Kundo Wakes Up by Saad Z Hossain

Publisher – Tor.com

Published – Out now

Price – £10.99 paperback £2.09 Kindle eBook

Hundreds of miles away from the techno-utopia of Kathmandu, the all-powerful, all-seeing AI known as Karma has gone silent, leaving the dying city of Chittagong—along with all its remaining residents—to continue its inexorable fall into the sea.

Kundo, once a famous artist with the Karma points to prove it, goes searching for his missing wife, only to uncover more inexplicable disappearances. And so Kundo and a group of motley companions embark on a tumultuous journey through an overwhelming maze made up of Chittagong’s neighborhoods, the hidden backrooms of video game parlors, and the depths of cyberspace, culminating in the realm of the djinn themselves, in search of love, redemption, and a good meal.

Sometimes you get the impression that SF&F is a young person’s game. Understandably it is good to have younger characters experience the wider world for the first time and act as introducers for readers. We are trained to think of youth as when you have adventures and then you settle down. But as you get older you soon realise that’ usually just the first act. Further challenges and decisions await. You’ll change again and again and sometimes you find you can’t change ay more and that makes you very stuck as to what happens next. In Saad Z Hossain’s excellent Kundo Wakes Up we get just that bunch of middle-aged characters you never get in a tale finding and working together to solve a mystery and just possibly solving themselves in the process.

In far future Bangladesh environmental ruin crossed the planet and only the invention of cities ruled by an AI called Karma protect the surviving generations of humanity. But its not a star trek future of everyone living perfect lives. There are those with karma points of zero who live on the edges of society and day by day is a struggle to the next where the air, water or even drones may kill you. Kundo was once a world-famous artist driven by his career but his wife without warning left him and that sent him first searching for her and then with time getting lost in a depression that life has passed him by. One day he has just enough energy again to start again and a message from the hacker telling him he has found Kundo’s wife, but he must now give up searching for her and also that he’ll never hear from this hacker again. Kundo though carries on investigating a legendary computer game, a link with the devil and an unusual group of the people the world has given up on that may lead to some answers for everyone.

This is an absolutely beautiful bit of storytelling. Hossain weaves setting character and plot perfectly together to create a fascinating tale. At the heart is Kundo and the assorted characters we meet; Fara a mutual acquaintance of Kundo and his missing hacker but also a deserted wife and mother of a young baby struggling to make ends meet; Hafez once a dapper and well respected extremely well-armed gangster but now an ailing old man in hospital with Alzheimer’s and completing the set the legendary hacker Dead Gola now lost in addiction to drugs. Its this set Kundo needs to solve the mystery of his wife and you never really get stories with his type of cast. What makes this tale work is the care Hossein puts into making these characters both human and awesome. They’re frail, each have their weaknesses and yet on a good day when they put their minds to it. They all can do amazing things, but it can go either way moment by moment. Each character has to face up to their failings and try to do a little better. By the bittersweet ending you really care for these characters and what decisions they have to make to survive this story. There is a scene where everyone comes together to help one character and it speaks volumes for the little found family they soon form.

The plot is a finely delivered and surprising mystery. A legendary computer game hiding in World of Final Fantasy 9000 (there are quite a few gaming jokes in the mix) that lead to the Black Road a game the Devil has constructed to create a challenge any good gamer will try for and the prize is unknown. The group discover a large number of people are missing and Kundo believes his wife is among that number. We get battles in cyberspace; advanced gaming machines that meld with bodies and then a sprinkling of various myths and legends again bringing in the Djinn as a major magical force in this world. The story is a well-crafted mix of SF cyberpunk with a twist of classic myth that really works on both fronts. The way the story shifts into the fantastical is very organic and never feels clunky as we know from the outset magic exists in this world. There are some little neat surprises thrown at us but it’s a wonderfully surprising set of events that still all makes sense as the story develops.

Lastly Hossain’s world in which this story takes place in the same post-apocalyptic world as Hossein’s equally great The Gurkha and The Lord of Tuesday. This mix of a land heavily poisoned by pollution, powerful godlike AI and magic feels both amazingly and full of further adventures to come but all of it shapes both characters’ lives and the wider plot. This time Hossein adds in the streets of hackers, strange markets and where those who struggle live to remind us that these Karma cities have a lot of people that seem to be forgotten about by the great and good that Kundo was once part of. Again, this is a story less bothered about the powerful and more those on the edges of society that have been underestimated.

A glorious mix of the funny, the fantastical and the human that is usually something that I associate with Pratchett and again Hossain makes me feel that way despite this story being very different in so many ways to Discworld. A writer I am very keen to read even more of and well worth your time. Strongly recommended!