Nadishka Aloysius's Reviews > The Inhuman Race

This story deserves 5 stars, but I'm not going to give it - Harper Collins India you have ruined a good book!
But positives first
The story starts in the year 2033. Elizabeth the Third is Queen of England and its various dominions, the Chinese are a powerful contender, and the city of Colombo is a destroyed wasteland. We follow the life of a girl who is dumb, and communicates with the aid of a radio by playing pre-recorded phrases. She lives in Colombo 3 and unlike many of the other children (there are no adults mentioned) she is a loner and does not belong to a tribe (the tribes are named after famous hotels now destroyed). She makes a new friend who is called Pissa because he seems a bit mad at first. The first part of the tale takes the reader on their journey towards a better place. The Silent Girl follows her friend to Colombo 1 and joins what seems a paramilitary group (again composed of only children, and you begin to realise something is not right). She discovers something terrible and flees with him to Kandy, now the centre of government, only to meet an untimely end. (I have tried to limit spoilers as much as possible!). The rest of the story follows Dr. Kushlani de Almeida in her quest for justice.
I liked the idea of a girl who is unable to talk as the central character. Her struggles to communicate make her thoughts and actions so much more meaningful. I also enjoyed the writer's style and turn of phrase. There were some particularly striking descriptions that were worth a second read.
"Then, the Sun appeared: a half-disc, glowing, the lone trumpet, pitching in, signalling the rest of the orchestra to begin. And then the gold exploded everywhere, flinging its arms and dispelling the night. Clouds swirled in glee. She gasped. It was just so beautiful."
The references to music did not stop there. I found particularly insightful the classical music that was played every morning to wake the children up (the ghoulish sound of Mozart's Lacrimosa Requiem gives a hint of what is to come, and Max Bruch's First Violin Concerto is known as the Music that did not Kill).
The fact that the story is set in Sri Lanka made for some interesting insider jokes and references that foreigners will not get (like the Bandaranaike family having been in power for decades, and the Singhe-le t-shirt flying high atop a mountain of garbage). Nevertheless I felt that given the genre, the back story was easy to latch on to. There are so many similarities, but also many differences in the world which is created in this narrative. There are thankfully no info-dumps but all the bits and pieces leak in almost subconsciously giving due place to the story unfolding. I also appreciated how there are tiny clues left scattered that you may remember later and go 'ah ha!' (flipping back and forth on an ebook is not as easy as with a paperback, but I must confess I went back and hunted for certain passages to re-read them so that they made sense after the 'revelations').
There were so many cultural references that were pure gems. My personal favourite was the password exchange between Pissa and Kanishkasir. The 'mango tree' conversation taken from the Mahavamsa of how Mahinda Thera tested King Devanampiyatissa's intelligence ties up nicely with the debate of sentient beings and intelligence later in the book.
Now to the negatives -
There were so many typos it was criminal! I hope the paperback is of better quality! I also felt that the story divided quite nicely into three sections - the children and their journey ending with when they reach Kandy, the aftermath of that ending with Almeida's determination to dig deeper, the events of 30 years later. I felt that the book should have been sectioned into official parts as it was a bit confusing to turn the page and start the next chapter and realise the story does not continue but jumps in what seems a completely disjointed manner. I also would have liked the native-speak of the first part to have had the Sinhala-Tamil bastardized speech that is referred to later by the scientists. Except for one instance where there is a phrase (Eelanga - Atutta - Xiayige) given in Sinhala, Chinese and (I think) Tamil, all the phrases are in Sinhalese only, which does not pair with the diagnosis given later. Also, the family name of Bandara suddenly became Bandaranaike in just one place in the text (the latter name of course made a lot more sense) - I don't know if that was intentional or just another typo. Also, I was left wondering at which point in the timeline the updates and memory re-sets were put in - whether in was only the first bots of Silent-girl's era that were not programmed like that, or whether it was an upgrade introduced in the thirty year gap between parts 2 and 3. If bots got regular memory re-sets from the start of the story (Is that what the Bluetooth paring was about?) to prevent them learning and remembering, how did Pissa and the others who lived alongside Silent-Girl behave in such a human fashion knowing Beauty, Goodness, Truth and Justice? I may need to read the book a second time to sort that one out.
Science Fiction writers today do more than entertain. They question concepts that we take for granted. This book is no different. What makes one human? What is sentience? How do you react when you discover there is something fundamentally wrong with accepted social norms and behaviour? This book also made me stop and value beauty, kindness, friendship and justice - the everyday things you accept as normal in life - because it is later revealed that the children have no right to those very things and it is an abnormality for them to value those at all.
"There were four main things that the ancients considered essential to a human being. Beauty, goodness, truth and justice...If you believe buggers who died a few thousand years ago, we've got the four main attributes of a human right here... You do realise, if these things are alive, then we're torturing living things for entertainment?"
The story ends with a sacrifice for the greater good of the Inhuman Race. I can't wait to see what develops next!