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quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Looking for your one shot to rise to the “top of the pots” in the cutthroat world of interstellar cuisine? Look no further - you might have what it takes to be an Interstellar MegaChef!
Stepping off a long-haul star freighter from Earth, Saras Kaveri has one bag of clothes, her little flying robot Kili … and an invitation to compete in the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show. Interstellar MegaChef is the showcase of the planet Primus’s austere, carefully synthesised cuisine. Until now, no-one from Earth - where they’re so incredibly primitive they still cook with fire - has ever graced its flow metal cook stations before, or smiled awkwardly for its buzzing drone-cams.
Corporate prodigy Serenity Ko, inventor of the smash-hit sim SoundSpace, has just got messily drunk at a floating bar, narrowly escaped an angry mob and been put on two weeks’ mandatory leave to rest and get her work-life balance back. Perfect time to start a new project! And she’s got just the idea: a sim for food. Now she just needs someone to teach her how to cook.
A chance meeting in the back of a flying cab has Saras and Serenity Ko working together on a new technology that could change the future of food - and both their lives - forever …
It’s around 2,500 years in the future.
Mankind has moved away from Earth and colonised the stars, making contact with other civilisations. Earth itself is a conflict-wrecked planet, viewed as backwards by those colonies that developed in accordance with Nakshatranaman principles. The most prominent of those colonies is Primus, which has become the cultural and economic epicentre of mankind’s ambition. The best music, the best shows, the best cooking is all done on Primus and one of the most popular shows in the known systems is Interstellar MegaChef.
It’s the chance to be on Interstellar MegaChef that’s brought Saras Kaveri and her flying robot Kili to Primus from Earth. There she was a critically acclaimed chef who ran her own restaurant, but she is’s also from a powerful family notorious for their ruthlessness suppression of anyone who threatens their wealth or position. When her family made clear their plans for her, she decided to take charge of her destiny and after Interstellar MegaChef accepted her audition tape she pretended to be a refugee and made her way to Primus. She just knows that she is going to ace this competition, become famous and prove her family wrong.
Serenity Ko was hired by XP Inc as a savant sim designer and she is very good at her job. The problem is that she’s also a selfish, unpleasant, ambitious control freak who has no real social skills and is very poor at relating to people. When the celebration party of her latest successful sim SoundSpace ends up starting a riot, she bumps into Saras as she’s being hustled away by her latest spurned lover Honour Aki. Forced to take leave by her concerned boss, Grace Kube, Serenity returns to her family home where the cooking of her grandmother - legendary cook Grace Menmo - inspires her to create a new sim, one that could change the very nature of food and the eating experience.
Unfortunately Serenity cannot cook to save her life so she needs someone to help her and then she remembers the Earth chef she met, whose journey on Interstellar MasterChef has not gone as planned …
Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s SF novel (the first in a duology) is an exuberant celebration of food and community that also contains themes of prejudice, colonialism and the irresponsibility of technology companies. If the characterisation is sometimes a little two-dimensional and the inevitable romance unearned, then the enthusiasm and scale of imagination carries you through to the extent that I am very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
I picked this up because I thought that Lakshminarayan’s debut novel THE TEN PERCENT THIEF was an ambitious and fresh take on the SF genre and was keen to see what she wrote next. INTERSTELLAR MEGACHEF has a more conventional structure with action divided primarily between Saras’s first person narration and Serenity’s third person story, interspersed with sections told from the point of view of Optimism Mahd’vi, a cultural bureaucrat on Primus who is determined to maintain her planet’s dominance. That said, Lakshminarayan is equally ambitious in her themes here and there is a lot to take in.
I really enjoy the sheer exuberance of Lakshminarayan’s writing. The enthusiasm that she brings to her world building, the detail and the way in which she focuses on relationships has a joyous quality to it that does carry you through the novel. Particularly good are the sections that focus on food itself, both the tastes and textures, the meaning and the community that are so important to it. I thoroughly believed in Saras’s expertise in cookery and her passion for it and Lakshminarayan is clever in fleshing out perspectives on this through also using Serenity’s grandmother to explain it.
Also good are the way Lakshminarayan weaves in themes of colonialism and prejudice through the book and how there is something sinister going on in Primus with the way in which its people view themselves and others. Some of this is the crude prejudice as displayed by the somewhat cartoonish Good Cheer Chaangte who straightforwardly berates and seeks to undermine those who are not from Primus, others such as Optimism Mahd’vi are more cunning and so committed to their belief in Primus’s supremacy that they are prepared to try and maintain it at all costs but are much more subtle in how they achieve that. What takes this book to the next level though is how Lakshminarayan shows that these attitudes can be internalised by those from other cultures - notably the brother and sister chefs Avi and Amol Kurshid who are originally from Earth but who have worked hard to be accepted on Primus and have their own Primian cookery celebrated for its sophistication - but who are too uncertain of their position to want to be seen to help others.
Finally this is a book that shows how careless technology companies and their workers can be. Serenity’s work on food sims is purely there to get her a promotion and prove how good she is at her job. She is utterly blind to what her new technology could do and dismissive of those - including her own grandmother - who try to warn her. I suspect this is something that will be developed further in the sequel as there is a lot of build up here that suggests something bad is going to happen but what’s here on the page already is cleverly done.
None of this is to say that the book is perfect. Saras is a little too naive at times - I especially did not believe that someone who is so familiar with Interstellar MegaChef was so blind to the risks of going on it and nor did I believe in how someone raised in a family like hers lacks any sense of what the family is capable of. That said I did enjoy her interactions with Kili, who serves as a kind of Jiminy Cricket type of character and she sticks up for herself more as the book goes on, which is the kind of development I always enjoy.
Likewise although I enjoyed the fact that Serenity Ko is not a sympathetic character at all, she is at times so deliberately unlikeable that it is difficult to root for her story and even though she also goes through a development the romance that develops between her and Saras in the final chapters of the book feels unearned.
All in all though I found this a real page turner and the ending is such that I am keen to find out how the duology ends.
The Verdict:
Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s SF novel (the first in a duology) is an exuberant celebration of food and community that also contains themes of prejudice, colonialism and the irresponsibility of technology companies. If the characterisation is sometimes a little two-dimensional and the inevitable romance unearned, then the enthusiasm and scale of imagination carries you through to the extent that I am very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
INTERSTELLAR MEGACHEF was released in the United States on 5th November 2024 and in the United Kingdom on 7th November 2024. Thanks to Rebellion Publishing for the review copy of this book.
Stepping off a long-haul star freighter from Earth, Saras Kaveri has one bag of clothes, her little flying robot Kili … and an invitation to compete in the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show. Interstellar MegaChef is the showcase of the planet Primus’s austere, carefully synthesised cuisine. Until now, no-one from Earth - where they’re so incredibly primitive they still cook with fire - has ever graced its flow metal cook stations before, or smiled awkwardly for its buzzing drone-cams.
Corporate prodigy Serenity Ko, inventor of the smash-hit sim SoundSpace, has just got messily drunk at a floating bar, narrowly escaped an angry mob and been put on two weeks’ mandatory leave to rest and get her work-life balance back. Perfect time to start a new project! And she’s got just the idea: a sim for food. Now she just needs someone to teach her how to cook.
A chance meeting in the back of a flying cab has Saras and Serenity Ko working together on a new technology that could change the future of food - and both their lives - forever …
It’s around 2,500 years in the future.
Mankind has moved away from Earth and colonised the stars, making contact with other civilisations. Earth itself is a conflict-wrecked planet, viewed as backwards by those colonies that developed in accordance with Nakshatranaman principles. The most prominent of those colonies is Primus, which has become the cultural and economic epicentre of mankind’s ambition. The best music, the best shows, the best cooking is all done on Primus and one of the most popular shows in the known systems is Interstellar MegaChef.
It’s the chance to be on Interstellar MegaChef that’s brought Saras Kaveri and her flying robot Kili to Primus from Earth. There she was a critically acclaimed chef who ran her own restaurant, but she is’s also from a powerful family notorious for their ruthlessness suppression of anyone who threatens their wealth or position. When her family made clear their plans for her, she decided to take charge of her destiny and after Interstellar MegaChef accepted her audition tape she pretended to be a refugee and made her way to Primus. She just knows that she is going to ace this competition, become famous and prove her family wrong.
Serenity Ko was hired by XP Inc as a savant sim designer and she is very good at her job. The problem is that she’s also a selfish, unpleasant, ambitious control freak who has no real social skills and is very poor at relating to people. When the celebration party of her latest successful sim SoundSpace ends up starting a riot, she bumps into Saras as she’s being hustled away by her latest spurned lover Honour Aki. Forced to take leave by her concerned boss, Grace Kube, Serenity returns to her family home where the cooking of her grandmother - legendary cook Grace Menmo - inspires her to create a new sim, one that could change the very nature of food and the eating experience.
Unfortunately Serenity cannot cook to save her life so she needs someone to help her and then she remembers the Earth chef she met, whose journey on Interstellar MasterChef has not gone as planned …
Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s SF novel (the first in a duology) is an exuberant celebration of food and community that also contains themes of prejudice, colonialism and the irresponsibility of technology companies. If the characterisation is sometimes a little two-dimensional and the inevitable romance unearned, then the enthusiasm and scale of imagination carries you through to the extent that I am very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
I picked this up because I thought that Lakshminarayan’s debut novel THE TEN PERCENT THIEF was an ambitious and fresh take on the SF genre and was keen to see what she wrote next. INTERSTELLAR MEGACHEF has a more conventional structure with action divided primarily between Saras’s first person narration and Serenity’s third person story, interspersed with sections told from the point of view of Optimism Mahd’vi, a cultural bureaucrat on Primus who is determined to maintain her planet’s dominance. That said, Lakshminarayan is equally ambitious in her themes here and there is a lot to take in.
I really enjoy the sheer exuberance of Lakshminarayan’s writing. The enthusiasm that she brings to her world building, the detail and the way in which she focuses on relationships has a joyous quality to it that does carry you through the novel. Particularly good are the sections that focus on food itself, both the tastes and textures, the meaning and the community that are so important to it. I thoroughly believed in Saras’s expertise in cookery and her passion for it and Lakshminarayan is clever in fleshing out perspectives on this through also using Serenity’s grandmother to explain it.
Also good are the way Lakshminarayan weaves in themes of colonialism and prejudice through the book and how there is something sinister going on in Primus with the way in which its people view themselves and others. Some of this is the crude prejudice as displayed by the somewhat cartoonish Good Cheer Chaangte who straightforwardly berates and seeks to undermine those who are not from Primus, others such as Optimism Mahd’vi are more cunning and so committed to their belief in Primus’s supremacy that they are prepared to try and maintain it at all costs but are much more subtle in how they achieve that. What takes this book to the next level though is how Lakshminarayan shows that these attitudes can be internalised by those from other cultures - notably the brother and sister chefs Avi and Amol Kurshid who are originally from Earth but who have worked hard to be accepted on Primus and have their own Primian cookery celebrated for its sophistication - but who are too uncertain of their position to want to be seen to help others.
Finally this is a book that shows how careless technology companies and their workers can be. Serenity’s work on food sims is purely there to get her a promotion and prove how good she is at her job. She is utterly blind to what her new technology could do and dismissive of those - including her own grandmother - who try to warn her. I suspect this is something that will be developed further in the sequel as there is a lot of build up here that suggests something bad is going to happen but what’s here on the page already is cleverly done.
None of this is to say that the book is perfect. Saras is a little too naive at times - I especially did not believe that someone who is so familiar with Interstellar MegaChef was so blind to the risks of going on it and nor did I believe in how someone raised in a family like hers lacks any sense of what the family is capable of. That said I did enjoy her interactions with Kili, who serves as a kind of Jiminy Cricket type of character and she sticks up for herself more as the book goes on, which is the kind of development I always enjoy.
Likewise although I enjoyed the fact that Serenity Ko is not a sympathetic character at all, she is at times so deliberately unlikeable that it is difficult to root for her story and even though she also goes through a development the romance that develops between her and Saras in the final chapters of the book feels unearned.
All in all though I found this a real page turner and the ending is such that I am keen to find out how the duology ends.
The Verdict:
Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s SF novel (the first in a duology) is an exuberant celebration of food and community that also contains themes of prejudice, colonialism and the irresponsibility of technology companies. If the characterisation is sometimes a little two-dimensional and the inevitable romance unearned, then the enthusiasm and scale of imagination carries you through to the extent that I am very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
INTERSTELLAR MEGACHEF was released in the United States on 5th November 2024 and in the United Kingdom on 7th November 2024. Thanks to Rebellion Publishing for the review copy of this book.
