Helyna L. Clove

I read this novel for The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, SPSFC. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole. Find out more about the competition here and my team, The Space Girls, here, and read all my reviews for the competition here!

The night Hania Fatik was murdered in cold blood, she died believing her death to be a permanent one. However, fate had a different plan in mind when Hania wakes up in a body not her own, in a city also not her own. Now, faced with an uncertain future as an illegal resurrect, Hania must learn to navigate a life she didn’t want, while trying to investigate the abrupt ending of the one she did.

The night a strange woman passes out in his store, Ayan Shihab realizes his wish to protect his loved ones and stay under the watcher’s radar is over. Holding the secret of his illicit activities close to his chest, Ayan finds his life is thrown into chaos when he’s forced to care for his unwelcome guest, dredging up demons from his past he’d rather forget. Now, he must do everything in his power to avoid getting purged for harboring an illegal resurrect, help his houseguest figure out the mystery of her murder, all while trying not to get anyone else killed.

Can Ayan push himself beyond his limits and take unprecedented risks to protect the ones he loves? Will Hania learn to let go of her long-held prejudices and rely on people she considered beneath her?

The novel starts gradually, introducing us to its setting from the two POVs which will accompany us through the story. Ayan works in a grocery store and is being accosted by what seems like corrupt officials, and through this scene and the next, we get to know his cat-form AI, WAFAA, some context to his futuristic, cyberpunk world based around South-Asian culture, then Ayan’s hidden life as a talented hacker, going to a shady meeting and promptly rejecting a job about resurrecting a rich client from their digital remains (wait for it). In the other POV, we see Hania, the heir to a company with monopoly on these types of resurrections, working to prove she can take over her mother’s role after her tragic death. She meets up with her father at home, they get attacked by intruders, and Hania—dies.

So, yes. In Frostbyte’s world, people who die don’t have to die permanently. People’s personalities (souldata) are stored and constantly backed-up, and if they die, these can be simply downloaded into a body, a biological container. Well, people with the means can, that is, the higher caste, the sacrosanct. The city is separated into different levels as well, forcing poorer people towards the outer, lower parts and the rich people live in luxury on the top. There is, of course, ways to save yourself anyway, and this illegal method is the Frostbyte, and the “products”, the Frosties. And a Frostie Hania Fatik becomes: after the attack on her home, she wakes up in a new body somewhere in the lower city with a different identity. Ayan is the one who ends up caring for her as Hania tries to deal with her situation and also perhaps find out who murdered her and why. But Ayan has darkness in his past too, which he is really intent on not dealing with, but as novels with great conflicts usually go, will probably be forced to.

I really, really enjoyed getting immersed in this world, the social structure, the relationships infused with Indian cultures, the foods, the traditions, everything, in the framework of a futuristic, dystopian city. The Aether, a twist and improvement on our current day internet into a full-on virtual space with levels, rules, and its own corrupted-data creatures, which the characters needed to visit a couple of times, was such an interesting concept, at times an experience almost like watching a video game. I really liked the characters (a highlight for me was Naz, Ayan’s enigmatic, badass hacker friend-slash-mother figure) and the displayed family/found family aspect to the relationships, and also the mystery of what happened to Hania and how is it connected to her mother’s death and Ayan’s brother’s fate. And although I expected a stronger romantic evolution of Hania’s and Ayan’s relationship, I appreciated the slow slow slow burn as well. There’s a lot to this book, and watch out for that cliffhanger!

That being said, the first half of the novel is moving quite slowly and without much of an urgency to the plot. There are certainly things happening emotionally for both Ayan and Hania, and we do get lots of information, world-building, and character details that will be important for the finale, but a couple of times around then, I found myself wondering where we were going and why we’re not in more of a hurry to get there. For sure, things and relationships needed space to evolve, however, comparatively, I did still feel that there were time spans spent in slightly repetitive conversations or scenes, and that even with these, I could have used more groundwork and gradual preparation to some of the character and emotional moments towards the end. At the same time, when things started to really get going (without spoilers) with revelations and twists and turns left and right, it was genuinely entertaining and tense.

All in all, Frostbyte was very enjoyable to read, with a unique setting, sympathetic characters, and a light-hearted style that still gives space to darker, tragic moments, that I am sure many cyberpunk fan will be all over.

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