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The Butterfly Effect
A self-obsessed Calcutta detective who goes by his last name `Kar’, an enigmatic internet cafe hostess in Seoul, and a hotshot geneticist labouring away on a top-secret corporate project. These are just a few pieces in the puzzle that need to be put together to explain a world sucked into the whirlpool of the `butterfly effect’. In the decaying capital city of a near-future Darkland, which covers large swathes of Asia, Captain Old – an off-duty policeman – receives news that might help to unravel the roots of a scourge that has ravaged the continent. As stories coalesce into stories – welding past, present and future together – will a macabre death in a small English town or the disappearance of Indian tourists in Korea, help to blow away the dusts of time? From utopian communities of Asia to the prison camps of Pyongyang and from the gene labs of Europe to the violent streets of Darkland – riven by civil war, infested by genetically engineered fighters – this time-travelling novel crosses continents, weaving mystery, adventure and romance, gradually fixing its gaze on the sway of the unpredictable over our lives.
376 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 16, 2018
12 people are currently reading
170 people want to read
About the author
Rajat Chaudhuri
15 books20 followersRajat Chaudhuri has published and edited a variety of works including novels, short story collections, anthologies and translations. His published works include Butterfly Effect, Calcutta Nights (translation), The Great Bengali Poetry Underground (translation, poetry) Hotel Calcutta, The Best Asian Speculative Fiction (ed), Calculus (fiction, Bengali) and Amber Dusk. He is the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow (2014) at the University of Chichester, United Kingdom, Hawthornden Castle Fellow (2015) and a Korean Arts Council Fellow (2013) at Toji Cultural Centre, South Korea. Chaudhuri is a past Fellow of the Sangam House International Writers Residency. Chaudhuri's fiction has appeared in Eclectica, Underground Voices, Notes from the Underground, The Statesman, L'Allure des Mots and other snakepits of the international literary underground. He is also a critic and has reviewed fiction for Sahitya Akademi's (India's National academy of Letters) Indian Literature journal, The Asian Review of Books, Outlook, The Telegraph and elsewhere. One of his short stories was the winning entry of the Wordweavers Fiction Contest, 2011. Before turning to writing full-time, Chaudhuri has been a consumer rights activist, an economic and political affairs officer with a Japanese Mission and a climate change advocate at the United Nations, New York. Chaudhuri has also published non-fiction work in the area of water rights and misleading environmental claims in advertising.
Hotel Calcutta reviewed:
`A persuasive artist' -- Asian Review of Books http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new...
`Sheer power of storytelling' -- The Telegraph http://telegraphindia.com/1130329/jsp...
`Astounding’ … `Not to be missed.’ -- Indian Literature journal, Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters)
http://bit.ly/18DeozO
Amber Dusk reviewed:
`A heady mix of experiences' -- The Telegraph
`A memorable novel of East-West encounter' -- Amitava Roy
`Another type of writing emerging within Indian English writing' -- Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi (JSTOR)
Hotel Calcutta reviewed:
`A persuasive artist' -- Asian Review of Books http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new...
`Sheer power of storytelling' -- The Telegraph http://telegraphindia.com/1130329/jsp...
`Astounding’ … `Not to be missed.’ -- Indian Literature journal, Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters)
http://bit.ly/18DeozO
Amber Dusk reviewed:
`A heady mix of experiences' -- The Telegraph
`A memorable novel of East-West encounter' -- Amitava Roy
`Another type of writing emerging within Indian English writing' -- Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi (JSTOR)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 6, 2020
“…the genes from the deep sea that had lit up those eyes in a blue glow, for the brief stretch of her youth, decided to switch off the lights.”
The Butterfly Effect initially spends its time showing you an extrapolated dystopic future reminiscent of Blade Runner. It is filthy, people are starving—scrounging and subsisting off moldy food in a dictatorship run by The Supreme Guide. We follow a character known only as “Captain Old.” He greets a mysterious visitor and takes a case trying to infiltrate and assassinate the dissidents in the abandoned metro. Rather than replicants or androids of some kind, there are bioengineered humans, “dishbabies”, manufactured to fulfill a purpose but not artificial. Their eyes glow blue all the same. There’s a glossary of terms in the back of the book for all the foreign terminology used, a staple of cyberpunk fiction.
“Krava-4 was never sure what a ghost actually is. She had heard that bloodbabies contain a soul — which is like water in a cup.”
But here’s where it departs. Honestly, this Darkland was interesting enough that I’d have been fine reading about a biopunk spin on a Blade Runner world. Instead, as Captain Old ventures into the metro, the narrative jumps back in time. And then it does so again. And then again.
There’s the story of Kar, a P.I in Calcutta who is hired to get to the bottom of a mystery. It seems a group of tourists visited Seoul and haven’t returned. He flies to South Korea to discover what’s happened. We see the tourists’ perspective through the lens of man from Calcutta meeting a mysterious woman who takes over as their tour guide, the whole thing unraveling with romantic undertones.
“It was as if the trees were awake and someone had placed little tea lamps along the trail. Perhaps it was the moss on the gnarled tree trunks that glowed for some reason or it was the light of their eyes reflected by the night. Possibly it was the glow of stardust, a faint sidereal light, a hint that they were all children of the stars.”
In the U.K a scientist dedicates his life to trying to solve world hunger while discussing with his good friend the ethics of how the problem might be solved. A woman flees a prison in North Korea, attempting to find somewhere safe.
“Disease is also a gift. A gift which we could do without. It is the sap of life flowing through nature leaking or spilling out because of our disjointed living.”
Rather than lingering on this dystopia, The Butterfly Effects weaves these stories together to show you how this came to pass, rather than having the meat of the story be Captain Old’s case in the future. It’s a very interesting way to write a cyberpunk/biopunk novel, and it’s challenging. It’s intersectional with climate-fiction, or cli-fi, as well because much of the story takes place in present day. It stops this future moment and traces how Captain Old came to be situated in that time and space, building suspense regarding the multiple questions posed by this grim future.
Yet more of these are seeded throughout. By the end, it is incredibly satisfying to have all these disparate events wrapped together. The structure is similar to Cloud Atlas, in which the short stories break and crash into one another but culminate together. This does something similar as it collapses back to the future with a slight twist to this predictable formula.
“Through the glazed glass hotel window, the electric night was an ocean of light washing over the high rises, a city of desire that had claimed dominion over the night. Looking out reminded him also of the K-pop girls with their smooth faces and coloured hair, belting out their power-packed lines.”
What was more astounding was the level of detail found in these places. From Calcutta to Seoul to the U.K—the colloquialisms, the food—everything shows a focused lens that comes from research. The acknowledgments go into some of that. While some readers may not like the level of granularity, and indeed, sometimes it does drag because of it. But when the story pivots into consolidating all of the plot threads it is all the better for it.
‘Sometimes they are Red Admirals with their bright orange on black wings flapping about wantonly in my frontal lobe, or else they were swallowtails flitting from cerebellum to hippocampus or even a clutch of glowing spliced hesperiadae blushing playfully between my ears ...’
The Butterfly Effect initially spends its time showing you an extrapolated dystopic future reminiscent of Blade Runner. It is filthy, people are starving—scrounging and subsisting off moldy food in a dictatorship run by The Supreme Guide. We follow a character known only as “Captain Old.” He greets a mysterious visitor and takes a case trying to infiltrate and assassinate the dissidents in the abandoned metro. Rather than replicants or androids of some kind, there are bioengineered humans, “dishbabies”, manufactured to fulfill a purpose but not artificial. Their eyes glow blue all the same. There’s a glossary of terms in the back of the book for all the foreign terminology used, a staple of cyberpunk fiction.
“Krava-4 was never sure what a ghost actually is. She had heard that bloodbabies contain a soul — which is like water in a cup.”
But here’s where it departs. Honestly, this Darkland was interesting enough that I’d have been fine reading about a biopunk spin on a Blade Runner world. Instead, as Captain Old ventures into the metro, the narrative jumps back in time. And then it does so again. And then again.
There’s the story of Kar, a P.I in Calcutta who is hired to get to the bottom of a mystery. It seems a group of tourists visited Seoul and haven’t returned. He flies to South Korea to discover what’s happened. We see the tourists’ perspective through the lens of man from Calcutta meeting a mysterious woman who takes over as their tour guide, the whole thing unraveling with romantic undertones.
“It was as if the trees were awake and someone had placed little tea lamps along the trail. Perhaps it was the moss on the gnarled tree trunks that glowed for some reason or it was the light of their eyes reflected by the night. Possibly it was the glow of stardust, a faint sidereal light, a hint that they were all children of the stars.”
In the U.K a scientist dedicates his life to trying to solve world hunger while discussing with his good friend the ethics of how the problem might be solved. A woman flees a prison in North Korea, attempting to find somewhere safe.
“Disease is also a gift. A gift which we could do without. It is the sap of life flowing through nature leaking or spilling out because of our disjointed living.”
Rather than lingering on this dystopia, The Butterfly Effects weaves these stories together to show you how this came to pass, rather than having the meat of the story be Captain Old’s case in the future. It’s a very interesting way to write a cyberpunk/biopunk novel, and it’s challenging. It’s intersectional with climate-fiction, or cli-fi, as well because much of the story takes place in present day. It stops this future moment and traces how Captain Old came to be situated in that time and space, building suspense regarding the multiple questions posed by this grim future.
Yet more of these are seeded throughout. By the end, it is incredibly satisfying to have all these disparate events wrapped together. The structure is similar to Cloud Atlas, in which the short stories break and crash into one another but culminate together. This does something similar as it collapses back to the future with a slight twist to this predictable formula.
“Through the glazed glass hotel window, the electric night was an ocean of light washing over the high rises, a city of desire that had claimed dominion over the night. Looking out reminded him also of the K-pop girls with their smooth faces and coloured hair, belting out their power-packed lines.”
What was more astounding was the level of detail found in these places. From Calcutta to Seoul to the U.K—the colloquialisms, the food—everything shows a focused lens that comes from research. The acknowledgments go into some of that. While some readers may not like the level of granularity, and indeed, sometimes it does drag because of it. But when the story pivots into consolidating all of the plot threads it is all the better for it.
‘Sometimes they are Red Admirals with their bright orange on black wings flapping about wantonly in my frontal lobe, or else they were swallowtails flitting from cerebellum to hippocampus or even a clutch of glowing spliced hesperiadae blushing playfully between my ears ...’
July 25, 2020
On the whole, it was a good read until I got to the end. It is marred by erratic punctuation and proofreading. Some passages are incredibly well written while the others are like an early draft. After the first few pages I had to check to see whether it was a translation but it does seem as though the author wrote this in English. Perhaps it is not his first language. It appears that some of it was written at a different time some others, supported by grants, if I understand the acknowledgements correctly. Have you read it?
It's a portmanteau novel in the manner of, although not nearly in the same league as, Cloud Atlas. Of course if you don't know this before the start you are disappointed by the first chapter if, like me, you read many dystopian cyberpunk novels. It just feels like more of the same. What keeps you reading is curiosity about how all the parts will fit together at the end. But when it comes it is a bit of a letdown, not least because it doesn't live up to the promise of the genre type – you end up being told how everything fits together, rather than the protagonists figuring it out against all the odds. I feel that dramatically it could have been handled better.
The publisher really needs to commission a good copyeditor. There are some bizarre consistent errors in the last section.
It's a portmanteau novel in the manner of, although not nearly in the same league as, Cloud Atlas. Of course if you don't know this before the start you are disappointed by the first chapter if, like me, you read many dystopian cyberpunk novels. It just feels like more of the same. What keeps you reading is curiosity about how all the parts will fit together at the end. But when it comes it is a bit of a letdown, not least because it doesn't live up to the promise of the genre type – you end up being told how everything fits together, rather than the protagonists figuring it out against all the odds. I feel that dramatically it could have been handled better.
The publisher really needs to commission a good copyeditor. There are some bizarre consistent errors in the last section.
March 8, 2020
The author has explained an extremely complex subject and made it easy for the readers like me. Great job.
August 16, 2019
A different kind of detective story where hard-boiled meets a romantic wonderland. A no-nonsense disaster tale which jerks us out of our nonchalance. Stories within stories and some amazing characters in conflict with their destinies set in a global frame. This novel is a thinking man’s potboiler.
September 17, 2020
There is definitely a lot going on in this story of a GM mediated ecological disaster with a background of climate change. But it's not straightforward dystopian fiction as it's a genre bending work which travels back and forth through alleys of time and geographies and is embellished with stylistic differences between sections. The narrative gradually reveals the connectedness of events and seems to highlight how the world sits on a short fuse at the brink of disaster. This connecting together of stories is brilliantly executed and because of the splendid detailing I found this book taking me on many journeys. I read it slowly though there are cliffhangers galore. You would come across pages where you could get bogged down by excessive details but soon enough the pace picks up. It is difficult for me to compare it with any recent novel but I would definitely recommend it to those who love a literary dystopia with an experimental structure along with a coming together of scifi and fantasy. I found the detective character at the centre of the action quite interesting but the enigmatic Korean guide was even better.
October 15, 2019
Did not maintain my interest
definitive-tbr
March 18, 2019I received a physical copy of this via the publisher. Thank you, Rajat Chaudhuri and Niyogi Books!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews