At the beginning of Dakini Atoll, there’s a note from the author explaining that while this book follows the story of their previous work, Club Ded (2020), the narrative does not assume that readers will be familiar with that other story. Having not previously read Club Ded, I found this to be very helpful information to bear in mind, since Singh begins this narrative by introducing dozens of separate characters who initially seem to be deeply enmeshed in an ongoing plot. At first, this gives the sense that Dakini Atoll is meant to function as a sequel building from the earlier work, and yet I think this disorienting approach to storytelling may actually be an expression of this book’s larger themes.
Set in a near-future corporate dystopia, the bulk of Dakini Atoll is spread across five interwoven storylines. Foremost among these is that of a movie star originally named Zlata Zuhk, but who now goes by the more widely recognized stage name of Delilah Lex. Famous for having once starred in a series of popular children’s movies about a mermaid named Cyane, begins Delilah is performing the title role in a daily holographic reality television program called (with an exclamation mark) Good Morning Delilah!. In this program, Delilah wanders around a digitally rendered island known as Lexland, and navigates an endless series of algorithmically generated storylines for the benefit of this program’s tens of thousands of viewers. Yet as the book opens, Delilah begins to suspect that the automated system governing this program has been hacked, and that as a result, she has become trapped within a simulation.
Delilah’s story is supplemented by that of a filmmaker named Fortunato—a friend of Delilah’s who has worked with her on numerous occasions. When an ambiguous message from her leads Fortunato to suspect that she may be in danger, he sets out to track down Good Morning Delilah!’s filming location—a secretive facility known only as “Dakini Atoll.” This in turn draws Fortunato to investigate a conspiracy surrounding this program—a conspiracy in which numerous corporate sponsors seek to use Delilah to create not merely a media franchise, but possibly an entirely artificial religion.
These two stories are accompanied by still another narrative—that of a scientist named Seikichi who had previously worked with one of Good Morning Delilah!’s sponsors, the enigmatic corporation Oracle Inc. Having recently set out to find a cure for the deadly plague known as Prion Eyes (an illness so named due to how it causes the eyeballs of all whom it infects to liquify rapidly and fall out of their heads), Seikichi has, as the book opens, cut ties with his former corporate benefactors. Mysteriously, he has realized that these corporations are fervently opposed to any research into not only a cure for Prion Eyes, but also any attempt to uncover the origins of this rapidly spreading illness.
Amongst all of this, there is also the story of Chloe, a former member of the matriarchal island nation of Club Ded—a territory that had previously served as the main filming location for one of Delilah’s movies. As the novel begins, Club Ded is overrun in a military coup sponsored by Oracle, with the country’s queen, Anita, abducted and (Chloe assumes) executed by the corporation. Ultimately, Chloe finds herself trapped in a bizarre situation wherein she is held hostage by a robotic version of Delilah that is referred to as “the white widow.” Forced by this robot to act out a playfully mundane day-to-day existence, Chloe secretly works to use what little resources she has to slowly piece together a mystery regarding why Oracle staged this coup, and whether or not this simultaneously sadistic but also bubbly robot is still under their control.
Meanwhile, in the novel’s fifth strand, we see that Anita has not been executed, but sent to work for the secretive organization Angelinc. This is a company which claims to strive to improve the lives of people all over the globe, and towards this end sends its employees (or, as it calls them, “Angels”) to covertly manipulate society for the benefit of all of humanity. Yet as altruistic as Angelinc claims to be, the company’s mission is simultaneously marred by its regular policy of executing those “fallen Angels” deemed to have improperly divined the corporation’s will.
As these summaries probably demonstrate, Dakini Atoll jumps between dozens of outwardly unrelated narratives, to the point where at times the book resembles more an anthology of short stories than a singular novel. Rather than causing the resulting work to collapse under the combined weight of its many disparate plots, Singh writes all of these stories so that points of commonality emerge naturally as each story unfolds. All of the characters of Dakini Atoll, whether or not they realize it, are people shown to be trapped within restrictive systems they cannot fully perceive. Singh explores this theme by fragmenting even the reader’s perspective of this story and producing a work which often seems intended to evade complete apprehension.
There’s one moment, though, which demonstrates a central question that I think holds these many storylines together. Early on, Fortunato travels to New York. While there, he happens to bump into an old friend of his named Nikhil—an individual who, a little confusingly, seems to be the author of this novel, here appearing as a character in his own book. Nikhil talks with Fortunato about a difficulty he has encountered with a story he was planning to write but has since abandoned. Having heard of a literary contest challenging its contestants to produce a work of truly utopian science fiction, Nikhil decided to try to write a narrative that was utterly devoid of conflict. Yet, as he explains to Fortunato, this proved to be a task that may very well have been impossible. The problem he encountered was not merely that all narrative paradigms rely on some form of conflict in order to function (with a protagonist being driven to seek a goal which the story must in some way hinder them from achieving); in attempting to write a truly utopian novel, Nikhil also began to wonder whether all articulations of paradise produced by a human mind may simply be alternate descriptions of hell.
“Visions of hell tend to be localized. Locked in a nightmare—trapped. Imagery coincides with traditional infernal views. Places, where one is in bondage to oppressive forces. Logically, heaven must be the opposite. Total freedom. I think this is why people cannot properly describe heaven. They become bogged down with a false sense of localization. To experience heaven, one must exist in a state of perpetual expansion. Think of the joy of childhood—expanding into new realms. Utopia must encompass this innocent ideal. Nobody can really imagine what is fresh, new and undiscovered. It has yet to be experienced. The narrative must be pure exploration—yet, within a sphere that somehow, realistically represents no threat.”
As this conversation continues, Nikhil describes to Fortunato the story he originally intended to write (a novel set on a prehistoric Earth before the evolution of animal life). This story, he explains, would have been told from the perspective of a sentient plant—a being that derives all its energy from the sun, and is therefore free of the “cycle of eating.” This protagonist then discovers another being—a polymorphic shapeshifter whose existence is influenced by the perceptions of those who observe it, and with whom the protagonist becomes fascinated.
Yet even this story—one that Nikhil envisioned as being driven not by conflict or danger, but by a continually expanding sense of mutual awe—could not be sustained.
“It [the shape-shifter] acts as a psychological mirror for our protagonist, who becomes completely fascinated. Their interaction leads to a deeper understanding of natural patterns—staged in revelatory onion layers. Peeling back Eden's processes.”
“So, the narrative is driven by wonder?”
“This is my feeling. But, I still don’t see how it’s possible to construct a novel predicated on constant revelation—without any counter-foil. Perpetual light without shadow—it’s blinding.”
“Only if you have eyes …”
The solution that Fortunato suggests here is a concept that continually emerges in the many interwoven narratives that follow: The problem Nikhil is facing may be rooted not in the utopia he has imagined for his protagonist, but instead, his protagonist’s ability to perceive it.
In Delilah’s case, her story opens as she awakens in her own kind of deeply flawed paradise—a digitally rendered tropical resort comprising the Good Morning Delilah! set. Mysteriously having no memory of where she is, it’s in this state that Delilah is greeted by a giant holographic version of herself—a cheerful entity that explains to her, via snippets of brief pre-recorded messages, the nature of the Good Morning Delilah! program. It’s only as an afterthought that this hologram mentions that the simulation’s underlying interface routinely blocks large segments of Delilah’s memory, presumably presumably to produce only those on-screen performances deemed most commercially advantageous.
Essentially, Delilah awakens in this scene to find that she is not only trapped within a supposed paradise, but has also had her brain altered without her knowledge, so as to limit her ability to perceive the confines of this reality. Of course, the horror of this situation is only reenforced by the enthusiastic way that the hologram describes it to her.
“Good Morning Delilah! You are the star of a hit show! It’s the holographic reality serial. Think Cyane, all grown up. Living in an alien paradise, amongst the humanoids. Celebrity guests. Surreal sets. Weird games. In Lexland! Your very own island! Tour virtually with your Lex band. Win for charities of your choosing. But, here’s the twist—every day, areas of your memory are temporarily blocked …”
Delilah is agog. Red flag. In waking life, she can barely leave her room. Notorious loner. Constant surveillance, her worst nightmare. How could she consent to this?
A similarly fraught utopia appears in Anita’s segments of the story—a utopia which, just as with Delilah’s Lexland, is sustained via an artificially enforced ignorance. After the violent corporate coup at Club Ded, in the words of Angelinc, Anita “ascends” to the rank of Angel within the organization. In time, she is sent to oversee the development of an experimental surveillance network in the rural desert town of Arcadia Springs, and, while there, is introduced to a self-centered tech billionaire named Jared. Working to create what he describes as an ideal community, Jared has been subliminally regulating the lives of this town’s residents using holographic surveillance technology similar to that employed by Good Morning Delilah!.
Yet Arcadia Springs not only bears all the hallmarks of the flawed worldview of its creator (Jared’s resulting utopia feels suspiciously similar to the setting of generic American sitcoms from the 1950s); Jared himself is ultimately shown to be unknowingly constrained by an ego-driven worldview that is even more limiting than the one his utopia has imposed upon others. Despite Jared’s claimed altruism, Anita eventually discovers that his work creating Arcadia Springs has a much simpler motive. Using information gathered by his surveillance network, he has begun posing as a fortune teller in a local farmer’s market—basking in the false admiration of the townspeople as he demonstrates boundless knowledge of the intimate details of their lives. Despite Jared’s claimed wish to create an ideal utopia, his true motive is an inherently self-serving one which even he is perhaps incapable of perceiving.
In the case of the story of Seikichi’s quest for a cure for Prion Eyes, meanwhile, Singh introduces an alternate perspective on this book’s themes. When Fortunato eventually travels to meet with Seikichi in person, he learns that this man harbors a nearly religious fascination with the natural world. While Oracle and Angelinc exist as organizations imposing their own agenda upon humanity, Seikichi’s research into Prion Eyes instead works by utilizing only the chaotic forces of nature itself—forces that he in turn seems to see as expressions of his own personal articulation of utopia.
When describing to Fortunato his current research (which involves the chemical reactions by which spiders produce silk), Seikichi highlights how the inhumanly complex sophistication of nature emerges not despite its lack of a conscious mind, but because of it. Critically, this is how Seikichi’s worldview contrasts with the mechanized paradigm of Oracle and Angelinc:
“We could never truly understand this process. It’s something done by feel. A product of applied genetic knowledge, coded creatively, within the spider’s body. The coils of protein within the web itself, for example. A machine would logically order these. But natural spider silk possesses and aspect of almost chaotic, structural disorder. Particularly in the arrangement of glycine peptides. What a machine might deem disorderly, in actuality, gives web its supreme elasticity.”
Seikichi’s sense of wonder parallels that which Nikhil had earlier described to Fortunato, with Seikichi shown to be just as enraptured by the beauty of nature as the protagonist of Nikhil’s story. Yet the true implications of Seikichi’s ideology emerge when Fortunato learns the horrifying nature of Seikichi’s so-called “cure” for Prion Eyes. Using the near-zero-g environments of a series of low altitude orbital platforms, he has been breeding into existence a species of giant (and, as he proudly insists to Fortunato, 100 per cent natural) flesh-eating spiders. Having behaviorally conditioned these animals to hunt and kill only those humans infected with Prion Eyes, Seikichi has already begun to release these spiders into cities all over the globe, and in this way seeks to eradicate this incurable disease via the chaotic processes of nature itself. Just as with the simulated reality in which Delilah is trapped, and the forced utopia envisioned by Jared which Anita confronts, Seikichi’s vision of an ideal world governed only by the forces of nature is something that Fortunato discovers is built on willful ignorance of the reality sustaining it.
These many narratives continue to fuse together as the novel progresses, to the point where it becomes difficult to parse them out into distinct storylines, with each individual thread overlapping with the others. Delilah’s narrative ends when she manages to overcome her captivity—an act which, while freeing her from her simulation, also only further reveals the boundless nature of the larger system in which she is trapped. Likewise, as Anita and Chloe gradually come to grasp the true nature of Oracle and Angelinc’s plans, they are simultaneously confronted with an automated system which seems driven by an inhuman intelligence, even as it also lacks any capacity for conscious awareness. Then there is Seikichi, whose story reaches a very definitive end when he succeeds in acting out the role that he’s always seen himself to be, that of the tortured but noble scientist working for the benefit of humanity. Yet he never realizes (or willfully ignores) that his obsession with this role invalidates his claimed love of a natural world that is, by his own definition, beyond human perception.
All of this establishes Dakini Atoll as a dense book which utilizes its own bewildering plot to further the final disorienting culmination that its many stories ultimately reach. Just as Delilah is confined within a simulated paradise rendered torturous because she can know of its existence, and the residents of Arcadia Springs are restricted to preselected life paths which they must never question, Dakini Atoll on the whole is a book about utopias that vanish when subjected to the perceptions of a conscious mind—existences which, as Fortunato remarked to Nikhil back at the start of the book, prove blinding, but “only if you have eyes.”
Fortunately, there’s a plague for that.