindle pages, which translates to 515 paperback pages, and while there are some slower, simpler parts, a lot of it has a lot happening all at once, with big banger reveals throughout.

My Thoughts

I really enjoyed this one. The cyberpunk sci-fi part is ably done, with all the cool future tech and dystopian authoritarianism and cyberspace exploits you’d want, but the real strengths of the book for me were the setting and the characters. I don’t think there’s a book I’ve read recently where I’ve been excited to look up so many words, whether they were an Urdu phrase, a piece of clothing, a building, a tradition, or a tasty food or drink. There are a lot of these, but it isn’t overwhelming at all – you could skim over these and know their general meaning from context – but for me, it was fun hopping on Google and imagining what the characters were seeing or eating or wearing (or swearing).

The characters, similarly, were fully developed and rich, each with specific and complementary strengths along with flaws and weaknesses and blind spots. Seeing Hania deal with the massive disruption of her life, and seeing her struggles reflected in the found-family of her new criminal friends, makes for a really engaging story, especially when she learns that her society isn’t all what she thought it was, and also when her journey of discovery and evolution impacts her new friends in ways that highlight the flaws and the worse parts of their nature. This is all the more difficult and intricate because all three of the criminals are basically good people, although often with past incidents and actions they deeply regret.

A 500-page book is a big ask for a reader, especially for a debut novel, and for the most part, the book delivers consistent and abundant awesomeness. I did find some of the scenes slow to develop, sometimes with conversations that didn’t move the plot along much, although they always showed the strength and complexity of the bonds between the four main characters, and they often gave me foods to look up and hunger for. Some of the action sequences take a while to develop also, and there’s a lot of internal dialogue – all of it good and in character, but it does slow the reading down a little.

The only parts I really chafed at were some of the dream sequences, where what was depicted was generally a vivid fabrication or confabulation of real events, and in a few places where it felt like people were getting emotional and evasive in ways that only served to give them a reason to squabble. This created some emotional tension, but it sometimes seemed out of character and a little stupid, because the truth would have resolved most of these arguments quickly and efficiently. Instead, we got a lot of whining and raging and stomping around, often based on interpretations that the reader already knows are wrong, because we’ve seen the truth from the other side, a truth that the other characters somehow don’t find a way to reveal. Sometimes, also, a fact that’s clearly and definitively established gets taken away or revised, which is a little frustrating for mystery fans who like to figure it out as they go, but this always happens in the context of the story and the society, so it mostly works and is fair.

Summation

You won’t have read a book like this before, which of course is a strong recommendation all its own. The cyberpunk and mystery parts manage to milk some cool tropes of the genre, but it’s good milk, served in a fresh, exciting, and original way. The characters are memorable, deep, and complex, and Chaudhury isn’t afraid to put them through the wringer and grant them both their strengths and flaws as they navigate a tremendously complex world and the super-twisty threads of mystery and history woven all around them. But the most awesome part is the vibrant and exciting cultural backdrop against which the story is set. When you have a book where you’re learning all kinds of stuff about a culture that doesn’t get represented enough in books AND enjoying a well-crafted, twisty thriller, it’s a clear winner. Nicely done, and I recommend FrostByte highly.