Lakshminarayan, Lavanya
Entry updated 31 July 2023. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) Indian Videogame designer and author whose first book of fiction, Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future (coll of linked stories/fixup 2020; rev vt The Ten Percent Thief 2023), sophisticatedly overrides any restrictive classification of her portrait of the lives of twenty inhabitants of the distant Near Future Apex City, members of the privileged "Twenty Percent", each occupying a story of their own through a close-third-person narrative lens that gives an insect-eye perspective on the whole. The City portrayed is not perhaps unusual in the literature of Dystopia, though its location in the crater that was once Bangalore sets a tone of complex change through time: the Virtual haves and the Analog have-nots (who comprise the virtually no-hope "Seventy Percenters" and an underclass known as the "Ten Percenters") do not much surprise, nor does the ostensible (but corrupt) meritocratic sorting of sheep from goats. The radical deprivation of Technology meted out to failures is, however, poignantly conveyed. [JC]
Lavanya Lakshminarayan
born India
works
- Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future (Gurugram, India: Hachette India, 2020) [coll of linked stories/fixup: pb/]
- The Ten Percent Thief (New York: Solaris, 2023) [coll of linked stories/fixup: rev vt of the above: hb/]
links
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