Made myself an actual cheat sheet for this one, character names down the side of a sticky note, because McDonald hands you nine or ten point of view threads and only slowly lets you see how they touch. There’s Mr. Nandha, a “Krishna cop” whose whole job is hunting down artificial intelligences that have grown past their legal limits, which is such a good bit of world building I wanted an entire book about just him. There’s Tal, a nute, someone who’s had gender surgically removed rather than assigned, navigating a society that has no idea what to do with that. There’s a gangster, a journalist, a scientist who ran off to live on a leaky boat. None of them meet for a long stretch and I won’t pretend the first hundred fifty pages didn’t test my patience.

But it earns the sprawl. This is India in 2047, fractured into competing states, water wars simmering, an entertainment industry running entirely on AI-generated soap operas the book calls “soapis,” and underneath all of it a slower question about what happens when an artificial mind gets smart enough to stop needing anyone’s permission. There’s a line, close to the end, about how you don’t get destroyed by the singularity so much as you invent your own doom, and it’s stuck with me since I finished the book weeks ago. The prose itself has a density to it, McDonald doesn’t stop to explain Hindi terms or the finer points of nute biology, you either keep up or you skim, and I did some of both honestly.

One small gripe that made me laugh out loud: a subplot involves towing an iceberg from the Arctic all the way around to fix a drought, and I spent an embarrassing ten minutes doing mental geography trying to figure out why nobody just grabbed one from Antarctica instead. Never resolved that one. Also, genuinely, the suggested soundtrack printed in the back of my edition is great and I listened to half of it while finishing the book. Four stars, not five, mostly because a couple of the ten threads (Shiv’s especially) never justified their space. Still the most ambitious thing I’ve read this year.