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India 2047 #1
River of Gods
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.
In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. 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.
In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. 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.
583 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2004
239 people are currently reading
10943 people want to read
About the author
Ian McDonald
265 books1,262 followersIan Neil McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis's childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story "The Island of the Dead" in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing full-time.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 448 reviews
March 14, 2022
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: 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—the waif, the mind reader, the prophet—when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.
In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.
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.
My Review: Ian McDonald. This is a name to conjure with, boys and girls. This is one fearless Irishman. This is a major major talent doing major major things. How dare he, how dare I, warble his praises when he, a white guy from the colonial oppressor state, has the temerity to write a science fiction novel about INDIA?!? There are scads of Indian writers and it's their country! Let *them* write their stories!
Codswallop.
Read the book. Then come and tell me it should have remained unwritten because of some nonsensical national pride hoo-hah.
It's got every damn thing a reader could want: A new gender, the nutes, pronoun “yt;” a wholly new form of energy harvested from other universes; a political scandal-ridden politician who falls for our main nute character, despite his long marriage, and pursues yt desperately; a civil war a-brewin' over water rights in the now fragmented subcontinental political world; aeais (artificial intelligences) that are forbidden by law to exceed the Turing Test that establishes whether an entity is human or human-passable; and, as with any law, the lawbreakers who inevitably arise are hunted by a new breed of law enforcement officers, here called “Krishna cops.” Krishna being the Original God, Supreme Being, One Source in many parts of India, there is some justice to that, one supposes.
Recapitulating the plot is pointless. This is a sprawling story, one that takes nine (!) main characters to tell. I felt there were two too many, and would entirely prune Lisa, the American physicist, and Ajmer, the spooky girl who sees the future, because those story lines were pretty much just muddying the waters for me. I thought the physicist on a quest, who then makes a giant discovery, which leads her back to the inventor of the aeais, could easily have been a novel all on its own, one that would fit in this universe that McDonald has summoned into being. I simply didn't care for or about Ajmer.
The aeais' parent, Thomas Lull, is hidden away from the world in a dinky South Indian village. Yeah, right! Like the gummints of the world would let that happen! I know why McDonald did this, plot-wise, but it's just not credible to me. He could be demoted from player to bit part and simplify the vastness of the reader's task thereby.
So why am I giving this book a perfect score? Because. If you need explanations:
--The stories here are marvelously written.
Some of my favorite passages I can't put here, because they contain some of the many, many words and concepts that one needs—and I do mean needs—the glossary in the back of the book to fully appreciate.
The concept of the book is breathtaking. Westerners don't usually see India as anything other than The Exotic Backdrop. McDonald sees the ethnic and religious tensions that India contains, barely, as we look at her half-century of independence ten years on (review written 2007) and contemplate the results of the Partition. He also sees the astounding and increasing vigor of the Indian economy, its complete willingness to embrace and employ any and all new ideas and techniques and leverage the staggeringly immense pool of talent the country possesses.
McDonald also extrapolates the rather quiet but very real and strong trend towards India as a medical tourism destination: First-world trained doctors offering third-world priced medical care. This is the genesis of the nutes, people who voluntarily have all external gender indicators and all forms of gender identification surgically removed, their neural pathways rewired, and their social identities completely reinvented.
Think about that for a minute.
If your jaw isn't on the floor, if your imagination isn't completely boggled, then this book isn't for you and you should not even pick it up in the library to read the flap copy. If you're utterly astonished that an Irish dude from Belfast could winkle this kind of shit up from his depths, if you're so intrigued that you think it will cause you actual physical pain not to dive right in to this amazing book, you're my kind of people.
Welcome, soul sibling, India 2047 awaits. May our journey never end.
The Publisher Says: 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—the waif, the mind reader, the prophet—when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.
In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.
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.
My Review: Ian McDonald. This is a name to conjure with, boys and girls. This is one fearless Irishman. This is a major major talent doing major major things. How dare he, how dare I, warble his praises when he, a white guy from the colonial oppressor state, has the temerity to write a science fiction novel about INDIA?!? There are scads of Indian writers and it's their country! Let *them* write their stories!
Codswallop.
Read the book. Then come and tell me it should have remained unwritten because of some nonsensical national pride hoo-hah.
It's got every damn thing a reader could want: A new gender, the nutes, pronoun “yt;” a wholly new form of energy harvested from other universes; a political scandal-ridden politician who falls for our main nute character, despite his long marriage, and pursues yt desperately; a civil war a-brewin' over water rights in the now fragmented subcontinental political world; aeais (artificial intelligences) that are forbidden by law to exceed the Turing Test that establishes whether an entity is human or human-passable; and, as with any law, the lawbreakers who inevitably arise are hunted by a new breed of law enforcement officers, here called “Krishna cops.” Krishna being the Original God, Supreme Being, One Source in many parts of India, there is some justice to that, one supposes.
Recapitulating the plot is pointless. This is a sprawling story, one that takes nine (!) main characters to tell. I felt there were two too many, and would entirely prune Lisa, the American physicist, and Ajmer, the spooky girl who sees the future, because those story lines were pretty much just muddying the waters for me. I thought the physicist on a quest, who then makes a giant discovery, which leads her back to the inventor of the aeais, could easily have been a novel all on its own, one that would fit in this universe that McDonald has summoned into being. I simply didn't care for or about Ajmer.
The aeais' parent, Thomas Lull, is hidden away from the world in a dinky South Indian village. Yeah, right! Like the gummints of the world would let that happen! I know why McDonald did this, plot-wise, but it's just not credible to me. He could be demoted from player to bit part and simplify the vastness of the reader's task thereby.
So why am I giving this book a perfect score? Because. If you need explanations:
--The stories here are marvelously written.
“And you make me a target as well,” Bernard hisses. “You don't think. You run in and shout and expect everyone to cheer because you're the hero.”
“Bernard, I've always known the only ass you're ultimately interested in is your own, but that is a new low.” But the barb hits and hooks. She loves the action. She loves the dangerous seduction that it all looks like drama, like action movies. Delusion. Life is not drama. The climaxes and plot transitions are coincidence, or conspiracy. The hero can take a fall. The good guys can all die in the final reel. None of us can survive a life of screen drama. “I don't know where else to go,” she confesses weakly. He goes out shortly afterwards. The closing door sends a gust of hot air, stale with sweat and incense, through the rooms. The hanging nets and gauzes billow around the figure curled into a tight foetus. Najia chews at scaly skin on her thumb, wondering if she can do anything right.
Krishan barely feels the rain. More than anything he wants to take Parvati away from this dying garden, out the doors down on to the street and never look back. But he cannot accept what he is being given. He is a small suburban gardener working from a room in his parents' house with a little three-wheeler van and a box of tools, who one day took a call from a beautiful woman who lived in a tower to build her a garden in the sky.
Some of my favorite passages I can't put here, because they contain some of the many, many words and concepts that one needs—and I do mean needs—the glossary in the back of the book to fully appreciate.
The concept of the book is breathtaking. Westerners don't usually see India as anything other than The Exotic Backdrop. McDonald sees the ethnic and religious tensions that India contains, barely, as we look at her half-century of independence ten years on (review written 2007) and contemplate the results of the Partition. He also sees the astounding and increasing vigor of the Indian economy, its complete willingness to embrace and employ any and all new ideas and techniques and leverage the staggeringly immense pool of talent the country possesses.
McDonald also extrapolates the rather quiet but very real and strong trend towards India as a medical tourism destination: First-world trained doctors offering third-world priced medical care. This is the genesis of the nutes, people who voluntarily have all external gender indicators and all forms of gender identification surgically removed, their neural pathways rewired, and their social identities completely reinvented.
Think about that for a minute.
If your jaw isn't on the floor, if your imagination isn't completely boggled, then this book isn't for you and you should not even pick it up in the library to read the flap copy. If you're utterly astonished that an Irish dude from Belfast could winkle this kind of shit up from his depths, if you're so intrigued that you think it will cause you actual physical pain not to dive right in to this amazing book, you're my kind of people.
Welcome, soul sibling, India 2047 awaits. May our journey never end.
April 16, 2017
I liked this more than Necroville which I liked a lot and which served as measuring stick for this book since old McDonald's writing style makes it hard to compare it to anything else.
Like in Necroville we again have near future setting, far enough to fully implement lot of new technology and near enough not to let go of old ways yet. India is atypical setting for sci-fi and with McDonald's unusual brand of writing creates experience with strong and unusual flavor.It's colorful setting where tradition meets progress and way the new technology clashes with local mentality feels absolutely plausible.
Story is told through PoV's of ten different people. Not all of them meet and not all of their stories converge to the same point and initially their stories don't feel connected but their actions have ripples that shape events in main storyline.
Like in Necroville I had trouble connecting with characters.They are complex and well written but something about McDonald's characters that keeps me from getting attached to most of them but unlike Necroville this time there are few characters that I really cared about.This along with very memorable setting made rate this book one star higher than Necroville.
After two book I can definitively see author has distinctive style which I like (minus the characters) and I do plan to continue with McDonald's books in near future.
Like in Necroville we again have near future setting, far enough to fully implement lot of new technology and near enough not to let go of old ways yet. India is atypical setting for sci-fi and with McDonald's unusual brand of writing creates experience with strong and unusual flavor.It's colorful setting where tradition meets progress and way the new technology clashes with local mentality feels absolutely plausible.
Story is told through PoV's of ten different people. Not all of them meet and not all of their stories converge to the same point and initially their stories don't feel connected but their actions have ripples that shape events in main storyline.
Like in Necroville I had trouble connecting with characters.They are complex and well written but something about McDonald's characters that keeps me from getting attached to most of them but unlike Necroville this time there are few characters that I really cared about.This along with very memorable setting made rate this book one star higher than Necroville.
After two book I can definitively see author has distinctive style which I like (minus the characters) and I do plan to continue with McDonald's books in near future.
February 25, 2010
6.0 stars. A staggering, literary achievement. McDonald is a superb author and this may be his best book ever. I was absolutely blown away by the original, well-thought ideas crammed into this book.
Nominee: Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Novel (2005)
Nominee: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2005)
Nominee: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2005)
Winner: British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel (2005)
Nominee: Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Novel (2005)
Nominee: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2005)
Nominee: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2005)
Winner: British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel (2005)
January 1, 2014
Plenty of bang for the buck, but it takes some bucks of effort to keep up with all the balls being juggled here. The nut theory of art applies here: that getting more out of a creation takes more effort. So despite having to set it aside for several months, I still give a top rating.
The time is 2047 (40 years from the book’s writing in 2007), and the setting is Varanasi, an ancient and holy city on the Ganges in north-central India. The intertwining voices of eleven main characters weave the tale. A key set of four characters are all mysteriously linked: their portraits have been discovered in an alien artifact in space billions of years old. They are an American inventor of a software virtual world, his former colleague and lover who is now a CIA agent, a police agent who leads an artificial intelligence extermination force, and a spiritual young Indian woman with surprising powers of reading people and situations. Other colorful characters include a CEO of an energy development company, a female prime minister, a member of a new neuter gender, a key advisor to the prime minister scandalously in love with the “nute”, and a journalist who exposes the scandal and is after a scoop on secret agendas of advanced artificial intelligence beings (“aeais”).
So you can see there is quite a rich stew here. It doesn’t make for casual reading. Fortunately, once I got adept at remembering the characters, I was progressively more eager to find out what they were up to. A few core threads in the plot should help you understand what is at stake in the tale, and thus aid in your decision to tackle it. The brahmin family’s energy company has funded university scientists to produce essentially a “pocket universe” in a lab and is now on the verge of tapping it for infinite free energy. India also harbors the last few advanced aeais, a key to high tech industries such as a computer-generated virtual reality soap opera that has addicted much of the world. These developments pose a threat to a lot of governments and industries.
The government in power wants to exterminate the aeais in accordance with fear-driven international law. Using virtual avatars, the aeies work to influence politics in favor of their survival and for unknown reasons invest heavily in the company trying to make a gateway to an alternate universe. All these characters and plot streams move toward a grand collision. There is a lot of rich social interaction in between military clashes and riots that often endanger them. The love affairs, betrayals, and selfish ambitions of the players in the tale make an interesting parallel with the aeai-created soap opera, “Town and Country”, while contrasting in their human drama with the inscrutable and hidden lives of the aeais themselves.
As with McDonald’s “The Dervish House”, which was set in Istanbul, I found this earlier novel a lot of fun once the stories started converging. This pleasure was similar to the fun I had with Stephenson's "Snow Crash." From my recent readings of popular scientific accounts, I feel McDonald made a brilliant effort in bringing alive some of the current ideas in theoretical physics and progress toward artificial intelligence. It’s too bad the theories of the multiverse are stranger than fiction. Previously, only Stephenson’s “Anathem”, did justice to my taste with the implications of these theories. The possibilities for the outcomes of “the singularity”, when computer intelligence achieves self-consciousness and exceeds human thinking, are also explored with great skill. The story provides an alternative solution to the desperate competition featured in “The Blade Runner” and the Terminator movies. The blend of all this classic sci fi adventure and the multiple cultures and religions of India was mind expanding.
I was quite happy with McDonald’s evocative prose. For example, he puts into the thoughts of an organized crime thug an attractive pragmatic and cynical outlook with respect to the ongoing technological advances and religious interpretations of them:
He tilted his head back and watched the steam from the coffee curl up until he could, worth a squint, merge it with jet contrails. The Nepali Temple Ball said, believe: believe nothing is solid, everything is credible. It is a big universe. Shit. The universe was tight and mean and crammed into a wedge of brightness and music and skin a handful of decades long and no wider than your peripheral vision. People who believed otherwise were amateurs.
I tuck a couple of other examples in these spoiler boxes for the potential reader to sample if interested. In the first, the computer scientist Thomas to his mysterious new friend Aj his view of the singularity event in a way that doesn’t require a physics degree:
As an example of lyrical prose, here are the thoughts of the prime minister’s cabinet member after being fired for his relationship with a nute, prompted by her query “What did you think you could do with them?”:
The time is 2047 (40 years from the book’s writing in 2007), and the setting is Varanasi, an ancient and holy city on the Ganges in north-central India. The intertwining voices of eleven main characters weave the tale. A key set of four characters are all mysteriously linked: their portraits have been discovered in an alien artifact in space billions of years old. They are an American inventor of a software virtual world, his former colleague and lover who is now a CIA agent, a police agent who leads an artificial intelligence extermination force, and a spiritual young Indian woman with surprising powers of reading people and situations. Other colorful characters include a CEO of an energy development company, a female prime minister, a member of a new neuter gender, a key advisor to the prime minister scandalously in love with the “nute”, and a journalist who exposes the scandal and is after a scoop on secret agendas of advanced artificial intelligence beings (“aeais”).
So you can see there is quite a rich stew here. It doesn’t make for casual reading. Fortunately, once I got adept at remembering the characters, I was progressively more eager to find out what they were up to. A few core threads in the plot should help you understand what is at stake in the tale, and thus aid in your decision to tackle it. The brahmin family’s energy company has funded university scientists to produce essentially a “pocket universe” in a lab and is now on the verge of tapping it for infinite free energy. India also harbors the last few advanced aeais, a key to high tech industries such as a computer-generated virtual reality soap opera that has addicted much of the world. These developments pose a threat to a lot of governments and industries.
The government in power wants to exterminate the aeais in accordance with fear-driven international law. Using virtual avatars, the aeies work to influence politics in favor of their survival and for unknown reasons invest heavily in the company trying to make a gateway to an alternate universe. All these characters and plot streams move toward a grand collision. There is a lot of rich social interaction in between military clashes and riots that often endanger them. The love affairs, betrayals, and selfish ambitions of the players in the tale make an interesting parallel with the aeai-created soap opera, “Town and Country”, while contrasting in their human drama with the inscrutable and hidden lives of the aeais themselves.
As with McDonald’s “The Dervish House”, which was set in Istanbul, I found this earlier novel a lot of fun once the stories started converging. This pleasure was similar to the fun I had with Stephenson's "Snow Crash." From my recent readings of popular scientific accounts, I feel McDonald made a brilliant effort in bringing alive some of the current ideas in theoretical physics and progress toward artificial intelligence. It’s too bad the theories of the multiverse are stranger than fiction. Previously, only Stephenson’s “Anathem”, did justice to my taste with the implications of these theories. The possibilities for the outcomes of “the singularity”, when computer intelligence achieves self-consciousness and exceeds human thinking, are also explored with great skill. The story provides an alternative solution to the desperate competition featured in “The Blade Runner” and the Terminator movies. The blend of all this classic sci fi adventure and the multiple cultures and religions of India was mind expanding.
I was quite happy with McDonald’s evocative prose. For example, he puts into the thoughts of an organized crime thug an attractive pragmatic and cynical outlook with respect to the ongoing technological advances and religious interpretations of them:
He tilted his head back and watched the steam from the coffee curl up until he could, worth a squint, merge it with jet contrails. The Nepali Temple Ball said, believe: believe nothing is solid, everything is credible. It is a big universe. Shit. The universe was tight and mean and crammed into a wedge of brightness and music and skin a handful of decades long and no wider than your peripheral vision. People who believed otherwise were amateurs.
I tuck a couple of other examples in these spoiler boxes for the potential reader to sample if interested. In the first, the computer scientist Thomas to his mysterious new friend Aj his view of the singularity event in a way that doesn’t require a physics degree:
As an example of lyrical prose, here are the thoughts of the prime minister’s cabinet member after being fired for his relationship with a nute, prompted by her query “What did you think you could do with them?”:
January 12, 2019
(Friends, I may be rewriting this because I am not satisfied that I have effectively conveyed my thoughts and reactions to this book.)
This book is being touted as science fiction because McDonald has put his stories in the future, 2047, when the modern state of India has been in existence for 100 years. But the science is, in many ways, less the focus than the ways it affects the characters and hovers behind their actions.
Yes, there are significant changes to the world and to the subcontinent in particular. The Ganges is about to run dry and that could result in armed conflict. Yes, artificial intelligences are more ubiquitous and there is a ministry in charge of assuring that any that evolve into something approaching human intelligence are destroyed. Yes, mankind has embarked on genetically engineering its future generations, but maybe more interesting is that adults are now able to have a new (neutral) gender choice.
McDonald has a deft touch and weaves this all together with a very Indian flavor. The novel is furthered by how he both lays out individual stories and yet, as the novel progresses, dramatizes the interconnectivity of it all. Yet, having said that, I found myself unengaged: amazed by it all but touched by only some of it. Perhaps it is the vibe I got from his writing: smug and cynical. Like a practitioner of three card monte, McDonald fans his cards for all to see and then deftly makes your assumptions come up short.
I found myself curious but not captured by the plot or characters. It is possible (but certainly not certain) that I will get back on this ride for the other volumes McDonald has in store for us.
This book is being touted as science fiction because McDonald has put his stories in the future, 2047, when the modern state of India has been in existence for 100 years. But the science is, in many ways, less the focus than the ways it affects the characters and hovers behind their actions.
Yes, there are significant changes to the world and to the subcontinent in particular. The Ganges is about to run dry and that could result in armed conflict. Yes, artificial intelligences are more ubiquitous and there is a ministry in charge of assuring that any that evolve into something approaching human intelligence are destroyed. Yes, mankind has embarked on genetically engineering its future generations, but maybe more interesting is that adults are now able to have a new (neutral) gender choice.
McDonald has a deft touch and weaves this all together with a very Indian flavor. The novel is furthered by how he both lays out individual stories and yet, as the novel progresses, dramatizes the interconnectivity of it all. Yet, having said that, I found myself unengaged: amazed by it all but touched by only some of it. Perhaps it is the vibe I got from his writing: smug and cynical. Like a practitioner of three card monte, McDonald fans his cards for all to see and then deftly makes your assumptions come up short.
I found myself curious but not captured by the plot or characters. It is possible (but certainly not certain) that I will get back on this ride for the other volumes McDonald has in store for us.
June 21, 2009
You know you're probably not going to write a rave when you find yourself skimming hundreds of pages at a time to reach parts of the book that matter to the plot.
Four things really bothered me about River of Gods, Ian MacDonald's latest about how humans will react when they create beings greater than themselves (i.e., AIs). In no particular order:
1. I'm not a Puritan - sex? profanity? violence? I can deal with it if it's part of the plot or character but outside of romance novels or explicitly pornographic ones most authors should really stay away from sex beyond the implied. Imaginative readers can supply their own scenes; real "Puritans" will be happy enough not to have to deal with it. Violence belongs in the same category. I may have become oversensitized to its frequency but I found MacDonald guilty of insipid sex scenes and gratuitous violence too often for my comfort zone.
2. Too many unimportant and uninspired characters (engaging in pointless sex and mayhem). For example, in the "Kalki" section, POV shifts nine times in 100 pages. In terms of the plot, only three characters (Lisa Durnau, Thomas Lull and Mr. Nandha) are crucial to the story, which could have been told in a long short story or novella.
3. Uninspired writing. Beyond the basic story (which I found tame, formulaic, and relied too heavily on the deus-ex-machina antics of the AIs), MacDonald's evocation of a near-future India just kind of falls flat. I didn't believe it. Despite protestations to the contrary from various characters, I never felt I was seeing the world in a uniquely "Indian" or "Hindu" point of view, rather than the point of view of a Western observer. (And before you complain that I only "skimmed" it, how could I really know, I was faithfully reading every word up through page 200 or so. Plenty of time to establish bona fides, IMO.)
4. My last issue with the novel is that I've read it before. Or it feels that way. I'm not a great fan of this kind of near-future, urban, cyber-punkish SF, so it takes a particularly talented author to hold my attention - early Alastair Reynolds (oh, I hope he can return to form soon), Dan Simmons (off and on), Tony Daniel, Iain Banks, A.A. Attanasio, among others - and MacDonald didn't in this case.
None of the reasons above were sufficient to make this book a failure for me; I have plenty of three-stars on my shelf that are guilty of one or more of the above offenses. Together, however, they conspired in this caper to make the experience of reading less enjoyable than the author probably intended it to be.
Four things really bothered me about River of Gods, Ian MacDonald's latest about how humans will react when they create beings greater than themselves (i.e., AIs). In no particular order:
1. I'm not a Puritan - sex? profanity? violence? I can deal with it if it's part of the plot or character but outside of romance novels or explicitly pornographic ones most authors should really stay away from sex beyond the implied. Imaginative readers can supply their own scenes; real "Puritans" will be happy enough not to have to deal with it. Violence belongs in the same category. I may have become oversensitized to its frequency but I found MacDonald guilty of insipid sex scenes and gratuitous violence too often for my comfort zone.
2. Too many unimportant and uninspired characters (engaging in pointless sex and mayhem). For example, in the "Kalki" section, POV shifts nine times in 100 pages. In terms of the plot, only three characters (Lisa Durnau, Thomas Lull and Mr. Nandha) are crucial to the story, which could have been told in a long short story or novella.
3. Uninspired writing. Beyond the basic story (which I found tame, formulaic, and relied too heavily on the deus-ex-machina antics of the AIs), MacDonald's evocation of a near-future India just kind of falls flat. I didn't believe it. Despite protestations to the contrary from various characters, I never felt I was seeing the world in a uniquely "Indian" or "Hindu" point of view, rather than the point of view of a Western observer. (And before you complain that I only "skimmed" it, how could I really know, I was faithfully reading every word up through page 200 or so. Plenty of time to establish bona fides, IMO.)
4. My last issue with the novel is that I've read it before. Or it feels that way. I'm not a great fan of this kind of near-future, urban, cyber-punkish SF, so it takes a particularly talented author to hold my attention - early Alastair Reynolds (oh, I hope he can return to form soon), Dan Simmons (off and on), Tony Daniel, Iain Banks, A.A. Attanasio, among others - and MacDonald didn't in this case.
None of the reasons above were sufficient to make this book a failure for me; I have plenty of three-stars on my shelf that are guilty of one or more of the above offenses. Together, however, they conspired in this caper to make the experience of reading less enjoyable than the author probably intended it to be.
February 15, 2009
Drawing on 60’s New Wave SF(especially Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar), Cyberpunk, and the mainstream novel, McDonald pulls off this incredibly ambitious novel. A near future India broken into different countries and three sexes(a new pronoun is used) which the reader gets immersed in through nine intertwining character lines. This is a future that lives and breathes and is incredibly convincing, and even though the technology is quite interesting(including a frightening look at cybernetic warfare and artificial intelligence), it is the characters that move this thing along. You can’t help but root for all of them, even though they show several shades of gray, and feel as they fail, escape, or meet tragedy. An amazon review(I believe) wrote that all the sex in this book was related to anger, which I couldn’t disagree with more as I found all the sex, well was actually sexy, which is a rare breath of fresh air. Wars about water, new genders, a soap opera entirely run by AIs, cybernetic wars, quantum mechanics, genetically created sabertooth tigers, and political intrigue, are among the speculative elements in this book, and these with the deftly handled ensemble caste should make this appeal equally to fans of speculative and mainstream lit.
September 2, 2013
-Todos los ingredientes del Cyberpunk pero cocinando un plato diferente.-
Género. Ciencia-Ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. En una India desmembrada en diferentes estados a mediados del siglo XXI, las vidas y circunstancias de un policía especializado en la localización y retirada de inteligencias artificiales no autorizadas y/o fuera de control, de una joven periodista freelance de ascendencia afgana, del ayudante y consejero de confianza de la primera ministra, de un diseñador informático de peculiar sexualidad, de una bióloga evolutiva, de un famoso investigador que decide vivir entre el anonimato y la clandestinidad, de un delincuente de medio pelo, de un diletante humorista y uno de los herederos de una enorme corporación, entre otros, se van mezclando junto a las de muchos otros personajes.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ciencia-Ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. En una India desmembrada en diferentes estados a mediados del siglo XXI, las vidas y circunstancias de un policía especializado en la localización y retirada de inteligencias artificiales no autorizadas y/o fuera de control, de una joven periodista freelance de ascendencia afgana, del ayudante y consejero de confianza de la primera ministra, de un diseñador informático de peculiar sexualidad, de una bióloga evolutiva, de un famoso investigador que decide vivir entre el anonimato y la clandestinidad, de un delincuente de medio pelo, de un diletante humorista y uno de los herederos de una enorme corporación, entre otros, se van mezclando junto a las de muchos otros personajes.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
September 3, 2009
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
As I've mentioned here several times before, there are many of us science-fiction fans who believe that the industry has entered a whole new "age" in the last ten years, one major enough to be compared to the four eras that came before it (to be specific, the historic "Golden Age" of the 1930s and '40s; the Modernist-influenced "Silver Age" of the '50s and '60s; the countercultural "New Age" of the '60s and '70s; and the angsty, postmodern "Dark Age" of the '80s and '90s); I myself have mostly been calling this new post-9/11 period the "Accelerated Age" (after the Charles Stross novel) and also sometimes the "Diamond Age" (after the Neal Stephenson one), although of course the fan community as a whole hasn't yet collectively agreed on a term, and probably won't until the age itself is over. And in the best historical tradition, this age is mostly defined in opposition to the period that came right before it; unlike the Dark Age, for example, Accelerated-Age tales tend to be overly optimistic about the future, many times bypassing our current political messes altogether to instead picture how our society might work hundreds or even thousands of years from now, with a whole series of scientific conceits that tend to pop up in book after book, thus defining it as a unified "age" to begin with -- sentient computers; the effortless mixing of the biological and mechanical (otherwise known as the Singularity); a "post-scarcity" society where food is artificially created and money no longer exists; practical immortality through a combination of inexpensive cloning and "brain backups" to infinitely powerful hard drives; and a lot more.
And also like the eras that came before it, the Accelerated Age is mostly being defined through a loose handful of authors who all seem to sorta know each other, or at the very least always seem to be mentioned together in conversations on the topic -- people like the aforementioned Stross and Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, Justina Robson, John Scalzi, Robert J Sawyer, Jeff Vandermeer and more (although to be fair, Mr. Vandermeer has criticized me publicly in the past for lumping all these people together, which I suppose marks the main difference between him as an actual practitioner and me as simply a fan); but out of all these post-9/11 SF authors, it seems sometimes that the one who gets the most consistent amount of praise of them all is Ian McDonald, an Englishman by birth who's lived most of his life in Northern Ireland, part of the much ballyhooed "British Invasion" of the early 2000s which is yet another big calling-card of the Accelerated Age.
And this is ironic, because the majority of McDonald's work does not fit the typical Accelerated-Age mold whatsoever; in fact, what McDonald is mostly known for among fans is being the so-called "heir to cyberpunk," the subgenre from the '80s that mostly defined the Dark Age before him. And that's because McDonald is a master of taking day-after-tomorrow concepts and marrying them to the dirty, sweaty here-and-now, which is exactly what such classic cyberpunk authors as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling did in the '80s to become famous in the first place, itself a rebellious response to the shiny, clean visions of such Silver-Age authors as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov; but unlike this first wave of cyberpunk authors, McDonald does this uniting not among the smoky back alleys of America and western Europe, but rather in the trash-filled slums of such emerging regions as Africa and South America (see for example my review last year of his latest novel, Brasyl), delivering an entire series of third-world fever-dreams that could've never even been imagined by the trenchcoated fans of '80s science-fiction.
And it's all this that finally leads us to what's arguably McDonald's most famous book, River of Gods, originally published in the UK in 2004 and then a few years later in the US by our friends over at Pyr, considered by a whole lot of people to be the single best SF novel on the planet in the last ten years; and I'm happy to report that I just finished the book myself, after recently receiving the brand-new related book of short stories Cyberabad Days, and essentially begging the good folks at Pyr* for a copy of the original so that I could catch up, an incredibly slow yet pleasurable reading experience that took me six weeks altogether, hampered in my case by first having a bad bicycle accident right after starting, then being on a whole series of powerful narcotics the rest of the time, which one could argue made the reading experience even better than normal, but unfortunately also dropped my concentration level to nearly zero, which is why it took me so freaking long to get through these two books in the first place. Whew!
And after finishing it myself, I have to confess that the hype is mostly warranted; if this isn't maybe the single best SF novel of the entire Accelerated Age so far, it's at least in the top five, an infinitely rewarding experience that made me almost immediately want to start all over again on page one after initially finishing. And a big part of this, frankly, is just in its setting alone; because for those who don't know, this is one of the first English-language books in SF history to be set in India, a part of the world that in just the last few years has suddenly become a red-hot topic among an ever-growing amount of Americans and Europeans. And that's because we're in the middle of watching one of the most fascinating moments in that region's entire history, the moment when the population of India is pulling itself kicking and screaming out of third-world status and into the first world; and yes, I know, this is an inherently insulting term to even begin with, a classification dreamt up by rich white males in the middle of the Industrial Age mostly as a way to differentiate themselves from non-whites, which of course is part of what makes it so fascinating, to see whether terms like these are even applicable anymore in this multicultural age of ours.
You see, for Westerners who don't know, India in the 21st century is a giant mass of contradictions, a big reason why it's suddenly becoming of such interest to so many in the West in the first place: it's the world's largest secular democracy, for example, yet with a sizable minority (and growing every day) who believes the country should instead be run under a Hindu-based theocracy, much like how the Muslim nations around them are fundamentally based on Islamic law; it's been a politically unified whole since 1947 now, yet for thousands of years before that was actually a series of constantly warring mini-kingdoms, part of what allowed the British to so easily take over the entire region in the 1700s; and speaking of which, it's a country with infinitely complicated thoughts about its past as a British colony, proud of its Victorian heritage and widespread knowledge of English, even while rightly ashamed of the various indignities it suffered under the so-called "Raj" of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a nation which desperately wishes to be the next great international hub for education and technology, yet a nation where tens of millions still go without electricity, without indoor plumbing; a nation virtually ruled by its explosively growing middle class, yet experiencing all the same bourgeois-based problems as the British did two centuries ago when its own middle class first exploded, a nation where Jane Austen storylines are literally played out in real life every day.
McDonald perfectly understands the drama inherent in such a situation, and puts all these issues to great use in River of Gods, although be warned from the start that you Westerners will need to do a bit of homework to fully appreciate it; as mentioned, for example, you will need to know a little about the longstanding conflict there between Hindus and Muslims (and a little about the Hindu religion in the first place), a little about India's ancient caste system, a little about its former history as a series of warring mini-states, a little about the growing gap between traditional Indian life (think housewives in saris and cows roaming the streets) and modern Indian life (think two-earner families in business suits and clutching iPhones). And that's because this is a major theme of River of Gods as well, the growing divide between old third-world India and the gleaming first-world vision it wants to become, with the entire novel set in the year 2047, the 100th anniversary of the area becoming a unified independent nation in the first place.
Ah, but see, there's trouble in paradise in McDonald's world, which is why it's so important to have a basic understanding of all these cultural issues; just to mention one important example, in River of Gods India isn't even a unified country anymore by 2047, after global warming led to a period of severe drought there in the early 21st century, leading to a breakdown into regional states again and a series of bloody civil-war skirmishes over the dwindling water supply. We then mostly follow the fate of one of these states -- "Bharat," comprising the northeast corner of the former nation, with the religious mecca of Varanasi its new capital...or "Varanasi 2.0" if you will, a head-spinning mix of the ancient and the cutting-edge, with thousand-year-old ghats along the Ganges River now sitting in the shadows of mountainside skyscrapers and maglev trains.
The actual storyline of River of Gods is best left as secret as possible, which is why I'm going to largely skip over it today; but I will say that in the best cyberpunk tradition, it's actually made up of a half-dozen smaller storylines that each stand on their own, almost impossible at first to determine how they fit together until getting closer and closer to the end, and as the lives of the hundred or so major and minor characters on display start interweaving more and more. And I can also mention that the story here is a dense-enough one and laden with enough local issues and terms to make one think that McDonald must be an expat who has spent a substantial amount of time in India himself (and don't forget, by the way, that there's a glossary of terms at the end of the book); and this is in fact one of the other things McDonald is known for, because the fact of the matter (as he has confirmed many times in past interviews) is that the vast majority of his books' details come merely from page-based academic research, along with just a minimum amount of actual traveling through the region in question, almost all of it simply tourist-based traveling instead of pseudo-native backpacker-style. How he manages to turn in novel after novel of such depth using only traditional book-based research is a mystery that sometimes borders on the magical; and it's precisely this that makes McDonald so intensely loved by certain types of literary fans out there, and is precisely one of the reasons so many consider River of Gods the best SF novel written in the last decade.
And then as far as this book's companion piece, Cyberabad Days, the main reason I was sent the pair of volumes in the first place, it's pretty much what you expect -- a collection of standalone short stories all set in the same world as River of Gods, that McDonald has written for various magazines over the last five years, published together here as a whole for the very first time, with all the traditional good and bad things that come with such minor story collections. Surprisingly, though, instead of needing to first read River of Gods for this companion volume to make sense (as is usually the case in these situations), Cyberabad Days actually exists as a great primer to get yourself ready for the bigger main novel; because also in good cyberpunk tradition, in River of Gods McDonald simply drops you right in the middle of things at first, not bothering to explain any of the details of the situation itself but instead letting the reader slowly pick them up here and there over the first 200 pages of that 600-page tome, something that diehard SF fans love but that can drive others a little batty. That of course is one of the biggest benefits of the short-story format in general, is that authors are simply forced to explain things in a much shorter period of time; for those of you who like getting your backstory out of the way quickly, you may actually benefit from tackling the companion book first before even trying the main novel in question.
I have to admit, out of all the books I could've gotten stuck with during a long convalescence from a major accident, I could've done a lot worse than these two; and now after taking my sweet time with them both, I can very easily see why people continue to go so nuts over McDonald's vision of a future India, even half a decade after he first started laying this vision out. It's one of the great pleasures of being a science-fiction book critic in the early 2000s, in my opinion -- a chance to be reading and reviewing this literature right when it's first being written and published, that is -- and after taking in now a pretty fair amount of ultra-contemporary SF, I have to confess that I too have become a pretty slavish fanboy of McDonald. If you're looking for stories that elevate themselves above the usual tropes of the genre, you can't really go wrong by picking up this groundbreaking saga; here's hoping that McDonald has lots more of them in store for us down the road.
*And by the way, all kidding aside, I do want to thank the hardworking PR staff at Pyr once again for all their help; over the last year I've probably requested at least a dozen old backtitles from their catalog, and in every case they've sent them along with a smile and nary a complaint, not to mention of course all the new titles they're actively seeking publicity for, a huge difference in attitude from some other SF publishers who shall remain nameless. It's a common trait among a lot of publishing companies these days, to treat litbloggers like sh-t, so I always appreciate it when coming across companies like Pyr who take bloggers as seriously as any other book reviewers out there.
As I've mentioned here several times before, there are many of us science-fiction fans who believe that the industry has entered a whole new "age" in the last ten years, one major enough to be compared to the four eras that came before it (to be specific, the historic "Golden Age" of the 1930s and '40s; the Modernist-influenced "Silver Age" of the '50s and '60s; the countercultural "New Age" of the '60s and '70s; and the angsty, postmodern "Dark Age" of the '80s and '90s); I myself have mostly been calling this new post-9/11 period the "Accelerated Age" (after the Charles Stross novel) and also sometimes the "Diamond Age" (after the Neal Stephenson one), although of course the fan community as a whole hasn't yet collectively agreed on a term, and probably won't until the age itself is over. And in the best historical tradition, this age is mostly defined in opposition to the period that came right before it; unlike the Dark Age, for example, Accelerated-Age tales tend to be overly optimistic about the future, many times bypassing our current political messes altogether to instead picture how our society might work hundreds or even thousands of years from now, with a whole series of scientific conceits that tend to pop up in book after book, thus defining it as a unified "age" to begin with -- sentient computers; the effortless mixing of the biological and mechanical (otherwise known as the Singularity); a "post-scarcity" society where food is artificially created and money no longer exists; practical immortality through a combination of inexpensive cloning and "brain backups" to infinitely powerful hard drives; and a lot more.
And also like the eras that came before it, the Accelerated Age is mostly being defined through a loose handful of authors who all seem to sorta know each other, or at the very least always seem to be mentioned together in conversations on the topic -- people like the aforementioned Stross and Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, Justina Robson, John Scalzi, Robert J Sawyer, Jeff Vandermeer and more (although to be fair, Mr. Vandermeer has criticized me publicly in the past for lumping all these people together, which I suppose marks the main difference between him as an actual practitioner and me as simply a fan); but out of all these post-9/11 SF authors, it seems sometimes that the one who gets the most consistent amount of praise of them all is Ian McDonald, an Englishman by birth who's lived most of his life in Northern Ireland, part of the much ballyhooed "British Invasion" of the early 2000s which is yet another big calling-card of the Accelerated Age.
And this is ironic, because the majority of McDonald's work does not fit the typical Accelerated-Age mold whatsoever; in fact, what McDonald is mostly known for among fans is being the so-called "heir to cyberpunk," the subgenre from the '80s that mostly defined the Dark Age before him. And that's because McDonald is a master of taking day-after-tomorrow concepts and marrying them to the dirty, sweaty here-and-now, which is exactly what such classic cyberpunk authors as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling did in the '80s to become famous in the first place, itself a rebellious response to the shiny, clean visions of such Silver-Age authors as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov; but unlike this first wave of cyberpunk authors, McDonald does this uniting not among the smoky back alleys of America and western Europe, but rather in the trash-filled slums of such emerging regions as Africa and South America (see for example my review last year of his latest novel, Brasyl), delivering an entire series of third-world fever-dreams that could've never even been imagined by the trenchcoated fans of '80s science-fiction.
And it's all this that finally leads us to what's arguably McDonald's most famous book, River of Gods, originally published in the UK in 2004 and then a few years later in the US by our friends over at Pyr, considered by a whole lot of people to be the single best SF novel on the planet in the last ten years; and I'm happy to report that I just finished the book myself, after recently receiving the brand-new related book of short stories Cyberabad Days, and essentially begging the good folks at Pyr* for a copy of the original so that I could catch up, an incredibly slow yet pleasurable reading experience that took me six weeks altogether, hampered in my case by first having a bad bicycle accident right after starting, then being on a whole series of powerful narcotics the rest of the time, which one could argue made the reading experience even better than normal, but unfortunately also dropped my concentration level to nearly zero, which is why it took me so freaking long to get through these two books in the first place. Whew!
And after finishing it myself, I have to confess that the hype is mostly warranted; if this isn't maybe the single best SF novel of the entire Accelerated Age so far, it's at least in the top five, an infinitely rewarding experience that made me almost immediately want to start all over again on page one after initially finishing. And a big part of this, frankly, is just in its setting alone; because for those who don't know, this is one of the first English-language books in SF history to be set in India, a part of the world that in just the last few years has suddenly become a red-hot topic among an ever-growing amount of Americans and Europeans. And that's because we're in the middle of watching one of the most fascinating moments in that region's entire history, the moment when the population of India is pulling itself kicking and screaming out of third-world status and into the first world; and yes, I know, this is an inherently insulting term to even begin with, a classification dreamt up by rich white males in the middle of the Industrial Age mostly as a way to differentiate themselves from non-whites, which of course is part of what makes it so fascinating, to see whether terms like these are even applicable anymore in this multicultural age of ours.
You see, for Westerners who don't know, India in the 21st century is a giant mass of contradictions, a big reason why it's suddenly becoming of such interest to so many in the West in the first place: it's the world's largest secular democracy, for example, yet with a sizable minority (and growing every day) who believes the country should instead be run under a Hindu-based theocracy, much like how the Muslim nations around them are fundamentally based on Islamic law; it's been a politically unified whole since 1947 now, yet for thousands of years before that was actually a series of constantly warring mini-kingdoms, part of what allowed the British to so easily take over the entire region in the 1700s; and speaking of which, it's a country with infinitely complicated thoughts about its past as a British colony, proud of its Victorian heritage and widespread knowledge of English, even while rightly ashamed of the various indignities it suffered under the so-called "Raj" of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a nation which desperately wishes to be the next great international hub for education and technology, yet a nation where tens of millions still go without electricity, without indoor plumbing; a nation virtually ruled by its explosively growing middle class, yet experiencing all the same bourgeois-based problems as the British did two centuries ago when its own middle class first exploded, a nation where Jane Austen storylines are literally played out in real life every day.
McDonald perfectly understands the drama inherent in such a situation, and puts all these issues to great use in River of Gods, although be warned from the start that you Westerners will need to do a bit of homework to fully appreciate it; as mentioned, for example, you will need to know a little about the longstanding conflict there between Hindus and Muslims (and a little about the Hindu religion in the first place), a little about India's ancient caste system, a little about its former history as a series of warring mini-states, a little about the growing gap between traditional Indian life (think housewives in saris and cows roaming the streets) and modern Indian life (think two-earner families in business suits and clutching iPhones). And that's because this is a major theme of River of Gods as well, the growing divide between old third-world India and the gleaming first-world vision it wants to become, with the entire novel set in the year 2047, the 100th anniversary of the area becoming a unified independent nation in the first place.
Ah, but see, there's trouble in paradise in McDonald's world, which is why it's so important to have a basic understanding of all these cultural issues; just to mention one important example, in River of Gods India isn't even a unified country anymore by 2047, after global warming led to a period of severe drought there in the early 21st century, leading to a breakdown into regional states again and a series of bloody civil-war skirmishes over the dwindling water supply. We then mostly follow the fate of one of these states -- "Bharat," comprising the northeast corner of the former nation, with the religious mecca of Varanasi its new capital...or "Varanasi 2.0" if you will, a head-spinning mix of the ancient and the cutting-edge, with thousand-year-old ghats along the Ganges River now sitting in the shadows of mountainside skyscrapers and maglev trains.
The actual storyline of River of Gods is best left as secret as possible, which is why I'm going to largely skip over it today; but I will say that in the best cyberpunk tradition, it's actually made up of a half-dozen smaller storylines that each stand on their own, almost impossible at first to determine how they fit together until getting closer and closer to the end, and as the lives of the hundred or so major and minor characters on display start interweaving more and more. And I can also mention that the story here is a dense-enough one and laden with enough local issues and terms to make one think that McDonald must be an expat who has spent a substantial amount of time in India himself (and don't forget, by the way, that there's a glossary of terms at the end of the book); and this is in fact one of the other things McDonald is known for, because the fact of the matter (as he has confirmed many times in past interviews) is that the vast majority of his books' details come merely from page-based academic research, along with just a minimum amount of actual traveling through the region in question, almost all of it simply tourist-based traveling instead of pseudo-native backpacker-style. How he manages to turn in novel after novel of such depth using only traditional book-based research is a mystery that sometimes borders on the magical; and it's precisely this that makes McDonald so intensely loved by certain types of literary fans out there, and is precisely one of the reasons so many consider River of Gods the best SF novel written in the last decade.
And then as far as this book's companion piece, Cyberabad Days, the main reason I was sent the pair of volumes in the first place, it's pretty much what you expect -- a collection of standalone short stories all set in the same world as River of Gods, that McDonald has written for various magazines over the last five years, published together here as a whole for the very first time, with all the traditional good and bad things that come with such minor story collections. Surprisingly, though, instead of needing to first read River of Gods for this companion volume to make sense (as is usually the case in these situations), Cyberabad Days actually exists as a great primer to get yourself ready for the bigger main novel; because also in good cyberpunk tradition, in River of Gods McDonald simply drops you right in the middle of things at first, not bothering to explain any of the details of the situation itself but instead letting the reader slowly pick them up here and there over the first 200 pages of that 600-page tome, something that diehard SF fans love but that can drive others a little batty. That of course is one of the biggest benefits of the short-story format in general, is that authors are simply forced to explain things in a much shorter period of time; for those of you who like getting your backstory out of the way quickly, you may actually benefit from tackling the companion book first before even trying the main novel in question.
I have to admit, out of all the books I could've gotten stuck with during a long convalescence from a major accident, I could've done a lot worse than these two; and now after taking my sweet time with them both, I can very easily see why people continue to go so nuts over McDonald's vision of a future India, even half a decade after he first started laying this vision out. It's one of the great pleasures of being a science-fiction book critic in the early 2000s, in my opinion -- a chance to be reading and reviewing this literature right when it's first being written and published, that is -- and after taking in now a pretty fair amount of ultra-contemporary SF, I have to confess that I too have become a pretty slavish fanboy of McDonald. If you're looking for stories that elevate themselves above the usual tropes of the genre, you can't really go wrong by picking up this groundbreaking saga; here's hoping that McDonald has lots more of them in store for us down the road.
*And by the way, all kidding aside, I do want to thank the hardworking PR staff at Pyr once again for all their help; over the last year I've probably requested at least a dozen old backtitles from their catalog, and in every case they've sent them along with a smile and nary a complaint, not to mention of course all the new titles they're actively seeking publicity for, a huge difference in attitude from some other SF publishers who shall remain nameless. It's a common trait among a lot of publishing companies these days, to treat litbloggers like sh-t, so I always appreciate it when coming across companies like Pyr who take bloggers as seriously as any other book reviewers out there.
April 18, 2007
The one set in a near-future India, where a non-natural object is found in the asteroid belt which is older than the solar system and contains pictures of three humans currently alive. Leadership and scientific struggles at the nation's largest power company; a religious revolt; a Muslim government minister brought down by his passion for an artificial third gender called nutes; AIs thousands of times more intelligent than humans, outlawed and hunted down by a police branch called Krishna Cops.
I would have been willing to sacrifice a good deal of this breadth for just a little depth. The characters are chessmen: they have a certain set of characteristics at the start of the book, a certain pattern of moves, and they make those moves, and at the end of the book their circumstances may have changed, but the characters themselves are entirely unchanged, unless they're dead.
This is a grand old SF characterization tradition, of course, and at least these characters are plausible, unlike the Buck Rogers-style SF characters -- but still, in the end they don't read as real people because they walk through their established paces without changing.
I found the politics completely opaque, but I'm ignorant of Indian politics (and even geography) and probably didn't read carefully enough.
I have a serious problem with the nutes. They should be utterly alien -- they've had all gender-related pathways removed from their brains and their body chemistry, in favor of a system by which they consciously control their hormone release (Tal decides it needs adrenaline, so it pushes a button) -- and yet they act either like very girly women or like very stereotypically diva-ish gay men.
Possibly this wouldn't trouble me quite so much if there were any actual gay people in the story, but there aren't. And except for Vishram Ray (who I find is the only major character I have any real affection for), there's really no normal sexuality in the book -- when arousal is reported, most of the time it's related to cruelty or danger.
The thing that interests me most -- the AIs and their stories -- is covered in about three pages at the end and then rushed offstage.
I would have been willing to sacrifice a good deal of this breadth for just a little depth. The characters are chessmen: they have a certain set of characteristics at the start of the book, a certain pattern of moves, and they make those moves, and at the end of the book their circumstances may have changed, but the characters themselves are entirely unchanged, unless they're dead.
This is a grand old SF characterization tradition, of course, and at least these characters are plausible, unlike the Buck Rogers-style SF characters -- but still, in the end they don't read as real people because they walk through their established paces without changing.
I found the politics completely opaque, but I'm ignorant of Indian politics (and even geography) and probably didn't read carefully enough.
I have a serious problem with the nutes. They should be utterly alien -- they've had all gender-related pathways removed from their brains and their body chemistry, in favor of a system by which they consciously control their hormone release (Tal decides it needs adrenaline, so it pushes a button) -- and yet they act either like very girly women or like very stereotypically diva-ish gay men.
Possibly this wouldn't trouble me quite so much if there were any actual gay people in the story, but there aren't. And except for Vishram Ray (who I find is the only major character I have any real affection for), there's really no normal sexuality in the book -- when arousal is reported, most of the time it's related to cruelty or danger.
The thing that interests me most -- the AIs and their stories -- is covered in about three pages at the end and then rushed offstage.
September 29, 2024
When you pick this up and hold the hard cover in your hands, its heft is a little intimidating. When you put it down 597 pages later, you’ll wonder how he managed to keep it so focused, how he kept it from wandering all over the place. Not that it doesn’t have a tremendous scope (borders on “epic” but I feel I must reserve that adjective for a space opera review) but McDonald keeps it moving at an aggressive pace. Every back alley detour and out-of-town foray is very deliberate and very much part of the storytelling.
I won’t go on at length about the Indian-post-cyberpunk-scifi-omg-wtf-how-awesome-is-that?-ness that you might have seen elsewhere. I’ll keep it at this: it was well-chosen, well-developed, and in the end made sense. (Which is to say that putting it in India... excuse me: Bharat didn’t feel like some cloying, waste-of-time, you’re-just-doing-this-to-be-cute gimmick.)
While I wouldn’t say that it was totally new or ground-breaking fiction, McDonald moves this piece along efficiently and engages you with some well-developed characters. The “like an Indian Neuromancer” comparisons floating around out there are not far off. That being said, it’s a more mature, more sophisticated Neuromancer. The text wants for nothing and (I would say) achieves its goals quite well. McDonald’s treatment of “the Singularity” here is delivered in a palpable, sympathetic way: You invent your own doom.
If this novel is indicative of the quality of McDonald’s other work: I’m there.
original: [http://blog.founddrama.net/2007/04/ri...]
I won’t go on at length about the Indian-post-cyberpunk-scifi-omg-wtf-how-awesome-is-that?-ness that you might have seen elsewhere. I’ll keep it at this: it was well-chosen, well-developed, and in the end made sense. (Which is to say that putting it in India... excuse me: Bharat didn’t feel like some cloying, waste-of-time, you’re-just-doing-this-to-be-cute gimmick.)
While I wouldn’t say that it was totally new or ground-breaking fiction, McDonald moves this piece along efficiently and engages you with some well-developed characters. The “like an Indian Neuromancer” comparisons floating around out there are not far off. That being said, it’s a more mature, more sophisticated Neuromancer. The text wants for nothing and (I would say) achieves its goals quite well. McDonald’s treatment of “the Singularity” here is delivered in a palpable, sympathetic way: You invent your own doom.
If this novel is indicative of the quality of McDonald’s other work: I’m there.
original: [http://blog.founddrama.net/2007/04/ri...]
August 28, 2011
I respect what Ian was trying to do with this novel, I really do, but his ambition, I think, exceeded the execution to the point of muddling ambiguity. Mr. MacDonald's a wordsmith, there's not doubt about it, and some of his descriptions are small morsels of pure prose desert. He is truly a master of the language and plays with it beautifully. The issue, however, is that one will read pages, perhaps a chapter, and realize how very little actually occurred in the scene and how little it contributes to the overall story. It's very self-indulgent, like an arena-band guitar solo. He's showing off and we can all tell. It scrambles the story and by bombarding the reader with lengthy Indian names, it makes the reading tedious. By including an inadequate glossary in the back, it's almost admitting the problem. Yes, Mr MacDonald, we're aware of your fountain of Indian cultural knowledge, but by beating us over the head repeatedly... it comes off as a bit of a middle-finger.
And to the story and plot itself... The novel's why too long. What could have been accomplished here, could have been accomplished without four or five of the main characters, and a cool 350 pages as opposed to epic level 580 pages. By attempting to cover too many esoteric pontifications on reality and this AI polyverse extrapolation, he more or less draws and quarters his plot, leaving the remnants a bloody incomplete blob. So many questions get thrown at the reader with so very few answers, with little over fifty pages left to go in this overwritten beast, I had that uncomfortable 'Lost' feeling a few episodes before its series finale. A sloppy attempt is made at tying up the loose ends, but when it comes to the characters resolutions, the reader's left cold.
When it came to the 'future-shock' element, Ian wasn't able to deliver. This did not have that Neuromancer cyberpunk strangeness. Sadly, for a book meant to take place in 2047, too many pop references felt dated in 2010. The Zeitgeist of this novel is definitely 2005, not 2047. I have not been to India, but the one described in City of Gods, felt very 00's, more or less the India of today but with robots and gadgets... the cultural shift wasn't there.
For that type of fair, I would recommend Paolo Bacagullupi's The Windup Girl, a similar setting in Thailand, but the world is truly a product of its future era, the detail much more ironed, less extrapolation and more futurism.
I would like to read more of Ian's stuff, but would hope I could find something more to the point, less characters, and less overwrought. This novel was just to self-indulgent and I think undeserving of its high praise.
And to the story and plot itself... The novel's why too long. What could have been accomplished here, could have been accomplished without four or five of the main characters, and a cool 350 pages as opposed to epic level 580 pages. By attempting to cover too many esoteric pontifications on reality and this AI polyverse extrapolation, he more or less draws and quarters his plot, leaving the remnants a bloody incomplete blob. So many questions get thrown at the reader with so very few answers, with little over fifty pages left to go in this overwritten beast, I had that uncomfortable 'Lost' feeling a few episodes before its series finale. A sloppy attempt is made at tying up the loose ends, but when it comes to the characters resolutions, the reader's left cold.
When it came to the 'future-shock' element, Ian wasn't able to deliver. This did not have that Neuromancer cyberpunk strangeness. Sadly, for a book meant to take place in 2047, too many pop references felt dated in 2010. The Zeitgeist of this novel is definitely 2005, not 2047. I have not been to India, but the one described in City of Gods, felt very 00's, more or less the India of today but with robots and gadgets... the cultural shift wasn't there.
For that type of fair, I would recommend Paolo Bacagullupi's The Windup Girl, a similar setting in Thailand, but the world is truly a product of its future era, the detail much more ironed, less extrapolation and more futurism.
I would like to read more of Ian's stuff, but would hope I could find something more to the point, less characters, and less overwrought. This novel was just to self-indulgent and I think undeserving of its high praise.
July 25, 2013
Ovvero libri di genere fantascientifico considerati minori per la loro appartenenza allo stesso, impossibilitati alla scalata letteraria fino al titolo che più gli competerebbe, quello di Literary Fiction (Letteratura Alta).
Questo tomo di Ian McDonald è magistrale, uno per cui potreste spendere la parola di capolavoro. Ve lo dice una lettrice da sempre allergica all'India come contesto geografico e come ispirazione cultural-religiosa in ogni metodologia narrativa esistente.
Cinquecento e passa pagine di vastissimo eppur fittissimo affresco corale dell'India e del Mondo nel 2047, sull'orlo della catastrofe ecologica e dello scontro razziale con le AI e gli ibridi da esse resi possibili (cfr Nute & Brahmini, il prodotto meglio riuscito della visionarietà di McDonald in un libro che trabocca di visioni meritevoli di riflessione) non sono la più classica lettura estiva da ombrellone. Il libro però è così maturo per intreccio, scrittura e riflessioni sull'intelligenza artificiale (finalmente intesa come figlia di una realtà virtuale che la rende tanto incomprensibile e superiore all'uomo quanto la divinità) da farsi facilmente perdonare la fatica iniziale nel ricordarei numerosissimi personaggi e intrecci. Saprà conquistarvi tanto da perdonargli anche il folle ensemble di POV (punti di vista) alternati paragrafo dopo paragrafo nel climax conclusivo.
Per una volta che l'edizione Urania è meritoria: edizione integrale con collana Jumbo appositamente creata (resuscitata?), traduzione notevole (una decina di typos e un glossario indispensabile per un libro che in lingua originale deve essere un incubo) e un costo irrisorio, soprattutto considerando l'edizione digitale.
Difficile che da qui a dicembre qualcuno rubi il titolo di "Miglior Urania del 2013" a questo libro.
Questo tomo di Ian McDonald è magistrale, uno per cui potreste spendere la parola di capolavoro. Ve lo dice una lettrice da sempre allergica all'India come contesto geografico e come ispirazione cultural-religiosa in ogni metodologia narrativa esistente.
Cinquecento e passa pagine di vastissimo eppur fittissimo affresco corale dell'India e del Mondo nel 2047, sull'orlo della catastrofe ecologica e dello scontro razziale con le AI e gli ibridi da esse resi possibili (cfr Nute & Brahmini, il prodotto meglio riuscito della visionarietà di McDonald in un libro che trabocca di visioni meritevoli di riflessione) non sono la più classica lettura estiva da ombrellone. Il libro però è così maturo per intreccio, scrittura e riflessioni sull'intelligenza artificiale (finalmente intesa come figlia di una realtà virtuale che la rende tanto incomprensibile e superiore all'uomo quanto la divinità) da farsi facilmente perdonare la fatica iniziale nel ricordarei numerosissimi personaggi e intrecci. Saprà conquistarvi tanto da perdonargli anche il folle ensemble di POV (punti di vista) alternati paragrafo dopo paragrafo nel climax conclusivo.
Per una volta che l'edizione Urania è meritoria: edizione integrale con collana Jumbo appositamente creata (resuscitata?), traduzione notevole (una decina di typos e un glossario indispensabile per un libro che in lingua originale deve essere un incubo) e un costo irrisorio, soprattutto considerando l'edizione digitale.
Difficile che da qui a dicembre qualcuno rubi il titolo di "Miglior Urania del 2013" a questo libro.
January 14, 2020
Full disclosure, I'm a fan of this author. However, I’m not a slavish fan. Some of his books really shine, and others don’t. For example, I really liked New Moon (Luna #1) (my review) , but did not finish Desolation Road. This book is somewhere in the middle. It’s well written and richly detailed. The story had an old fashioned cyberpunk feel to it. It also feeds into my current fetish for stories of the historical British Raj. The near-future world building was exceptionally good. Frankly, it was immersive. However, the ensemble cast in addition to the near-lethal dose of south-Asia diluted the plot whilst encumbering the story.
My version of the book was a weighty 500-pages. Some of these pages went fast and others very slowly.
Writing was good. This includes: dialog, descriptive and action scenes. The recent books by this author have been likewise been solid. The tech-speak, Hinglish and foreign language usage was credible. Note the book contains a Glossary.
Note that this story includes: sex, drugs, Indian pop and classical music. This book is likely inappropriate for Young Adult readers. The sex scenes may offend bougie sensibilities, but may tempt others to try this at home. Substance abuse involved alcohol and tobacco usage. In addition, soft-core drugs commonly found in South-Asia were consumed. The near-futuristic cocktails sounded tasty to me. Hard-core near-futuristic drug usage was also involved. Music was woven into the plot lines. However, most interesting to me were music references in the “Soundtrack” section at the back of the book. It had me looking into Asian Anokha.
The ensemble cast posed the largest problem to me. There are a lot of characters: Shiv, Mr. Nanda, Shaheen Badoor Khan, Najia, Lisa Durnau, Prof. Thomas Lull, Tal, Vishram Ray, Ajmer Rao, etc.. Each character had a POV. Some of the characters were better than others. I liked the female characters better than the male. I had an easier time with the Anglo characters than with the Indian. Frankly, the book could have been carried with just: Lisa, Lull, Ajmer and Mr. Nandha with a few secondary characters. However, many of these extra characters did have merit. For example, I thought Tal was a great idea. (I thought the Shiv character was a bad idea.) Yet, like many ensemble novels set in a foreign land (like War and Peace ) keeping track of a large number of characters, switching POVs, and their sub-plots with unfamiliar or unpronounceable names in a foreign land was a chore at times.
Plotting was good, but not excellent. The many POVs that drove the plot threads forward were well done. Switching was aptly handled. The inevitable convergence toward the end of the story saw characters and plot lines dying like flies on a sacred cow. I suspect some of these characters will reappear in another book in the series. However, it was early predictable who the true protagonists were going to be at the end of the story.
The world building was in places excellent and others 'good'. I remain very impressed by McDonald’s work at creating a credible future history in a foreign culture. Having worked with and having Indian friends, I’m somewhat familiar with the territory covered. I would be quibbling by making any objections I had over the rendition of near-future India. Tech was a little more problematic. For example, the degree of military-tech automation found earlier in the story would have made the contemporary-styled, mil-tech of the armoured brigades found later in the story long obsolete. The details of the advanced AI and zero-point energy were credible, but a bit thin in places. I also thought there was a bit of socio-economic hand-waving over the effect of AIs and inexpensive automation on a sub-continent with a very large surplus population of greatly uneven wealth and education. Yet, I thought this was some of the best cyberpunk-ish world building I’ve read in a while.
I liked this book. It’s was not perfect, but it was very good. It was both cyberpunk-ish and strange, but in a good way. There was high-degree of Edu-tainment for folks interested in the Indian sub-continent. My objections to the book involved its length, which was driven by the many POVs. I didn’t think they were all necessary. I would greatly have appreciated a shorter book, or at least one with fewer characters.
I will likely be reading the second book in the series Cyberabad Days which is a collection of short stories and essays in the author’s India 2047 universe.
My version of the book was a weighty 500-pages. Some of these pages went fast and others very slowly.
Writing was good. This includes: dialog, descriptive and action scenes. The recent books by this author have been likewise been solid. The tech-speak, Hinglish and foreign language usage was credible. Note the book contains a Glossary.
Note that this story includes: sex, drugs, Indian pop and classical music. This book is likely inappropriate for Young Adult readers. The sex scenes may offend bougie sensibilities, but may tempt others to try this at home. Substance abuse involved alcohol and tobacco usage. In addition, soft-core drugs commonly found in South-Asia were consumed. The near-futuristic cocktails sounded tasty to me. Hard-core near-futuristic drug usage was also involved. Music was woven into the plot lines. However, most interesting to me were music references in the “Soundtrack” section at the back of the book. It had me looking into Asian Anokha.
The ensemble cast posed the largest problem to me. There are a lot of characters: Shiv, Mr. Nanda, Shaheen Badoor Khan, Najia, Lisa Durnau, Prof. Thomas Lull, Tal, Vishram Ray, Ajmer Rao, etc.. Each character had a POV. Some of the characters were better than others. I liked the female characters better than the male. I had an easier time with the Anglo characters than with the Indian. Frankly, the book could have been carried with just: Lisa, Lull, Ajmer and Mr. Nandha with a few secondary characters. However, many of these extra characters did have merit. For example, I thought Tal was a great idea. (I thought the Shiv character was a bad idea.) Yet, like many ensemble novels set in a foreign land (like War and Peace ) keeping track of a large number of characters, switching POVs, and their sub-plots with unfamiliar or unpronounceable names in a foreign land was a chore at times.
Plotting was good, but not excellent. The many POVs that drove the plot threads forward were well done. Switching was aptly handled. The inevitable convergence toward the end of the story saw characters and plot lines dying like flies on a sacred cow. I suspect some of these characters will reappear in another book in the series. However, it was early predictable who the true protagonists were going to be at the end of the story.
The world building was in places excellent and others 'good'. I remain very impressed by McDonald’s work at creating a credible future history in a foreign culture. Having worked with and having Indian friends, I’m somewhat familiar with the territory covered. I would be quibbling by making any objections I had over the rendition of near-future India. Tech was a little more problematic. For example, the degree of military-tech automation found earlier in the story would have made the contemporary-styled, mil-tech of the armoured brigades found later in the story long obsolete. The details of the advanced AI and zero-point energy were credible, but a bit thin in places. I also thought there was a bit of socio-economic hand-waving over the effect of AIs and inexpensive automation on a sub-continent with a very large surplus population of greatly uneven wealth and education. Yet, I thought this was some of the best cyberpunk-ish world building I’ve read in a while.
I liked this book. It’s was not perfect, but it was very good. It was both cyberpunk-ish and strange, but in a good way. There was high-degree of Edu-tainment for folks interested in the Indian sub-continent. My objections to the book involved its length, which was driven by the many POVs. I didn’t think they were all necessary. I would greatly have appreciated a shorter book, or at least one with fewer characters.
I will likely be reading the second book in the series Cyberabad Days which is a collection of short stories and essays in the author’s India 2047 universe.
June 14, 2015
A kitchen sink novel of catastrophe, salacious sex, and gritty businessisms buoyed together amidst a well-executed cohesion of theme, culture, and linguistic rhythms. McDonald throws it all in: AI, multiverse theory, Urban Combat Robots, media obsession, third gender and does it with style and purpose. A world where gods and data collide.
December 30, 2021
Няма как да не сравнявам тази творба на Макдоналд с „Дервишката къща“, която ме запали по творчеството му. При подобно сравнение обаче „Реката на боговете“ издиша. Не е чак такъв проблем, все пак ги делят пет години писателска практика (макар да не е писател от вчера), което се отразява.
Тук ги има проблемите на „къщата“, които може да са проблеми само за мен и явно са типични за творчеството му. Сегашното време, което използва успява да накърти в толкова много страници. При положение, че имаме за основа Индия и нейната кастова система, а разделението на много бедни и свръх богати винаги е бил един от стълбовете на киберпънка, някак пънкът го няма, а авторът ни потапя в един свят сладникаво приличащ на сапунката, която е част от сюжета. Фантастичните допуски не са достатъчно смели и са експлоатирани доволно много от колегите му още преди тридесетина години и екзотичната атмосфера, този път не успява да покрие пропуска. Съдбите на множеството герои не се припокриват толкова добре, колкото в другия споменат роман, а и прекаленото количество страници отделено за развитието на характерите им не се оправдава на финала, където две трети биват изхвърлени в нищото и не подлежат на каквото и да е развитие, въпреки преживените катаклизми.
Но да се потопим в пъстроцветната Индия, където един сериал с кибер герои владее сърцата на многомилионната си аудитория. Където един комик е принуден да застане на чело на енергийна компания движеща се по острието на новите технологии. Където един полицай от отдела за борба с изкуствените интелекти ще направи огромен кариерен пробив. Където един хирургично променен нют ще се опари от интригите на големия град. Където политиката и войната ще вземат огромни жертви. Където изкуствените интелекти мечтаят за собствена вселена. Където една професорка по физика ще се припознае в хилядолетен космически артефакт. И още доволно много съдби, мечтания и падения ще се преплетат в шеметна футуристична, но плашещо реално звучаща история.
Комата отново е избила рибата с ненормално добър превод.
Предполагам няма да видим на кирилица книгата за Бразилия, което е жалко.
Тук ги има проблемите на „къщата“, които може да са проблеми само за мен и явно са типични за творчеството му. Сегашното време, което използва успява да накърти в толкова много страници. При положение, че имаме за основа Индия и нейната кастова система, а разделението на много бедни и свръх богати винаги е бил един от стълбовете на киберпънка, някак пънкът го няма, а авторът ни потапя в един свят сладникаво приличащ на сапунката, която е част от сюжета. Фантастичните допуски не са достатъчно смели и са експлоатирани доволно много от колегите му още преди тридесетина години и екзотичната атмосфера, този път не успява да покрие пропуска. Съдбите на множеството герои не се припокриват толкова добре, колкото в другия споменат роман, а и прекаленото количество страници отделено за развитието на характерите им не се оправдава на финала, където две трети биват изхвърлени в нищото и не подлежат на каквото и да е развитие, въпреки преживените катаклизми.
Но да се потопим в пъстроцветната Индия, където един сериал с кибер герои владее сърцата на многомилионната си аудитория. Където един комик е принуден да застане на чело на енергийна компания движеща се по острието на новите технологии. Където един полицай от отдела за борба с изкуствените интелекти ще направи огромен кариерен пробив. Където един хирургично променен нют ще се опари от интригите на големия град. Където политиката и войната ще вземат огромни жертви. Където изкуствените интелекти мечтаят за собствена вселена. Където една професорка по физика ще се припознае в хилядолетен космически артефакт. И още доволно много съдби, мечтания и падения ще се преплетат в шеметна футуристична, но плашещо реално звучаща история.
Комата отново е избила рибата с ненормално добър превод.
Предполагам няма да видим на кирилица книгата за Бразилия, което е жалко.
June 26, 2018
I have been wanting to read this book for so long mainly because it was a futuristic SF set in India in 2047 and there has been some highly positive reviews around. So, I have managed to get my hands around it finally and here are my thoughts.
Most of my reactions and feelings are mixed. I loved some aspects of the story while some of the things I didn't like very much. First I will talk about the things that I really liked. The setting is one of the most unique that I have ever read. I am sure there aren't many books set in India, especially in a futuristic India. The India that is presented to us here is at times very familiar, but is also very alien in the way the humans and the technology evolved completely beyond our comprehension. The only slightly bad thing I can say about this is that Ian McDonald determined in the way of writing a realistic India seems to have stuck himself in a mire of Indian clichés and stereotypes.
The next thing that I really liked about the book is the central conflict that exists at the heart of the story. This book has many POVs(way too many in my opinion) and many storylines that intersect and overlap throughout the story. But the central conflict is this conflict of interests between humans and artificial intelligences, now this itself in not exactly new to science fiction, but I really loved how fresh Ian McDonald's take was on the issue and how cleverly he blends Indian mythology with the story. I don't want to get deep into it for fear of spoilers, but that was very very good indeed.
Now to a few things that I didn't like. First of all, let's talk a bit about the writing style itself. Ian McDonald has a very different writing style, it is constantly changing from normal third person to random not quite stream of consciousness style and sometimes it really works when you are jumping around the thoughts of the person you are following and sometimes it is so jarring that the whole chapter ends up nearly incomprehensible. This is also what you call a hard sci-fi and we may not always understand the things that are being explained.
The other thing that I didn't exactly like is that there are way too many POVs and I felt that the story could have been done without a few of them and the overall pacing could have been better.
Finally, even with all these things I rated this book 4 stars mainly because of the ending. It was one of those endings that was ambiguous and not everything is completely explained but I still loved it because of how intense and awesome everything at this point had become. And also I felt the overall story stands pretty good even with some things messing up the pacing. I am also really sold on how good Ian McDonald writes and I am looking forward to read more books from him.
Most of my reactions and feelings are mixed. I loved some aspects of the story while some of the things I didn't like very much. First I will talk about the things that I really liked. The setting is one of the most unique that I have ever read. I am sure there aren't many books set in India, especially in a futuristic India. The India that is presented to us here is at times very familiar, but is also very alien in the way the humans and the technology evolved completely beyond our comprehension. The only slightly bad thing I can say about this is that Ian McDonald determined in the way of writing a realistic India seems to have stuck himself in a mire of Indian clichés and stereotypes.
The next thing that I really liked about the book is the central conflict that exists at the heart of the story. This book has many POVs(way too many in my opinion) and many storylines that intersect and overlap throughout the story. But the central conflict is this conflict of interests between humans and artificial intelligences, now this itself in not exactly new to science fiction, but I really loved how fresh Ian McDonald's take was on the issue and how cleverly he blends Indian mythology with the story. I don't want to get deep into it for fear of spoilers, but that was very very good indeed.
Now to a few things that I didn't like. First of all, let's talk a bit about the writing style itself. Ian McDonald has a very different writing style, it is constantly changing from normal third person to random not quite stream of consciousness style and sometimes it really works when you are jumping around the thoughts of the person you are following and sometimes it is so jarring that the whole chapter ends up nearly incomprehensible. This is also what you call a hard sci-fi and we may not always understand the things that are being explained.
The other thing that I didn't exactly like is that there are way too many POVs and I felt that the story could have been done without a few of them and the overall pacing could have been better.
Finally, even with all these things I rated this book 4 stars mainly because of the ending. It was one of those endings that was ambiguous and not everything is completely explained but I still loved it because of how intense and awesome everything at this point had become. And also I felt the overall story stands pretty good even with some things messing up the pacing. I am also really sold on how good Ian McDonald writes and I am looking forward to read more books from him.
September 7, 2019
"Река на боговете" е идеално съчетание от магията на далечна Индия и мечтите за бъдещето. Подобна на произведенията на Дейвид Мичъл - с дузината герои с навързани съдби, както и заради специфичния поглед към бъдещето - книгата може да отнесе всеки почитател на жанра, гарантирано. Това е научна фантастика от наистина високо ниво и написана от наистина талантлив фантаст.
"Река на боговете" за мен е изключително елегантна сплав между всичко онова, което е Индия, и представата ми за една добре оплетена фантастична история с елементите на "това наистина би могло да се случи".
Тук са мечтите за роботите и развитието на онлайн света, надеждите на хората за един свят без граници и зачитане на различния, въпреки трудностите (намаляването на водата, например, или пък много интересните въпроси, свързани със семейството и бъдещето на човечеството).
Един не съвсем обикновен сериал владее душите на милиони по света. Хора създават и рушат цели нови вселени. Правителства откриват тайни на милиарди години. Едно момиче се опитва да намери родителите си. Един мъж иска да бъде раджа, друг - да бъде нито мъж, нито жена. Има и още много съдби и много животи - накрая всички ще бъдат изправени пред решаването на една загадка, независимо дали ще осъзнаят това, или не. А пък реката... ще продължи да си тече.
Макдоналд създава изключително убедителна фантастична картина на Индия през 2047-а. Потапя читателя в много внимателно и добре подреден свят. Героите му са силни и ярки (макар че може и да им липсва по нещо мъничко, никой от тях не "усетих", както се казва, не ми стана близък).
Препоръчвам тази книга на любителите на фантастиката!
(Това е и първата ми книга на издателство "Алтера", трябва да вметна, и оценявам високо работата, която са свършили по изданието. Книгоядец - изобщо много, много доволен.)
"Река на боговете" за мен е изключително елегантна сплав между всичко онова, което е Индия, и представата ми за една добре оплетена фантастична история с елементите на "това наистина би могло да се случи".
Тук са мечтите за роботите и развитието на онлайн света, надеждите на хората за един свят без граници и зачитане на различния, въпреки трудностите (намаляването на водата, например, или пък много интересните въпроси, свързани със семейството и бъдещето на човечеството).
Един не съвсем обикновен сериал владее душите на милиони по света. Хора създават и рушат цели нови вселени. Правителства откриват тайни на милиарди години. Едно момиче се опитва да намери родителите си. Един мъж иска да бъде раджа, друг - да бъде нито мъж, нито жена. Има и още много съдби и много животи - накрая всички ще бъдат изправени пред решаването на една загадка, независимо дали ще осъзнаят това, или не. А пък реката... ще продължи да си тече.
Макдоналд създава изключително убедителна фантастична картина на Индия през 2047-а. Потапя читателя в много внимателно и добре подреден свят. Героите му са силни и ярки (макар че може и да им липсва по нещо мъничко, никой от тях не "усетих", както се казва, не ми стана близък).
Препоръчвам тази книга на любителите на фантастиката!
(Това е и първата ми книга на издателство "Алтера", трябва да вметна, и оценявам високо работата, която са свършили по изданието. Книгоядец - изобщо много, много доволен.)
December 5, 2016
Aahh. It doesn't get much better than this. The bad news is that the novel is over. The good news is that I still have a collection of short stories set in the same fictional universe, "Cyberabad Days".
May 24, 2019
¡LIBRAZO!
April 15, 2016
This book is much like the country it takes place in. You get off the plane, go through immigration where notions of standing or cuing in line are meaningless. People always cut in front of you or that family of 20 is holding place for the other 20 that are coming. You get your luggage and have to fight the man who is trying to help you,meaning he is going to grab your suitcases, put them on a cart and try to take you to his taxi,hotel or whatever other service he may be in cahoots with. It is not free. You get away from the luggage man, make your way to the pre-paid taxi service (because this is easier than haggling, trust me please) walk outside and into a wall of heat,humidity, noise and a sea of humanity. All you can do at this point is find your pre-paid taxi and get the hotel you have booked online. But before you can get to the hotel, you must ride in the taxi. I suggest closing your eyes or looking strait ahead. Yelling in fear will do noting to make the madness stop. (When my son was 6 we were in an auto rickshaw, he covered his eyes). Upon arrival to the hotel, you are scanned, your luggage is scanned and your enter what is believed to be a place of rest and respite. You check in, another man comes to take your luggage, this time you are helpless. He takes it and you follow. He escorts you to your room, and then you must pay him money. They always ask for your foreign currency. Do not do this. (I forgot to mention the money changer at the airport before the pre-paid taxi, do not change all your money, the rate is not the best) Depending upon the hotel 30-50 rupees should be enough. It is ok to literally push him out if he doesn't leave. You sit on the bed and ask yourself where am I? Did I really want to come here?
You go out see the sites, eat the food. Get sick. You have moments of utter despair and helplessness. Nothing makes sense. It is am insane place. You consider cutting the trip short and getting the fuck out. You find yourself at a food stall...the food is unbelievable. Amazing. Best thing you have ever ate. Then you look around, people are friendly, brightly colored, and then you see how beautiful it all is. You find the reason behind the madness. You can't believe you were considering cutting the trip short and running home. And you immerse yourself. You don't want to leave ever. EVER. The world makes more sense than it ever did. You think you have found HOME.
This book is like India (I said that earlier). It will be loved or hated. No in between. There is no compromise. It is one way or the other. The author gets everything right. EVERYTHING. I recommend this to anyone, but I can't say you will love it. I can't promise you will find the beauty. But it brought me back HOME.
You go out see the sites, eat the food. Get sick. You have moments of utter despair and helplessness. Nothing makes sense. It is am insane place. You consider cutting the trip short and getting the fuck out. You find yourself at a food stall...the food is unbelievable. Amazing. Best thing you have ever ate. Then you look around, people are friendly, brightly colored, and then you see how beautiful it all is. You find the reason behind the madness. You can't believe you were considering cutting the trip short and running home. And you immerse yourself. You don't want to leave ever. EVER. The world makes more sense than it ever did. You think you have found HOME.
This book is like India (I said that earlier). It will be loved or hated. No in between. There is no compromise. It is one way or the other. The author gets everything right. EVERYTHING. I recommend this to anyone, but I can't say you will love it. I can't promise you will find the beauty. But it brought me back HOME.
December 4, 2011
on reading the synopsis i really wanted this to be something akin to The Windup Girl but what i got was more of an anthropological study mixed with a dull political intrigue thriller. the science fiction aspect was minimal but the major plus is the realistic depiction of a near future society, one that could quite easily happen within the timeframe set out.
i wanted something excellent and i got something simply ok that was actually a chore to finish. i'm left with a disappointment in a novel for the first time in quite some time.
i've heard good things about Ian McDonald and I hope that this early work is a blip and when i get round to reading dervish house i will be as impressed as i hoped to be by this one.
i've been talking about this book all week whilst i read, stopping along the way to try to verbalise my issues with it, forcing anyone who would listen to hear my disgruntled mumblings. and now it is your turn people of good reads. these are my major gripes.
i) there are way too many central characters to keep track of. in some instances this can pay off massively but for me it just got confusing and boring.
ii) the action seemed to happen in between the chapters so all you're ever reading is peoples reactions and the build up to the next action. this was frastrating. again in moderation this is a great way to tell stories but in the end i stopped caring.
iii) the payoff wasn't worth the effort. the penultimate chapter is over 100 pages long, everything was looking like it was coming to a dramatic conclusion but it was more of a damp squib.
iv) the use of 100 words when 2 would do. this seems churlish of me to say on a site dedicated to lovers of the written word and if i'd been engrossed in the story and characters i probably wouldnt have even noticed but as it was i found myself picking fault.
so theres my moan, an intereting idea turned in to an ok novel.
i wanted something excellent and i got something simply ok that was actually a chore to finish. i'm left with a disappointment in a novel for the first time in quite some time.
i've heard good things about Ian McDonald and I hope that this early work is a blip and when i get round to reading dervish house i will be as impressed as i hoped to be by this one.
i've been talking about this book all week whilst i read, stopping along the way to try to verbalise my issues with it, forcing anyone who would listen to hear my disgruntled mumblings. and now it is your turn people of good reads. these are my major gripes.
i) there are way too many central characters to keep track of. in some instances this can pay off massively but for me it just got confusing and boring.
ii) the action seemed to happen in between the chapters so all you're ever reading is peoples reactions and the build up to the next action. this was frastrating. again in moderation this is a great way to tell stories but in the end i stopped caring.
iii) the payoff wasn't worth the effort. the penultimate chapter is over 100 pages long, everything was looking like it was coming to a dramatic conclusion but it was more of a damp squib.
iv) the use of 100 words when 2 would do. this seems churlish of me to say on a site dedicated to lovers of the written word and if i'd been engrossed in the story and characters i probably wouldnt have even noticed but as it was i found myself picking fault.
so theres my moan, an intereting idea turned in to an ok novel.
November 1, 2007
A unique science fiction tale of India at its centenary told through the inter-locking tales of nine extremely different characters. There is Mr. Nandha,the Krishna cop tasked with exterminating artificial intelligences (or aeais as the book terms them) who break beyond their programming restrictions to a higher threshold of intelligence. There is Shiv, a gangster fallen on hard times forced to work for genetically-engineered titans. There is Tal, a nute (or neutral-gendered person) drawn into intrigues far beyond yts comprehension. There is Thomas Lull, a professor who designed digital worlds that gave birth to a multitude of smaller aeais before running away from it all to live on a leaky boat in Southern India. Most importantly there is Aj, an orphan searching for her origins while all around her India is crumbling into chaos and disaster. McDonald crafts an intricate story that comes together into a beautiful ending that hits every aspect of what I enjoy in sci-fi.
May 22, 2012
I read about this book in a study of postcolonial science fiction, and was motivated to want to read it. It's vast and sprawling in a way that enables it to do justice to its subject. The setting is Bharat, a portion of what once was India, in 2047; Bharat is at war with one of the other former-Indian countries, sectarian violence continues, there is a long-term drought emergency, and meanwhile a flourishing entertainment industry. Most importantly are the aeai, the sentient artificial intelligences behind much of the everyday functions of the society.
Some of the characters and their narratives were more compelling than others; there is a mix of perspective between South Asian and foreign (American and European) viewpoint characters, as well as male and female (and one particularly memorable character, Tal, the nute, who is neither). The majority of them were interesting, though I didn't find them all equally believable or well-developed. Perhaps one or two fewer storylines might have given McDonald space to spend more time with his characters; there was a level of depth beyond which the story rarely went.
Most of the South Asian narratives I've read in recent years have been by South Asian writers, and I wondered how an Irish writer was going to handle it. In fact, McDonald's done a good job with language and culture. His imagined future India is vividly portrayed in some places, less so in others; I have taught Rushdie's Midnight's Children a number of times (with many consequent rereads), which leaves me with very high expectations. This doesn't quite meet them, but then, it's a very different sort of novel.
Some of the characters and their narratives were more compelling than others; there is a mix of perspective between South Asian and foreign (American and European) viewpoint characters, as well as male and female (and one particularly memorable character, Tal, the nute, who is neither). The majority of them were interesting, though I didn't find them all equally believable or well-developed. Perhaps one or two fewer storylines might have given McDonald space to spend more time with his characters; there was a level of depth beyond which the story rarely went.
Most of the South Asian narratives I've read in recent years have been by South Asian writers, and I wondered how an Irish writer was going to handle it. In fact, McDonald's done a good job with language and culture. His imagined future India is vividly portrayed in some places, less so in others; I have taught Rushdie's Midnight's Children a number of times (with many consequent rereads), which leaves me with very high expectations. This doesn't quite meet them, but then, it's a very different sort of novel.
May 18, 2010
I doubt it's intentional, but Ian McDonald seems to be translating the great treasures of magical realism into scifi, and doing it masterfully. Where Desolation Road reads rather like One Hundred Years of Solitude set on Mars, River of Gods feels like someone gave Salman Rushdie a time machine so he could rewrite Midnight's Children a hundred years later. The result is something completely new, and breathtakingly imaginative and ambitious. The plot reads like magical realism, but McDonald has applied Arthur C. Clarke's maxim, and replaced the magic with developing future technologies that blur the line between science and magic, physics and metaphysics. McDonald's future India is fantastical and foreign, and yet plausible, a world as detailed as the computer-modeled town that future-India's AI-simulated soap opera actors think they live in when they're not acting on CGI sets.
April 28, 2016
Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig
(...)
Ultimately, the story of this book could have taken place anywhere, and India mainly serves as a metaphor for the complexity of our planet and our species. It also makes for a colorful backdrop, and the Indian pantheon allows easy links with software avatars. All that doesn’t take away the feeling I have that the reason McDonald chose India as the story’s setting has more to do with the stereotypical images we Westerners tend to have of India: ever rising population numbers, lots of religions intersecting, an emerging technological powerhouse full of IT PhDs working for minimum wage, mad ascetic gurus, etc., etc.
The fact that McDonald also wrote a Brazilian and a Turkish book – both of which I’ll willingly read somewhere in the future – makes me think the setting is more of a gimmick and a technique, and not a necessity internal to the story. That’s not a fault per se, and an author’s prerogative. McDonald shows both respect and has done heaps of research. But as a reader, I don’t have the feeling that I learned a lot about India. My preconceptions were reinforced, that’s about it.
Again, not a fault per se: it’s impossible to get to know something as large as a nation through a book, and expecting that is questionable in itself.
(...)
(...)
Ultimately, the story of this book could have taken place anywhere, and India mainly serves as a metaphor for the complexity of our planet and our species. It also makes for a colorful backdrop, and the Indian pantheon allows easy links with software avatars. All that doesn’t take away the feeling I have that the reason McDonald chose India as the story’s setting has more to do with the stereotypical images we Westerners tend to have of India: ever rising population numbers, lots of religions intersecting, an emerging technological powerhouse full of IT PhDs working for minimum wage, mad ascetic gurus, etc., etc.
The fact that McDonald also wrote a Brazilian and a Turkish book – both of which I’ll willingly read somewhere in the future – makes me think the setting is more of a gimmick and a technique, and not a necessity internal to the story. That’s not a fault per se, and an author’s prerogative. McDonald shows both respect and has done heaps of research. But as a reader, I don’t have the feeling that I learned a lot about India. My preconceptions were reinforced, that’s about it.
Again, not a fault per se: it’s impossible to get to know something as large as a nation through a book, and expecting that is questionable in itself.
(...)
November 28, 2008
This is one substantial story - both in sheer mass of the book, and in the plot itself. McDonald tells the story of India, 50 years into the future. I find his speculation on what may happen to India is believable, and his spec fic elements are plausible. The culture of India seems particularly suited to McDonald's storytelling style - he brings together all of his plots coherently, finding a certain underlying theme to the chaotic and disparate subplots he's working with.
The tale is voyeuristic, as fits a nation of more than a billion people living all in close physical and social proximity to each other. It is mystical, seeming to dance along a thin line between Gods as genuinely real and Gods as metaphor. It is brutal in places and visceral.
I've long been a fan of McDonald's short fiction. This is the second novel of his I've read, and it's a powerful work, taking all of the finely crafted intensity of his short stories and retooling it to the wider expanses of a full novel.
The tale is voyeuristic, as fits a nation of more than a billion people living all in close physical and social proximity to each other. It is mystical, seeming to dance along a thin line between Gods as genuinely real and Gods as metaphor. It is brutal in places and visceral.
I've long been a fan of McDonald's short fiction. This is the second novel of his I've read, and it's a powerful work, taking all of the finely crafted intensity of his short stories and retooling it to the wider expanses of a full novel.
July 26, 2015
I had great difficulties reading the first half of the book because I mainly read it on the tram, on my way to and from work. And this isn't a kind of book you just read for 20 minutes a day. Too much stuff going on you just know it's going to be relevant later.
I finished reading it on my vacation when I couldn't put it down. Everything came together in most interesting and delightful way, taking me by surprise. Masterful storytelling and a story beyond ages and universes, combining tradition and futurism in a country that sounds almost alien to a Southeastern European.
I highly recommend it to everyone who like a little depth in their science fiction, but without too much artificial drama and without preaching whatsoever.
I finished reading it on my vacation when I couldn't put it down. Everything came together in most interesting and delightful way, taking me by surprise. Masterful storytelling and a story beyond ages and universes, combining tradition and futurism in a country that sounds almost alien to a Southeastern European.
I highly recommend it to everyone who like a little depth in their science fiction, but without too much artificial drama and without preaching whatsoever.
February 3, 2017
Le sobran metros de papel. Muchos.
Le falta profundizar más obre los personajes principales y quizás le sobren algunos secundarios.
Como siempre con McDonald la primera mitad del libro es pura creación de escenarios, el tercer cuarto para dar una idea de lo que quiere contar y el resto es un carrera desenfrenada hacia el abismo.
Le falta profundizar más obre los personajes principales y quizás le sobren algunos secundarios.
Como siempre con McDonald la primera mitad del libro es pura creación de escenarios, el tercer cuarto para dar una idea de lo que quiere contar y el resto es un carrera desenfrenada hacia el abismo.
March 25, 2021
A sci-fi book set mostly in India year 2047.
The book left me with mixed feelings. While I enjoyed the specific descriptions and “Indian” atmosphere, I had difficulties following the plot and basically lost it. Adding some mysticism, robots, half robots and magical reality into it added to the confusion. In some stages the book reminded me of “
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and from my point of view this is not a very good comparison (I did not like that book either).
Basically it describes various conflicts that lead to some kind of a civil war in future India, I could not really follow who was against who and do not know who won and what were the achievements.
As I listened to another Ian McDonald book lately, the conclusion is that this author is not for me.
The book left me with mixed feelings. While I enjoyed the specific descriptions and “Indian” atmosphere, I had difficulties following the plot and basically lost it. Adding some mysticism, robots, half robots and magical reality into it added to the confusion. In some stages the book reminded me of “
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and from my point of view this is not a very good comparison (I did not like that book either).
Basically it describes various conflicts that lead to some kind of a civil war in future India, I could not really follow who was against who and do not know who won and what were the achievements.
As I listened to another Ian McDonald book lately, the conclusion is that this author is not for me.
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