A full two years after its original publication in the UK (and subsequent Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke award nominations), Ian McDonald’s RIVER OF GODS is finally in print in the U.S., thanks to Pyr Books, and it’s one hell of a novel.
Easily trumping any speculative fiction from the past couple of years, RIVER OF GODS is an exuberant leap into the future of India through the eyes of nine disparate characters. As their stories mingle and merge, McDonald not only weaves a tremendous yarn of mysteries and technological magic, but the truly illustrates the dilemmas lying in wait for humanity as we continue to leapfrog from one discovery to the next, inevitably toward a future we could never predict.
The river of the title is the Ganges, but a Ganges that’s merely a shallow creek in places because climate change has stopped the annual monsoon. The river flows not through a unified India, but through a trio of bitterly divided states on the brink of war –countries in which men greatly outnumber women and the norms and traditions of the 20th century and strive to coexist with rampant artificial intelligences and A.I.-hunting “Krishna cops” dedicated to keeping humanity at the top of the intellectual heap.
RIVER OF GODS is a big book, but readers are left needing more, despite the fact that, unlike certain doorstop-sized tomes of recent years, McDonald knows how to end a story. Revelation after revelation resolve themselves in a cascade of denouement that is at once thrilling and sorrowful, as if the author wants to stay in 2047 as much as the reader does. This is a must-read adventure that sets out to explore epic, uncharted paths in the territory founded by cyberpunk’s visionaries and succeeds masterfully. Great stuff. –Ryun Patterson
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