Kundo Wakes Up by Saad Z. Hossain
Kundo Wakes Up is a new novella by author Saad Z. Hossain, author of The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday and Cyber Mage. It's advertised as a companion novella to The Gurkha (which I have not read) but really it's just set in the same cyberpunk universe as both of these past works, a cyberpunk India/Bangladesh in which cities are run by AIs, virtual reality games are in vogue, and Djinns secretly influence events from behind the scenes. I really liked Cyber Mage, even though there were some cringey parts, so I was interested to try this new Hossain novella.
And Kungo Wakes Up takes this setting and makes it work really well, bringing together a cast of those left behind - an artist who never realized as things were falling apart around him, a woman and her child who didn't realize the neighborly hacker had a crush, an elderly crime lord cast away due to his age, a hacker with a drug addition etc. - as they try and figure out what's taking away more and more people from the City and disappearing them. Along the way of this very entertaining cyberpunk and djinn flavored plot we have a theme of realizing what you have and letting what you don't have and lost go, and it works pretty well, even if this never comes close to the "must read" level of work.
Quick Plot Summary: Kundo was once a famous artist, living a life full of Karma Points in the small city of Chittagong along with a wife he barely paid attention to. But he's barely paid attention to things for a while, barely even been awake even, and in the last few months his wife has left him and disappeared, his hacker friend who he asked to find her went silent, and the Karma AI running the whole city became less and less responsive. And so one day Kundo finally wakes up to full attention and begins a quest to figure out what's going on. His search will take him through video game parlors, fantasy worlds, the remains of criminal enterprises run by people with nothing, and to a cast of oddball allies who will reveal to him that what he actually needs and wants isn't the fantasy he kind of imagines.....
Thoughts: Kundo Wakes Up takes place in the cyberpunk future Bangladeshi setting of Hossain's other works, a city run by a powerful AI that awards people with worth Karma points for their efforts, and those without supposed worth are the "zeros" who live on the outskirts...(while the truly rich live in mansions guarded with automated weapons that kill anyone without the exact right permissions). It's a world where hackers are of incredible value, and where virtual reality video games (like Final Fantasy 9000, a game that is a major element of this novella while also present in the other works) are the big thing, to the point where some people don't even want to come out of them.
In this world takes place the plot, featuring a bunch of outcasts - you have Kundo the artist who forgot 3 years ago how to really live, and is only waking up to start this novella; you have Fara, a mother with a young kid who is basically on her own in an empty building once her hacker neighbor disappeared, who gets roped into helping Kundo and finds enjoyment in it; you have Hafez, the former head of a Black Market and local crime area under the nose of the AI Karma, and you have Dead Gola, a programmer-cheater-hacker who is so drug addicted so as to be dead to the AI. It's a very fun plot as the group gets into more and more bizarre things on their way to the end - a secret video game fighting competition, a Djinn controlled world, etc. - and meanwhile deal with themes like what it means to live and what is really important...and whom,, and what it means to let go of people who find something else, like Kundo's eventual wife. There's nothing here that's extraordinary, but it's a lot of fun along the way and never grows tired, so you can't really go wrong with this novella either. Worth your time.
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