Cyberabad Days (Paperback)

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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

"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

"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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: Pyr; First Edition edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591026997
• ISBN-13: 978-1591026990
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #58,724 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BB Review, February 28, 2009

By	ArtefaxDan "Dan" (Gypsyspace) - See all my reviews

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves ongoing high recommendation, September 18, 2009

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars entrancing and beautiful stories do create books worth your reading, June 21, 2009

By	Akira Touya (Berlin) - See all my reviews

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'.