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330 pp
ISBN: 978-1-59102-699-0
Trade Paperback(6" x 9")
$15
February 2009
Cover Illustration: © Stephan Martiniere
Ian McDonald’s River of Gods—called a “masterpiece” by Asimov’s Science Fiction and praised by the Washington Post as “a major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best SF novelists of our time”—painted a vivid picture of a near future India, 100 years after independence. It revolutionized SF for a new generation by taking a perspective that was not European or American. Nominated for the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and winning the BSFA Award, the rich world of the novel has inspired McDonald to revisit its milieu in a series of short stories, all set in the world of River of Gods.
Cyberabad Days is a triumphant return to the India of 2047, a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas.
Cyberabad Days is a collection of eight stories, one Hugo nominee and one Hugo winner among them, as well as a twenty-five thousand word original novella. As with everything Ian McDonald does, it is sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.
Featuring:
- The Little Goddess (Hugo nominee for best novella of 2006)
In near future Nepal, a child-goddess discovers what lies on the other side of godhood.
- The Djinn’s Wife (Hugo for best novelette and BSFA short-fiction winner of 2007)
A minor Delhi celebrity falls in love with an artificial intelligence, but is it a marriage of heaven and hell?
- The Dust Assassin
Feuding Rajasthan water-rajas find that revenge is a slow, subtle process.
- Jasbir and Sujay go Shaadi
Love and marriage should be plain sailing when your matchmaker is a soap-star artificial intelligence.
- Sanjeev and Robotwallah (selected for both The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection and Year's Best SF 13)
What happens to the boy-soldier roboteers when the war of Separation is over?
- Kyle meets the River
A young American in Varanas learns the true meaning of “nation building” in the early days of a new country.
- An Eligible Boy
An Indian take on “Cyrano de Bergerac'”
- Vishnu at the Cat Circus
A genetically improved “Brahmin”child finds himself left behind as he grows through the final generation of humanity.
Rave Reviews for Ian McDonald's Work:
Brasyl:
“Ian McDonald is hardly a hidden gem to science fiction readers by now, but with Brasyl he has proven once again that he should be reckoned as one of the finest of all our novelists. Brasyl fractures the Brazil we know into past, present, and near future in a brilliantly frenetic and spellbinding stew and a dramatic tale of character and culture.”
—Amazon.com “Best Books of the Year So Far: Hidden Gems” (August 2007)
“Packing his pages with local color and big-picture speculation, McDonald conjures three equally vivid worlds. Grade: B+” —Entertainment Weekly
"Science fiction writers, by definition, are supposed to take us to strange new worlds. Ian McDonald does this while at the same time impersonating a travel writer....If you liked River of Gods, which performed a similar mash-up of SF tropes with full cultural immersion in India, you will delight in Brasyl. And if you're a science fiction fan who has never read any Ian McDonald, well, then, clear your calendar....I always wanted to visit the future. But after Brasyl, I want to book a ticket to São Paulo also."
—Salon.com Recommended
Summer Reading List (2007)
"Chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous, this must-read teeters on the edge of melodrama, but somehow keeps its precarious balance." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"McDonald has outdone his prodigious self. A novel that makes magic from technology, alien worlds from the everyday. A novel of swordfights and quantum physics, of sly reality-TV humor and sheer poetry. I loved these people, I rooted for them. McDonald has so many writer tricks that I could read this book a hundred times and learn something new every time." —Cory Doctorow, co-editor, boingboing.net,
and author of Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present
“Having perfected a wonderful set of techniques and narrative strategies, both panoramic and microscopic, in his last big book, River of Gods (2004), a future history of India, McDonald employs them here. His new novel — hot and tropical and full of music (there's a suggested soundtrack in the back) — finds more than enough materials and promise in this developing land to support a conceit of cosmic magnitude. (Don't imagine you can guess the ultimate ending, because you can't!) He manages to work simultaneously at many levels, from the intimate and individual to the societal and universal. And he always embodies his themes in minutely particularized images and descriptions, both quotidian and fantastical. His characters are utterly believable, grounded in their unique pasts and presents. And typical of his more stefnal [SFnal] speculations is his invention of 'Q blades,' knives with quantum edges that can sever reality. They steal the show every time they appear.
Grade: A” —Sci Fi Weekly
River of Gods:
"River of Gods is a major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best sf novelists of our time." —Washington Post
"One of the best science fiction novels published in the United States this year.”
” —San Francisco Chronicle
“[A] literary masterpiece.... I can’t think of a better science fiction novel I’ve read in years...This novel is a masterpiece of science fiction by any meaningful standard ...[a] wonderfully complex novel....McDonald takes the reader to a level of immersion in the fine detail, texture, consciousness, pop culture, very being, of an extrapolated non-Western culture that is utterly awesome.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction
"This is sure to be one of the more talked-about SF novels of the year."
” — Publishers Weekly
“Every library should purchase this multi-textured tale of future perils and possibilities in the land of a thousand gods. Highly Recommended.” —Library Journal starred review
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