Immortal Longings

What Readers Say

Immortal Longings lands in a space that most books don't even attempt — cyberpunk aesthetics fused with wuxia-inspired martial arts and a brutal televised death game. The body-hopping mechanic is the real hook here. Players jump between bodies to compete, and that creates genuinely thorny questions about identity and attachment that I haven't seen handled this way elsewhere. How do you love someone whose face keeps changing? It's the kind of premise that could fall apart easily, but Gong makes it work by threading a romance through the violence like a live wire.

Readers on Reddit keep recommending this one in threads looking for that neon-soaked, closed-space intensity — the kind of atmosphere you'd find in the Neo Seoul chapters of Cloud Atlas. One commenter specifically called out the "closed space vibe with fantasy elements," which nails it. It showed up in a cyberpunk recommendation thread alongside heavy hitters like The Murderbot Diaries and pulled over a hundred upvotes, which tells me it's resonating with people who take the genre seriously and not just casual browsers.

What stands out to me is that this isn't cyberpunk window dressing on a standard fantasy plot. The futuristic city setting and the body-swapping technology are load-bearing — they drive the central conflict between Princess Calla's mission to dismantle her family's monarchy and the lover she picks up along the way. The stakes feel real because the premise won't let anyone hide behind a single identity.

Who It's For

If you're drawn to cyberpunk but tired of the same Blade Runner-derivative settings, this is where I'd point you. It's for readers who want their genre fiction to actually do something interesting with its premise rather than just using it as set dressing. Fans of Chloe Gong's These Violent Delights will recognize her knack for transplanting familiar story structures into settings that feel genuinely fresh — she did it with Romeo and Juliet in 1920s Shanghai, and she does it here with a death game in a city that feels like nothing else on my shelf.

This is also a strong pick for anyone who wants romance woven into high-concept sci-fi without either element feeling like an afterthought. It's the first book of a duology, so you're not committing to a massive series, but there's enough here that you'll probably want the sequel immediately.

Reading Context

Genre-wise, this sits at an intersection that doesn't have a clean label — cyberpunk meets wuxia meets romantasy, if you want to be reductive about it. I'd shelve it next to books that play with identity through technology, like Altered Carbon, but it has a completely different energy. Where Richard Morgan goes cold and noir, Gong goes operatic and bloody. If you've read Snow Crash or The Diamond Age for the world-building but wished they had more emotional heat, Immortal Longings fills that gap.

For companion reads, start with the cyberpunk side — Neuromancer or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep if you want the genre's roots, or Yumi and the Nightmare Painter if you're after another book that blends speculative mechanics with romance in unexpected ways. And if the body-hopping concept intrigues you but you want it in a different flavor, the Murderbot Diaries scratches a related itch around constructed identity, just with more dry humor and less bloodsport.