The world: 'Cyberabad' is 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 out-number females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. Cyberabad is a collection of 7 stories: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 nominee 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?The Dust Assassin. Feuding Rajasthan water-rajas find that revenge is a slow, subtle process. Jasbir and Sujay go Shaadi. Love and marriage should be plain-sailing when your matchmaker is a soap-star artificial intelligenceSanjeev and Robotwallah. What happens to the boy-soldier roboteers when the war of Separation is over?Kyle meets the River. A young American in Varanas learns the true meaning of 'nation building' in the early days of a new country.Vishnu at the Cat Circus. A genetically improved 'Brahmin' child finds himself left behind as he grows through the final generation of humanity.
Industry Reviews
"The sheer number of ideas and plotlines can sometimes make McDonald's novels seems dense, but the stories here are sharp, focused and witty." -- Jonathan Wright BBC FOCUS "McDonald's partitioned India of 2047, which he returns to in the seven stories in Cyberabad Days, is a heaving, complexly imagined society that is, helplessly of course, the work of a westerner." -- Thom Hutchinson DEATHRAY "McDonald's India engulfs you with an overwhelming, perfumed, stinky embrace. A hugely impressive collection. Seven nifty, witty stories." -- Dave Langford SFX "He considers India's political future as a rising superpower and the cold realities of ethnic and religious diversity turning hot and divisive, with obvious analogies to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. As with all short-story collections, some work better than others, but taken as whole, this is a fascinating read, rich in texture, imagery and language." -- Steve White DREAMWATCH TOTAL SCI FI "All in all, Cyberabad Days is a terrific book and a satisfying return to the world of River of Gods. Ian McDonald is a genius, pure and simple." PAT'S FANTASY HOTLIST "McDonald excels at conveying, in a gorgeous melange of sensory impressions, an India transformed by AIs, nanotech, robots and cybernetics: the subcontinent is chaotic and lurid, shot through with devotion to eternal Hindu gods and divided by internecine conflict. McDonald gives a refreshing take on the future from a non-western viewpoint." -- Eric Brown THE GUARDIAN "McDonald gives sci-fi its sense of wonder back, and creates a landscape in which nothing can be taken for granted." -- Roz Kaveney THE INDEPENDENT "One of the great pleasures of science fiction is the escape it offers readers from commonplace, everyday surroundings into strange new worlds, and nobody does it better than Ian McDonald. Although Cyberabad Days is set on Earth, and only a few decades into the future, McDonald's vision of a newly repartitioned India, warring over water and at the cutting edge of technologies based on artificial intelligence, is practically hallucinogenic in style and intensity." -- Lisa Tuttle THE TIMES
