This book asks a lot of you upfront, it splits its attention across nine point of view characters, a gangster, a cop and his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, a dropout, and a mysterious woman everyone just calls the waif, all converging on the same fractured future India as its hundredth anniversary approaches. There’s a glossary in the back and I used it constantly, not as a complaint exactly, just a fact about how dense the invented vocabulary gets, nutes and aeais and Krishna cops all doing real narrative work rather than just decoration.

The nutes are the best idea in the book, a third gender achieved through elective neutering, referred to with their own pronoun, and McDonald treats the concept with more curiosity than judgment, which given how the trope could easily go wrong is a genuine relief. The aeais, artificial intelligences legally forbidden from exceeding the Turing threshold, and the law enforcement built specifically to hunt down the ones that do anyway, give the book its clearest through line, a civil war brewing over water rights running underneath all of it like a slow fuse.

Where it lost me a little was two of the nine threads, the American physicist chasing a discovery that could’ve been its own separate novel, and the girl who sees the future, both of which felt like they were diluting attention that the stronger characters, the gardener building a rooftop garden for a woman who lives above the world, the comic and cop circling each other, actually earned. Recapping the plot is basically pointless, there’s too much of it, but the prose itself is genuinely gorgeous in places, specific and sensory in a way that a lot of dense worldbuilding books don’t bother with.

Four stars. I’d have trimmed a hundred pages and two characters and called it a five, but even sprawling, this is a big swing that mostly connects.