Threto is under lockdown for a new strain of bird flu, and a girl in a stolen jacket is running across a housing courtyard with two pills in her pocket and a police drone on her heels. The drone’s sensors chase sound, not movement. Then an old man on a balcony begins to sing, and another voice joins him from across the courtyard, and soon dozens of residents who were idly reading or smoking are belting out a song about a sleeping giant and a rising sun, while the machine spins between them, unable to choose. The old man winks. The girl runs. Coldwire by Chloe Gong is a book about surveillance, corporate power and the nature of minds, but it is at its best in moments like this one, when ordinary people refuse, briefly and cheerfully, to be managed.
A World Built Like a House With Two Floors
The premise is easy to state. With the oceans rising and the air unsafe, most of humanity now lives inside StrangeLoom, a full-scale virtual copy of the planet built and owned by NileCorp, a retailer that grew into a state within the state. Its founder named the engine after the idea of a strange loop, a system that circles back to rewrite its own beginning, and the novel takes the name seriously. People still own physical houses because their virtual property depends on it; real dogs are dying out while the rendered ones are walked every morning.
What makes Coldwire by Chloe Gong feel lived in is Gong’s attention to what the system leaves out. Cemeteries and places of worship are never rendered, so Threto’s tomb-sweeping festival becomes a street parade, a cheerful mass funeral with roast pig and incense and nothing to sweep. One small nation of temples exists only offline. A best friend proves her identity in every new chat by naming an animal she would be willing to eat, because voice clones and scraped data have made ordinary trust impossible. A booth sold as an AI love psychic turns out, perhaps, to have a bored human on the other end, and it still tells Lia something true about being demisexual in a world that keeps asking her to feel things on schedule.
Two Girls the Cold War Has Already Written
The book alternates between two narrators of Medan descent, both raised in Atahua as wards, a surname that marks them as state property and suspected spies. Lia is the anxious, competitive one, a senator’s adopted daughter who has spent four years tied for first place with the headmaster’s son and fears that her sense of unreality is an illness the academy must never discover. Eirale is her opposite: a contractor who joined NileCorp’s forces because the alternative for an orphan in debt was the street, and who answers every question about loyalty with a shrug about survival under capitalism.
Eirale’s flatness is the riskier choice and the more interesting one. Framed for an assassination and pressed into the crew of the anarchist who framed her, she watches everything, feels very little and slowly realises she likes these people. Miz, the prickly hacker who once had a best friend killed by NileCorp, and Blare, a thirteen-year-old pilot announcing a new gender identity mid-kidnapping, give her chapters their warmth. The pairing is the cleverest decision in Coldwire by Chloe Gong: one girl is desperate to win a system that will never fully accept her, the other has already lost to it and settled for a salary, and each makes the other’s choice look both reasonable and sad. Neither is written as a lesson. Lia’s rivalry with Kieren Murray, two perfectionists bickering their way toward something softer, is pure pleasure, and it supplies the lightness that the darker chapters need. The cold war between Atahua and Medaluo, a clear echo of the real rivalry between America and China, lands hardest through small scenes: a stranger on a subway posting abuse about Medan girls with Atahuan haircuts, a girl who watches food videos from a country she has never seen and hides her history in case it is used against her.
Where Chloe Gong Asks Too Much Patience
The trouble with Coldwire by Chloe Gong is a structural echo. Both narrators spend the long middle doing versions of the same job, entering three data centres in three cities to recover pieces of a puzzle, and the pattern of cloned badges, convenient disguises and narrow exits starts to feel procedural. Gong knows it, too: Lia’s handler pre-loads glowing arrows onto the floor, and one character remarks that it is like completing quests in a video game. A tighter draft would have kept the best two break-ins and lost the rest.
The novel also relies heavily on withholding. Nik Grant brushes off almost every direct question as beside the point, and by the fourth evasion the device is more visible than the mystery. When the answers finally arrive, many of them come in one long conversation across a kitchen table, which gives the big turns of Coldwire by Chloe Gong less force than they deserve. The tonal shifts are sharp as well: Lia’s chapters have the bounce of a campus romance, all texting and teasing, while Eirale’s run on smoke and corpses, and the switch between them can jar.
Readers should know the book handles violence, deaths, bombings and illness frankly, along with self-harm, racism and a suicide in a family’s past, and that its romance stays at kissing. Its age band is fourteen and up, which fits.
Chloe Gong Turns to the Machines
Gong studied English and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, and the second subject shows here more than in anything she has written before. Her debut, These Violent Delights, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for best youth novel in her home country of New Zealand, and she followed the Shanghai books with the adult Flesh and False Gods trilogy of Immortal Longings and Vilest Things. This series was announced in 2024 and is published in Britain by Hodderscape.
The dedication explains where the idea first surfaced: she pitched a cyberpunk novel on a first date with the man she now thanks for every conversation since. The second volume, Deadlock, is due on 17 November 2026, and the cliffhanger here makes it hard to resist.
What It Leaves Behind
Those who finish Coldwire by Chloe Gong wanting more machines with consciences should read Scythe by Neal Shusterman, whose world-running intelligence is the gentler cousin of NileCorp. Marie Lu’s Legend shares the split between a soldier and a fugitive who should be enemies, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer remains the root of all this cyberspace paranoia. Coldwire by Chloe Gong is too long and too fond of keeping secrets, but its central question, about who owns a mind once it has been stored on someone else’s server, is one young readers will recognise from their own phones. It also has the courtyard full of singers, which is worth the price of the long middle on its own.