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279 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 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 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?
- Vishnu at the Cat Circus
A genetically improved “Brahmin”child finds himself left behind as he grows through the final generation of humanity.
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Reviews:
Praise for IAN McDONALD
"The books are well written, semi-plausible and offer a non-American-centric view of the near future..."
—The Huffington Post
"...one of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era. Indeed, maybe the most interesting and accomplished." —Asimov's
"McDonald deserves to be going up against most of the world's top fiction writers, period." —Amazon's Bookstore Blog
Praise for Cyberabad Days
"Clifford D. Simak's City set an early high standard for the form, and McDonald's Cyberabad Days lives right up to [it]... a way of showing a future society from many different viewpoints, and while a short story can't feature the depth of characterization and complications of plot that are found in a novel, a series of short stories can, and in the case of Cyberabad Days does, serve as a way of introducing the breadth of a fictional future and portray it from the viewpoint of numerous characters who might not fit into a novel's narrative structure.... For readers new to McDonald's portrayal of 2047 India, Cyberabad Days is an excellent introduction to the complexities and trials of life in that future land. For readers already familiar with River of Gods, Cyberabad Days is a welcome second, third, and more look at a country and its people where the past is quickly meeting the future in strange, new and wonderful ways." —SF Site
“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 (greenmanreview.com)
“McDonald has found new myths for old places; in doing so, he has cemented his reputation as an amazing storyteller.” —Washington Post Book World Sunday
“He should be reckoned as one of the finest of all our novelists.”
—Amazon.com’s "Best 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 accomplished, 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
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