Cyberabad Days [Paperback]

Ian McDonald (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 24, 2009

Extraordinary new fiction set in the future India of River of Gods.

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 this 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 seven stories, one Hugo nominee and one Hugo winner among them, as well as a thirty-one-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:

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 Varanasi learns the true meaning of nation building in the early days of a new country.

The Dust Assassin

Feuding Rajasthan water-rajas find that revenge is a slow, subtle process.

An Eligible Boy
An Indian take on Cyrano de Bergerac. Love and marriage should be easy with an Artificial Intelligence matchmaker.

The Little Goddess Hugo nominee Best Novella 2006

In near future Nepal, a child-goddess discovers what lies on the other side of godhood.

The Djinn s Wife Hugo Best Novelette and BSFA short fiction winner 2007

A minor Delhi celebrity falls in love with an artificial intelligence but is it a marriage of heaven and hell?

Vishnu at the Cat Circus
A genetically improved Brahmin child finds himself left behind as he grows through the final generation of humanity.

Cover Illustration © Stephan Martiniere

Editorial Reviews

From Bookmarks Magazine

Ian McDonald’s chops as a storyteller and visionary have become apparent over two decades of cutting-edge SF—in short stories, novels, and the trickier novellas and novelettes that have often formed the springboard for longer works. The stories in Cyberabad Days showcase those skills, distilling the author’s extrapolation of the present into a cyberpunk, dystopian future that is still fundamentally human despite the increasing dominance of technology in “a world that manages to be convincingly, sympathetically India, but is still created with such light strokes of McDonald’s pen that the reader never gets bogged down in the world-building” (Green Man Review). No matter what form his fiction takes, McDonald has become one of the surest bets in SF.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Review

"In Cyberabad Days, author Ian McDonald returns to the technologically brilliant, parched and i-Dusty India of 2047, an India first visited in his award-winning novel River of Gods... McDonald is rightly praised as one of the industry's preeminent SF authors and Cyberabad Days is a showcase of his talent. The world he has created on the bled-dry banks of the Ganges is richly textured and alien, detailing lives that are mundane to the characters but foreign and exotic to the readers. The work that went into researching and developing the culture of this future India utopian or dystopian depending on your caste and wealth is obvious. This is a world that manages to be convincingly, sympathetically Indian, but is still created with such light strokes of McDonald's pen that the reader never gets bogged down in the world-building. You can taste the heat of the day on your tongue, feel the press of the crowds in the streets. Cyberabad Days is a brilliant, well-paced short story collection that snatches snapshots of life in this powerful, futuristic India. You don't need to have read River of Gods to enjoy Cyberabad Days, McDonald's world is so immersive it is easy to find your footing in it. The prose is elegant, drawing in lush scenes with a clean economy of language, and the stories riveting. It's an admirable addition to the canon of McDonald's work and one that I'd recommend reading." --Green Man Review, January 8, 2009

"He should be reckoned as one of the finest of all our novelists." --Amazon.com'sBest Books of the Year So Far: Hidden Gems

"One of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era, indeed maybe the most interesting and complished, and certainly the most culturally and musically sophisticated, the Frank Herbert, William Gibson, or arguably even Thomas Pynchon of the early 21st century." --Asimov's Science Fiction

"He should be reckoned as one of the finest of all our novelists." --Amazon.com'sBest Books of the Year So Far: Hidden Gems

"One of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era, indeed maybe the most interesting and complished, and certainly the most culturally and musically sophisticated, the Frank Herbert, William Gibson, or arguably even Thomas Pynchon of the early 21st century." --Asimov's Science Fiction

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: Pyr; First Edition edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591026997
• ISBN-13: 978-1591026990
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars BB Review February 28, 2009

By ArtefaxDan

Format:Paperback

Ian McDonald is one of science fiction's finest working writers, and his latest short story collection Cyberabad Days, is the kind of book that showcases exactly what science fiction is for.

Cyberabad Days returns to McDonald's India of 2047, a balkanized state that we toured in his 2006 novel River of Gods, which was nominated for the best novel Hugo Award. The India of River of Gods has fractured into a handful of warring nations, wracked by water-shortage and poverty, rising on rogue technology, compassion, and the synthesis of the modern and the ancient.

In Cyberabad Days, seven stories (one a Hugo winner, another a Hugo nominee) McDonald performs the quintessential science fictional magic trick: imagining massive technological change and making it intensely personal by telling the stories of real, vividly realized people who leap off the page and into our minds. And he does this with a deft prose that is half-poetic, conjuring up the rhythms and taste and smells of his places and people, so that you are really, truly transported into these unimaginably weird worlds. McDonald's India research is prodigious, but it's nothing to the fabulous future he imagines arising from today's reality.

All seven of these stories are standouts, but if I had to pick only three to put in a time-capsule for the ages, they'd be:

1. The Djinn's Wife: this Hugo-winning novelette is a heartbreaking account of a love affair between a minor celebrity and a weakly godlike artificial intelligence. The special problems of love with an "aeai" (AI) are incredibly, thoroughly imagined here, as are the possible glories. Here, McDonald perfectly captures the stepping-off-a-cliff feeling of the new kinds of romance that technology enables, and of the wonderful, terrible sense of the wind rushing past your ears as the ground screams towards you.

2. Sanjeev and Robotwallah: a story that will be anthologized in two of this year's "Best Of" anthologies, Sanjeev and Robotwallah is the story of a young, displaced boy who finds temporary glory in acting as batsman for a squadron of amped-up teen mecha pilots. The pathos here arises when the war ends and the glamorous warriors are retired, leaving Sanjeev in limbo, his aspirations smashed with the lives of the older boys. Like all of McDonald's stories, the ending is bittersweet, rich and unexpected.

3. Vishnu at the Cat Circus: the long, concluding novella in the volume is an account of three siblings: one genetically enhanced to be a neo-Brahmin, one a rogue AI wallah who is at the center of the ascension of humanity's computers into a godlike state, and one who remains human and bails out the teeming masses who are tossed back and forth by the technological upheaval. A story of character, Vishnu blends spirituality and technology to look at how the street might find its own use for things, when that street is rooted in ancient traditions that are capable of assimilating enormous (but not infinite) change.

Cyberabad Days has it all: spirituality, technology, humanity, love, sex, war, environmentalism, politics, media -- all blended together to form a manifesto of sorts, a statement about how technology shapes and is shaped by all the wet, gooey human factors. Every story is simultaneously a cracking yarn, a thoughtful piece of technosocial criticism, and a bag of eyeball kicks that'll fire your imagination. The field is very lucky to have Ian McDonald working in it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended on Its Own Merits May 18, 2010

By Randy Stafford VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

While it's set in the same future India as McDonald's vivid River of Gods, a world of old and new gods, soap operas, water wars, mech wars, gender imbalance, and new genders, it is in no way necessary to read that novel first. I read three of these seven stories before I read the novel, and they were satisfactory on their own. However, I do think the one story original to this collection, the concluding novella "Vishnu at the Cat Circus", will have added pleasures if you've read the novel.

Each story concentrates on one or more aspects of McDonald's India, and they mostly take place at various times before the novel's events.

"Sanjeev and the Robotwallah" covers the War of Separation when India breaks up into several countries from the nation we know. It's about a brief time in a man's life when, as a Japanese anima obsessed youth, he teleoperated the robots of that war. It's a type of war that may be physically safer, but the boys find, like many a veteran of the past, that society may not have much more use for them after the peace.

"Kyle Meets the River", while a decent story, is the weakest of the book. I think that's because its plot owes too much to the recent Iraqi War and the story's initial appearance in the themed Forbidden Planets anthology. India is viewed from the perspective of an American boy, his parents living in the Cantonment, a diplomatic compound of Westerners helping to build the newly independent nation of Bharat. Young Kyle first spends a lot of time viewing the massive artificial ecosphere simulation that features in River of Gods before he sees the equally strange world of India beyond the compound's wall. However, with the frequent terrorism in the Cantonment, Iraqi's Green Zone is unnecessarily brought to mind in a way that adds nothing to the story.

"The Dust Assassin" has the air and plot of a fairy tale. The Jodhra and Azad clans have been at war - a literal shooting war at times - in Jaipur for a long time, sometimes over water. The Azads wipe out the Jodhra clan except for Padmini, our young heroine, who goes into hiding with her nute retainers - a third gender artificially created and complete with its own methods of sexual gratification. Assured by her father before his death that she is a literal weapon, she undertakes martial arts training. But vengeance may lie in other directions -- if she even wants it anymore.

"An Eligible Boy" is an interesting, humorous and rather melancholy story centered around one of the key aspects of McDonald's future India: the vast gender imbalance caused by sex selective abortions eliminating millions of Indian women. In this topsy turvy, caste corroding world, men are the ones who must desperately appeal to the few women around. Our hero, Jasbir, has cosmetic surgery done and, at the suggestion of his roommate Sujay, who codes software for the soap operas the Indians are mad about, gets romantic tips from one of the starring artificial intelligences. Romance is found, lost, and, perhaps, missed all together.

"The Little Goddess", one of the best stories in the book, takes a seemingly autistic girl and makes her the chosen incarnation of the goddess Kumari Devi in Nepal. But it is the world she must navigate after being expelled from her position that is most fascinating. Here McDonald concentrates on the Brahmins - genetically engineered humans, superior in intelligence, more physically robust, but aging only half as fast as normal humans - and the Krishna Cops who try to keep America happy by patrolling the cybersphere for illegally advanced artificial intelligences.

"The Djinn's Wife", another fine story, also concentrates on those artificial intelligences, so-called aeais. Here one develops a romantic fixation on a classic Indian dancer. This being India, she even marries him. But the defining characteristic of aeais, their consciousness distributed in space and their concentration equally multiplied, conflicts with a female need for exclusivity.

"Vishnu at the Cat Circus" straddles the events of River of Gods, has appearances by some of its characters, and goes further into the future for another dramatic reinvention of India. Its narrator, a Brahmin who is now an obsolete offshoot of human evolution, tells us of the world created by his always jealous older brother, a world where India's middle class again pushes aside the poor to achieve its ambitions. That ambition here is nothing less than immortality via uploaded consciousness. But every ecosystem has its limits. In real India, it's water. In the virtual world, it is a need for vast amounts of storage space.

A world worth visiting whether you've read McDonald before or not.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A limited number of themes that grind after the novelty wears off. April 22, 2010

By Paul H

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

After many visits, I've come to the conclusion that India is impossible to describe - it has to be experienced. Ian McDonald has managed to project a future India and at the same time capture much of the unique texture of the country. Kudos are due for delivering a feel for India today. Projecting a future India without loosing the feel for the country is truly impressive.

Here's the problem: there are really only four themes around which each of these stories are written, and each story includes all of the themes. By the middle of the book, the wonderful creativity seems to turn into a varied retelling of the same basic vision. By the end of the book the constant retelling just grinds along.

It's worth a read just for the uniqueness of the non-Western approach to science fiction, but you could read any two of the stories in the collection and not miss the rest.