Customer Reviews

Cyberabad Days

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

I enjoyed "River of Gods", but "Cyberabad Days" generated very little empathy for the characters for me. The main characters were mostly shallowly-drawn and I couldn't really give a damn what happened to them. I'm not a professional reviewer, or even an English Major, but there is a big difference between RoG and CD in terms of my involvement with the characters. Sure it's comparing a novel with mostly short stories, but the author's obvious talents didn't transfer over to the characters, in my opinion.
I give the author high marks for his depiction of a future India and the medical and informational advances. He is original and talented. Just make me care about the characters.
This review is anomalous, given the higher stars awarded by others. In this regard, my prior reads were Bacigalupi's "Pump Six" and "The Windup Girl". In both these books the characters (all of them) grabbed me like a treble hook in a catfish
and kept me involved to the last page. So the bar was left pretty high when I got to RoG and CD. RoG comfortably cleared the bar, but CD caught the bar in the face.
Sorry, fans. Maybe his next in this arc will be better.

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.

This was a great collection of stories set in the same future India as McDonald's River of Gods, which I also really liked. My personal favorite was "The Little Goddess" which was about a schizophrenic Nepalese girl that is exiled to India after injuring herself and thereby disqualifying herself from being a goddess. To survive in India, she has to become a very unique smuggler. I don't want to say anymore for fear of spoiling a creative, well-told story.

I think McDonald's strong point is creating a believable, living and breathing world and then analyzing all sorts of cool technologies and ideas within that world. He's a little weaker on actual story telling. Most of the stories in this book don't have much of a plot. In fact, the final story is basically a retelling of the entire future "history" of India through the eyes of "Brahmin," and definitely should NOT be read before you read River of Gods.

Some of the phrases McDonald uses (like Brahmin, for example) are borrowed from Indian and/or middle-eastern culture and applied to the new technologies and genetic mutations he's invented for his future. This occasionally was a problem for me as I read the stories, trying to remember what different terms meant. For example, was a Djinn a ghost or was it the physical manifestation of an advanced AI personality? River of Gods had a glossary at the end to help you keep those terms straight. Cyberabad Days definitely could have also benefited from a glossary, especially for readers like me, who read River of Gods a couple years ago.

Readers of Ian McDonald will be delighted to see the future India presented in his River of Gods returns with renewed focus in CYBERBAD DAYS. Here is 2047 India, a new superpower in a world of artificial intelligences, drought, water wars, new genders and genetically-improved kids who age at half the rate of the old norm. Seven stories centered in this world form CYBERBAD DAYS, which deserves ongoing high recommendation for any serious science fiction collection.

The assembled stories are somewhat uneven but vary between pretty good and fantastic. Slicker than River of Gods - which is high praise indeed.

Cyberabad Days is a great collection of stories that deals with a cyberpunk India which seems to be the logical conclusion of all western IT companies offshoring IT work there. Cyberpunk is traditionally about a Blade-Runneresque future Japan. The stories in Cyberabad Days seem to take part in a believable millieu - and it's the setting that I love most about this work. You don't need to have read River of Gods to enjoy these stories, though I would highly recommend that book also.

the stories contained within this book are great in themselves and even better as they connect to the story contained without that is 'river of gods'. not all of the stories in this book are excellent but all are at their least enjoyable and at their best exceptional in their form. you would do well to read this book after having read 'river of gods'.

Well written to say the least. This was my first time reading this author. Each chapter could be considered a short story in itself. Well done background. The politics are not as developed as the characters involved. Which is my reason for three stars.
The last chapter wants to be a new book or is the author's hook as to what's comming next. I reccommed it to any one looking for some insight as to where the future of AI might be going.