(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.
I loved this book. It had me hooked from the first chapters and reading any opportunity I could get. Like India, the plot is big, the characters numerous. The author did a good job of alternating between points of view and notifying the reader of the new viewpoint with the chapter titles. I will admit, not infrequently I needed something more than a name to remind me which character was up next, as it might have been 50 pages or so since I last 'visited' them.I thought the Indian setting was fantastic - a non-WASP country, not the US, not England, Europe, not Russia. Someplace exotic and complex, with hierarchy's of Gods and steeped in thousands of years of traditions that most Westerners can't even begin to fathom or comprehend. The Ghats of Varanasi was a good example, especially well done as seen through the eyes of Vishram. Vishram attended a funeral in Scotland and was appalled at the cremation being hidden from all eyes, because in India, the funeral pyres are on the Gandi Devi, open so the ashes can blow away for rebirth and renewal and the families and friends are witness to that cycle. Or Thomas Lull, noting that Westerners are afraid of trains, because they can't see where the engine is going, and trains symbolize and ending, or death and are thus little used in Western worlds. Where in India, the train is the journey, not the destination, to be able to sit and watch the world go by, knowing the destination is not the goal.I also thought tying in the pending monsoon with the civil unrest and each person's personal unrest was well executed and nicely conveyed the growing tension an unease. The unrest, the discord, the discontent was well paced and added to the allure of the book. Add to all of this, a strange and fascinating background of an Indian "soapi" called Town and Country, where the actors are aeai's and nothing is really real but it seems as it is and everyone in India follows this soapi like a second religion. It's so subtly woven into everything.I also think, as everything came to the conclusion, there was a bit of karma happening, that what comes around, goes around. It's one more undercurrent to everything else happening, and I might be reading more into this than there really is. A karma aspect would be another tie-in with the Indian setting. My main complaint with the book was the sex. I don't like sex in my scifi. It seemed like the sexuality in the book was more gratuitous and 'shocking' and really didn't add much to the over all story. It didn't seem to fit.Overall, an absolutely brilliant read.
What do You think about River Of Gods (2006)?
Rating: 5* of fiveThe 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. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
—Richard Reviles Censorship Always in All Ways
Well, this book certainly is interesting. Set in a future India, it starts by following several seemingly unconnected characters whose stories rapidly converge to tell the story of a world in which AI soap stars, parallel universes and genderless designer humans co-exist alongside India's slums, caste system and multiple religions.The setting of India is a perfect choice for this style of sci-fi story, mixing the grit and dirt of poor and tradional with the leaping technology and style of the modern - and future - age. It makes the book feel more real than a typical sci-fi setting, more immediate and tangible. It also makes for an interesting cast, and brings in India's interesting social and political history. It takes a little while to get going, starting with the gangster Shiv who fancies himself a self-made raja, as he watches an unfortunate casualty from his blackmarket dealings float off down the Ganges - a woman's body, sari swirling in the water. The story quickly moves to the other characters, and as there are a lot of them it does take a time to get it all straight in your mind, who is who and what relationship they are. There's also all the sci-fi elements to contest with, name-dropped in with little explanation - you have to use a lot of imagination and identify them yourself. Without giving anything away, this book is captivating, stunning, horrifying and beautiful. Far too many people end up dead for my liking, but the violence and grit reminds me a lot of why I like Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard books - that dirty realism mixed with fantastic fantasy. I was a little disappointed with the ending, but can't let that detract from what is an amazing, gripping read.
—Rebecca Tayles
In 2047 India, while internal tensions and possible civil war looms, a cop hunts down illegal artificial intelligence while his marriage is in danger, a stand-up comic is called home to take over his father's business, a reporter gets the scoop of a lifetime, a high level politician pursues a taboo relationship that could ruin his career, and an American scholar seeks another regarding an impossible artifact in space. These stories, and others, all contribute to a change that will ring out throughout history.I really enjoyed this book, although it had a bit of a slow start. There are many different story lines, and at first the book visits all of them in turn, and so none of them advance much (most aren't connected at all at first, and even at the end, some are connected in ways that only the reader is aware of, not the characters). So it takes a while to really get invested, but once you do, things carry on and the plots start intertwining and a big mystery is set up and I liked the characters, and it all carried me through waiting to see what would happen next. Although there are a few Americans, and some who come from other countries, most of the characters in this book are Indian, and the book does not shy away from that fact. To someone like me, someone who doesn't have too much in-depth knowledge of Indian culture, beyond what I've gotten from the media and a life growing up in a fairly multicultural Canadian city, it presents a little bit of a challenge to get in to. It doesn't hold back or explain very much, it throws in terms from that culture and the Hindi language (and possibly other regional languages) as though it's part of the background, because, for most of the characters, it is. Although I was interested in the characters and the story from the outset, this made it a bit difficult to get into at first, at least until I picked up enough from context that I could get what was going on in some of the plotlines. At it turns out, I was reading this at the same time as The Three-Body Problem (set in China, and original written there), and I could not help thinking that it is THIS book that really needs footnotes, not TBP. There is a glossary for River of Gods at the back, which would certainly help, but I only became aware of it after I read the novel in full. Still, even with full immersion, it's not THAT difficult, it's just a bit of a challenge, and one worth taking on if you like good SF with strong characters. And I feel it's a good idea to stretch your horizons now and then and read books focusing on characters who aren't a part of your culture, or are written by those of differing perspectives. This book seems to be more the former than the latter, of course, as the author is British. As an outsider, I can't accurately judge how well the author captured the culture, but he at least seemed to give it a serious effort and without any obvious (to me) problems... and, at the very least, the Indian characters are mostly the protagonists in their own stories rather than just being background color for somebody else. Capturing the world of another culture is one challenge, building a future world is a whole different matter, and here, too, he mostly succeeds. Although only a few ideas are really focused on, there are more going on in the background that add up to a rich and convincing future world. He's apparently set a book of short stories in that world, Cyberabad Days, and I am going to be keeping an eye out for it. I do admit to one small, personal issue with the book. I would barely even call it a gripe, it was more just a stumbling block that affected me and might impact others. One of the plotlines is told from the perspective of a "neut", a member of a new subculture of people who have undergone a procedure that removes their gender. I have no problem with this idea, but neuts use the pronoun "yt" to replace "he", "she", "him", and "her" (and "yt's" for "his" and "her" possessively). And sometimes, this just made those sections difficult for me to read smoothly, particularly when you got sentences like "Yt told yt yt had to go." My brain just often stopped and said "what?" and I had to take time parsing it, which threw me out of the narrative. I might have preferred they use, if not "they", some other pronoun that felt more natural. In the end, though, it's a fairly minor gripe, if it is one at all. Highly recommended... my first experience with McDonald, but I don't think it'll be my last.
—Peter
