India, July 19 -- Tiny excerpt: Kundo blinked twice for messages, still his first instinct of the day. Nothing. Nothing personal, nothing from another live human. Nothing even from Karma, the AI running the city, who had been gradually going silent. At first her updates had been round the clock, but over the past few years they had reduced in number, until today, for the first time, there were none at all, no greeting, no report on the weather or hostile-nanotech count in the air. Could an AI stop caring? S et in a drowned and decaying Chittagong, Kundo Wakes Up (2022) by Bangladeshi author Saad Z Hossain imagines a world in which an algorithmic force called AI Karma - that once governed society through a vast social-credit system - has mysteriously fallen silent. The port city is meanwhile being swallowed by rising seas. In crumbling neighbourhoods, amid failing infrastructure, residents have in every sense been abandoned. Amid all this, Kundo, a once-celebrated artist, is now determined to resume the search for his wife, a gamer who left him about a year ago. As it turns out, others from across the city have gone missing too. Kundo is soon drawn into a far larger mystery. Joined by an eccentric band of gamers, coders, an Alzheimer's patient and a single mother, he journeys through hidden gaming parlours, digital underworlds and, eventually, into the mystical realm of djinns and ancient gods. Blending cyberpunk, folklore, high fantasy and climate fiction, Kundo Wakes Up tells a story of our enduring search for belonging and redemption, set in a civilisation on the brink of collapse....