This one had been on my list for years before I actually opened it, mostly because everyone described it in the same breath as “it won the Hugo and the Nebula” and I have a weird contrarian resistance to books that arrive pre-decorated. Turns out the hype was mostly earned, though I understand why some people bounce off it. The opening is genuinely slow. You’re dropped into post-oil Bangkok with four point-of-view characters and almost no hand-holding, and it took me a solid hundred pages before I stopped mixing two of them up.
Once it clicks though, it clicks hard. The world is a sophisticated, ugly, fully-realized mess, calorie companies controlling the food supply through engineered blight, genehacked animals, a windup girl built and conditioned to be disposable in ways the book doesn’t flinch from. There’s real sexual violence here and I want to say that plainly rather than bury it, it’s not gratuitous exactly but it’s not softened either, and I’d rather someone know that going in than be blindsided.
What stuck with me wasn’t the plot mechanics, which honestly kind of just end rather than resolve, it was the texture, the sense of a Thailand that’s simultaneously more insular and more desperate than the world around it because it’s one of the only places that held on. Four stars. The ending disappointed me a little, it just kind of stops, but the two hundred pages before that earned my patience back with interest.