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asianamlitfansWritten by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
Well, Erewhon is one of those publishers that are meeting this particular moment, especially with the rise in interest in speculative fictions. In this year alone, Erewhon will publish no less than five works by English language writers of Asian descent (who include Angela Mi Young Hur, who returns with her second novel; Cassandra Khaw; and J.M. Lee). Here I review Olivia Chadha’s Rise of the Red Hand (Erewhon, 2021), which I believe will be a longer series. Let’s hope so because the conclusion to this novel leaves a number of key threads unclosed! The marketing description gives us this background: “The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders lead luxurious lives inside a climate-controlled biodome, dependent on technology and gene therapy to keep them healthy and youthful forever. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with discarded black-market robotics, a society of poverty-stricken cyborgs struggling to survive in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs. Ashiva works for the Red Hand, an underground network of revolutionaries fighting the government, which is run by a merciless computer algorithm that dictates every citizen’s fate. She’s a smuggler with the best robotic arm and cybernetic enhancements the slums can offer, and her cargo includes the most vulnerable of the city’s abandoned children. When Ashiva crosses paths with the brilliant hacker Riz-Ali, a privileged Uplander who finds himself embroiled in the Red Hand’s dangerous activities, they uncover a horrifying conspiracy that the government will do anything to bury. From armed guardians kidnapping children to massive robots flattening the slums, to a pandemic that threatens to sweep through the city like wildfire, Ashiva and Riz-Ali will have to put aside their differences in order to fight the system and save the communities they love from destruction.” This particular description is pretty robust but leaves out one another major character, Taru, who is part of a younger generation of the Red Hand. Taru is crucial to the plot because she is one of the few people that Ashiva very much cares about and when Taru’s life becomes endangered, Ashiva must work with Riz-Ali to find a way to rescue her. Chadha is able to maintain dynamism in this sprawling fictional world by moving the narrative perspective between these three characters. As we toggle back and forth, we begin to learn of the highly stratified world in which these characters live and must survive. Readers must be patient because the described alliance between Ashiva and Riz-Ali doesn’t actually occur until about one hundred and fifty pages in, but from there the plot really never lets up. We want to find out exactly what is going on in this fictional world because so many characters and entities (such as Solace Corporation) are shrouded in secrets. Despite this novel being billed as an adult fiction, I can tell that Chadha is a fan of young adult novels because the formula she lays out is pretty similar to many that I have been reading in this genre. Chadha is able to weave together a romance plot and quest plot together with various science fictional elements to produce this wide-ranging fictional world. There are cyborgs, mecha, deadly plagues, neural networks that link Uplanders together, amongst other novel technologies. To be sure, Chadha’s novel is immensely entertaining, but the core of this work is the social justice aspect that makes this work rise above so many others. We want Ashiva to succeed if only to give the “downlanders” a chance to endure, amongst a larger global society that has seen fit to discard them.
Buy the Book Here
Edited by Lina Jiang
Well, Erewhon is one of those publishers that are meeting this particular moment, especially with the rise in interest in speculative fictions. In this year alone, Erewhon will publish no less than five works by English language writers of Asian descent (who include Angela Mi Young Hur, who returns with her second novel; Cassandra Khaw; and J.M. Lee). Here I review Olivia Chadha’s Rise of the Red Hand (Erewhon, 2021), which I believe will be a longer series. Let’s hope so because the conclusion to this novel leaves a number of key threads unclosed! The marketing description gives us this background: “The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders lead luxurious lives inside a climate-controlled biodome, dependent on technology and gene therapy to keep them healthy and youthful forever. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with discarded black-market robotics, a society of poverty-stricken cyborgs struggling to survive in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs. Ashiva works for the Red Hand, an underground network of revolutionaries fighting the government, which is run by a merciless computer algorithm that dictates every citizen’s fate. She’s a smuggler with the best robotic arm and cybernetic enhancements the slums can offer, and her cargo includes the most vulnerable of the city’s abandoned children. When Ashiva crosses paths with the brilliant hacker Riz-Ali, a privileged Uplander who finds himself embroiled in the Red Hand’s dangerous activities, they uncover a horrifying conspiracy that the government will do anything to bury. From armed guardians kidnapping children to massive robots flattening the slums, to a pandemic that threatens to sweep through the city like wildfire, Ashiva and Riz-Ali will have to put aside their differences in order to fight the system and save the communities they love from destruction.” This particular description is pretty robust but leaves out one another major character, Taru, who is part of a younger generation of the Red Hand. Taru is crucial to the plot because she is one of the few people that Ashiva very much cares about and when Taru’s life becomes endangered, Ashiva must work with Riz-Ali to find a way to rescue her. Chadha is able to maintain dynamism in this sprawling fictional world by moving the narrative perspective between these three characters. As we toggle back and forth, we begin to learn of the highly stratified world in which these characters live and must survive. Readers must be patient because the described alliance between Ashiva and Riz-Ali doesn’t actually occur until about one hundred and fifty pages in, but from there the plot really never lets up. We want to find out exactly what is going on in this fictional world because so many characters and entities (such as Solace Corporation) are shrouded in secrets. Despite this novel being billed as an adult fiction, I can tell that Chadha is a fan of young adult novels because the formula she lays out is pretty similar to many that I have been reading in this genre. Chadha is able to weave together a romance plot and quest plot together with various science fictional elements to produce this wide-ranging fictional world. There are cyborgs, mecha, deadly plagues, neural networks that link Uplanders together, amongst other novel technologies. To be sure, Chadha’s novel is immensely entertaining, but the core of this work is the social justice aspect that makes this work rise above so many others. We want Ashiva to succeed if only to give the “downlanders” a chance to endure, amongst a larger global society that has seen fit to discard them.
Buy the Book Here
