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<![CDATA[River of Gods]]>
278280
7
As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business—a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj—the waif, the mind reader, the prophet—when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden. <P>In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. <P>River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures—one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.
2440580
2004
River of Gods
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Tue May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007
Wed Apr 11 11:41:08 -0700 2007
Tue Apr 17 19:22:03 -0700 2007
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Mon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007
Fri Oct 19 06:11:14 -0700 2007
Thu Nov 01 14:47:45 -0700 2007
artificial intelligences (or aeais as the book terms them) who break beyond their programming restrictio...more...]]>
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Sun Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007
Wed Jun 27 08:07:56 -0700 2007
Thu Aug 23 19:02:53 -0700 2007
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Fri Nov 28 14:35:00 -0800 2008
Fri Nov 28 14:39:37 -0800 2008
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Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009
Sun Aug 16 16:17:23 -0700 2009
Sun Aug 16 16:17:36 -0700 2009
As India approaches its 100th birthday, it has balkanized into a number of semi independent nations. Technolog...more...]]>
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Mon Nov 24 12:51:32 -0800 2008
Fri Nov 28 18:29:02 -0800 2008
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Sun Oct 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009
Mon Sep 28 06:38:20 -0700 2009
Mon Oct 12 08:18:31 -0700 2009
That's the best way to describe how I felt on finishing this book. Obviously, I enjoyed it for the most part, otherwise why would I give it four stars? That said, the last section was a letdown.
Why?
(1) It felt overly hasty, like the strands of plot were ...more...]]>
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Fri Aug 08 19:38:13 -0700 2008
Fri Aug 08 19:39:45 -0700 2008
That's kind of how his writing style feels. ]]>
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Wed Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2005
Tue May 26 18:53:34 -0700 2009
Wed May 27 16:31:27 -0700 2009
Read this purely because it was a Hugo or Nebula nominee (I forget which) and they've never led me astray yet (though I had enjoyed McDonalds' Desolation Road, so I wasn't exactly going in blind.)
McDonald tells us a series of stories that all end up crossing over on...more...]]>
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Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 -0700 2009
Sun Mar 01 13:21:05 -0800 2009
Thu Mar 12 19:55:42 -0700 2009
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Sat Apr 18 00:00:00 -0700 2009
Sat Apr 11 10:02:18 -0700 2009
Sat Apr 18 10:52:36 -0700 2009
It took me about 200 pages to really get in...more...]]>
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Fri Jun 19 00:00:00 -0700 2009
Thu Apr 02 18:45:42 -0700 2009
Sun Jun 21 14:36:34 -0700 2009
1
Four things really bothered me about River of Gods, Ian MacDonald's latest about how humans will react when they create beings...more...]]>
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Wed Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008
Sat Oct 18 18:07:10 -0700 2008
Sat Oct 18 18:16:42 -0700 2008
1
The good: I found the language of the book...more...]]>
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Mon Sep 15 10:59:18 -0700 2008
Sat Feb 14 19:57:11 -0800 2009
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Thu Sep 03 00:00:00 -0700 2009
Fri Jun 20 17:16:12 -0700 2008
Thu Sep 03 14:52:59 -0700 2009
As I've mentioned here several times before, there are many of us science-fiction fans wh...more...]]>
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Wed Jul 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008
Mon Jan 28 03:47:41 -0800 2008
Fri Jul 25 00:58:22 -0700 2008
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Tue Mar 10 00:00:00 -0700 2009
Sat Mar 14 18:44:45 -0700 2009
Sat Mar 14 18:48:09 -0700 2009
A Suitable Boy. Set in India in 2047, it is similar in using a variety of characters to relate a story, but this one is about AI's. It was also interesting to read Indian characters written by an English author, rather than an Indian one--McDonald made a ...more...]]>
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Sat Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006
Sun Apr 05 10:10:21 -0700 2009
Sun Apr 05 10:13:28 -0700 2009
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Wed Sep 12 05:43:10 -0700 2007
Thu Sep 20 10:45:45 -0700 2007
The context or milieu of post-balkanization India was very novel, and lent an element of newness to the reading of this book that was a welcome change. In some way, having certain words and concepts foreign t...more...]]>
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Sat Jul 11 20:00:50 -0700 2009
Sat Jul 11 20:04:21 -0700 2009
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