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River of Gods Kindle Edition
August 15th, 2047. Happy Hundredth Birthday, India ... On the eve of Mother India's hundredth birthday, ten people are doing ten very different things. In the next few weeks, all these people will be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. From gangsters to government advisors, from superstitious street-boys to scientists to computer-generated soap stars, River of Gods shows a civilization in flux - a river of gods.
RIVER OF GODS is an epic SF novel as sprawling, vibrant and colourful as the sub-continent it describes. This is an SF novel that blew apart the narrow anglo and US-centric concerns of the genre and ushered in a new global consciousness for the genre.
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherGollancz
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Publication date17 Sept. 2009
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File size1324 KB
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From the Publisher
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
RIVER OF GODS
August 15, 2047-Happy Birthday, IndiaBy IAN MCDONALDPrometheus Books
Copyright © 2006 Ian McDonaldAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-595-5
Contents
PART ONE: GANGA MATA...............................11 Shiv.............................................32 Mr. Nandha.......................................93 Shaheen Badoor Khan..............................224 Najia............................................295 Lisa.............................................416 Lull.............................................517 Tal..............................................578 Vishram..........................................66PART TWO: SAT CHID EKAM BRAHMA.....................799 Vishram..........................................81l0 Shiv............................................8611 Lisa, Lull......................................9512 Mr. Nandha, Parvati.............................11913 Shaheen Badoor Khan, Najia1.....................3314 Tal.............................................14915 Vishram.........................................161PART THREE: KALKI..................................17916 Shiv............................................18117 Lisa............................................18818 Lull............................................20019 Mr. Nandha......................................21520 Vishram.........................................23121 Parvati.........................................24422 Shaheen Badoor Khan.............................25923 Tal.............................................27424 Najia...........................................29125 Shiv............................................299PART FOUR: TANDAVA NRITYA..........................30926 Shiv............................................31127 Shaheen Badoor Khan.............................32028 Tal.............................................32829 Banana Club.....................................33830 Lisa............................................34031 Lull............................................35332 Parvati.........................................36433 Vishram.........................................36834 Najia, Tal......................................37835 Mr. Nandha......................................38536 Parvati, Mr. Nandha.............................39237 Shaheen Badoor Khan.............................40038 Mr. Nandha......................................40839 Kunda Khadar....................................41540 Vishram.........................................41741 Lisa............................................42642 Lull............................................43143 Tal, Najia......................................43844 Shiv............................................44445 Sarkhand Roundabout.............................450PART FIVE: JYOTIRLINGA.............................45346 Ensemble........................................45447 Lull, Lisa......................................569Glossary...........................................577Soundtrack.........................................583Chapter One
SHIVThe body turns in the stream. Where the new bridge crosses the Ganga in five concrete strides, garlands of sticks and plastic snag around the footings; rafts of river flotsam. For a moment the body might join them, a dark hunch in the black stream. The smooth flow of water hauls it, spins it around, shies it feet first through the arch of steel and traffic. Overhead trucks roar across the high spans. Day and night, convoys bright with chrome work, gaudy with gods, storm the bridge into the city, blaring filmi music from their roof speakers. The shallow water shivers.
Knee deep in the river, Shiv takes a long draw on his cigarette. Holy Ganga. You have attained moksha. You are free from the chakra. Garlands of marigolds coil around his wet pant legs. He watches the body out of sight, then flicks his cigarette into the night in an arc of red sparks and wades back towards where the Merc stands axle-deep in the river. As he sits on the leather rear seat, the boy hands him his shoes. Good shoes. Good socks, Italian socks. None of your Bharati shit. Too good to sacrifice to Mother Ganga's silts and slimes. The kid turns the engine; at the touch of the headlights wire-thin figures scatter across the white sand. Fucking kids. They'll have seen.
The big Merc climbs up out of the river, over the cracked mud to the white sand. Shiv's never seen the river so low. He's never gone with that Ganga Devi Goddess stuff-it's all right for women but a raja has sense or he is no raja at all-but seeing the water so low, so weak, he is uncomfortable, like watching blood gush from a wound in the arm of an old friend that you cannot heal. Bones crack beneath the SUV's fat tyres. The Merc scatters the embers of the shore kids' fire; then the boy Yogendra throws in the four-wheel drive and takes them straight up the bank, cutting two furrows through the fields of marigolds. Five seasons ago he had been a river kid, squatting by the smudge-fire, poking along the sand, sifting the silt for rags and pickings. He'll end up there too, some time. Shiv will end up there. It's a thing he's always known. Everyone ends up there. The river bears all away. Mud and skulls.
Eddies roll the body, catch streamers of sari silk and slowly unfurl. As it nears the low pontoon bridge beneath the crumbling fort at Ramnagar, the corpse gives a small final roll and shrugs free. A snake of silk coils out before it, catches on the rounded nose of a pontoon and streams away on either side. British sappers built this bridge, in the nation before the nation before this one; fifty pontoons spanned by a narrow strip of steel. The lighter traffic crosses here; phatphats, mopeds, motorbikes, bicycle rickshaws, the occasional Maruti feeling its way between the bicycles, horn constantly blaring: pedestrians. The pontoon bridge is a ribbon of sound, an endless magnetic tape reverberating to wheels and feet. The naked woman's face drifts centimetres beneath the autorickshaws.
Beyond Ramnagar the east bank opens into a broad sandy strand. Here the naked sadhus build their wicker and bamboo encampments and practise fierce asceticisms before the dawn swim to the sacred city. Behind their campfires tall gas plumes blossom skyward from the big transnational processing plants, throwing long, quivering reflections across the black river, highlighting the glistening backs of the buffaloes huddling in the water beneath crumbling Asi Ghat, first of the holy ghats of Varanasi. Flames bob on the water, a few pilgrims and tourists have set diyas adrift in their little mango leaf saucers. They will gather kilometre-by-kilometre, ghat-by-ghat, until the river is a constellation of currents and ribbons of light, patterns in which sages scry omens and portents and the fortunes of nations. They light the woman on her way. They reveal a face of middle-life. A face of the crowd, a face that would not be missed, if any face could be indispensable among the city's eleven million. Five types of people may not be cremated on the burning ghats but are cast to the river: lepers, children, pregnant women, Brahmins and those poisoned by the king cobra. Her bindi declares that she is none of those castes. She slips past, unseen, beyond the jostle of tourist boats. Her pale hands are soft, unaccustomed to work.
Pyres burn on Manikarnika ghat. Mourners carry a bamboo litter down the ash-strewn steps and across the cracked mud to the river's edge. They dip the saffron-wrapped body in the redeeming water, wash it to make sure no part is untouched. Then it is taken to the pyre. As the untouchable Doms who run the burning ghat pile wood over the linen parcel, figures hip-deep in the Ganga sift the water with shallow wicker bowls, panning gold from the ashes of the dead. Each night on the ghat where Brahma the Creator made the ten-horse sacrifice, five Brahmins offer aarti to Mother Ganga. A local hotel pays them each twenty thousand rupees a month for this ritual but that does not make their prayers any less zealous. With fire, they puja for rain. It is three years since the monsoon. Now the blasphemous Awadh dam at Kunda Khadar turns the last blood in the veins of Ganga Mata to dust. Even the irreligious and agnostic now throw their rose petals on the river.
On that other river, the river of tyres that knows no drought, Yogendra steers the big Merc through the wall of sound and motion that is Varanasi's eternal chakra of traffic. His hand is never off the horn as he pulls out behind phatphats, steers around cycle rickshaws, pulls down the wrong side of the road to avoid a cow chewing an aged vest. Shiv is immune to all traffic regulations except killing a cow. Street and sidewalk blur: stalls, hot-food booths, temples, street shrines hung with garlands of marigolds. Let Our River Run Free! declares a hand-lettered banner of an anti-dam protestor. A gang of call-centre boys in best clean shirts and pants out on the hunt spill into the path of the SUV. Greasy hands on the paint job. Yogendra screams at their temerity. The flow of streets grows straiter and more congested until women and pilgrims must press into walls and doorways to let Shiv through. The air is heady with alcofuel fumes. It is a royal progress, an assertion. Clutching the cold-dewed metal flask in his lap, Shiv enters the city of his name and inheritance.
First there was Kashi: first-born of cities; sister of Babylon and Thebes and survivor of both; city of light where the Jyotirlinga of Siva, the divine generative energy, burst from the earth in a pillar of radiance. Then it became Varanasi; holiest of cities, consort of the Goddess Ganga, city of death and pilgrims, enduring through empires and kingdoms and Rajs and great nations, flowing through time as its river flows through the great plain of northern India. Behind it grew New Varanasi; the ramparts and fortresses of the new housing projects and the glassy, swooping corporate headquarters piling up behind the palaces and narrow, tangled streets as global dollars poured into India's bottomless labour well. Then there was a new nation and Old Varanasi again became legendary Kashi; navel of the world reborn as South Asia's newest meat Ginza. It is a city of schizophrenias. Pilgrims jostle Japanese sex tourists in the crammed streets. Mourners shoulder their dead past the cages of teen hookers. Skinny Westerners gone native with beads and beards offer head massages while country girls sign up at the matrimony agencies and scan the annual income lines on the databases of the desperate.
Hello hello, what country? Ganja ganja Nepali Temple Balls? You want to see young girl, jig-a-jig; see woman suck tiny little American football into her little woman? Ten dollar. This make your dick so big it scares people. Cards, janampatri, hora chakra, buttery red tilaks thumbed onto tourists' foreheads. Tween gurus. Gear! Gear! Knock off sports-stylie, hooky software, repro Big Name labels, this month's movie releases dubbed over by one man in one voice in your cousin's bedroom, sweatshop palmers and lighthoeks, badmash gin and whisky brewed up in old tanneries (John E. Walker, most respectable label). Since the monsoon failed, water; by the bottle, by the cup, by the sip, from tankers and tanks and shrink-wrapped pallets and plastic litrejohns and backpacks and goatskin sacks. Those Banglas with their iceberg, you think they'll give us one drop here in Bharat? Buy and drink.
Past the burning ghat and the Siva temple capsizing slowly, tectonically, into the Varanasi silts, the river shifts east of north. A third set of bridge piers stirs the water into Cats' tongues. Lights ripple, the lights of a high-speed shatabdi crossing the river into Kashi Station. The streamlined express chunks heavily over the points as the dead woman shoots the rail bridge into clear water.
There is a third Varanasi beyond Kashi and New Varanasi. New Sarnath, it appears on the plans and press releases of the architects and their PR companies, trading on the cachet of the ancient Buddhist city. Ranapur to everyone else; a half-built capital of a fledgling political dynasty. By any name, it is Asia's biggest building site. The lights never go out. The labour never ceases. The noise appals. One hundred thousand people are at work, from chowkidars to structural engineers. Towers of great beauty and daring rise from cocoons of bamboo scaffolding, bulldozers sculpt wide boulevards and avenues shaded by gene-mod ashok trees. New nations demand new capitals and Ranapur will be a showcase to the culture, industry and forward-vision of Bharat. The Sajida Rana Cultural Centre. The Rajiv Rana conference centre. The Ashok Rana telecom tower. The museum of modern art. The rapid transit system. The ministries and civil service departments, the embassies and consuls and the other paraphernalia of government. What the British did for Delhi, the Ranas will do for Varanasi. That's the word from the building at the heart of it all, the Bharat Sabha, a lotus in white marble, the Parliament House of the Bharati government, and Sajida Rana's prime-ministership.
Construction floods glint on the shape in the river. The new ghats may be marble but the river kids are pure Varanasi. Heads snap up. Something here. Something light, bright, glinting. Cigarettes are stubbed. The shore kids dash splashing into the water. They wade thigh-deep through the shallow, blood-warm water, summoning each other by whistles. A thing. A body. A woman's body. A naked woman's body. Nothing new or special in Varanasi but still the water boys drag the dead woman in to shore. There may be some last value to be had from her. Jewellery. Gold teeth. Artificial hip joints. The boys splash through the spray of light from the construction floods, hauling their prize by the arms up on to the gritty sand. Silver glints at her throat. Greedy hands reach for a trishul pendant, the trident of the devotees of Lord Siva. The boys pull back with soft cries.
From breastbone to pubis, the woman lies open. A coiled mass of gut and bowel gleams in the light from the construction site. Two short, hacking cuts have cleanly excised the woman"s ovaries.
In his fast German car, Shiv cradles a silver flask, dewed with condensation, as Yogendra moves him, through the traffic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from RIVER OF GODSby IAN MCDONALD Copyright © 2006 by Ian McDonald. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B002U3CC24
- Publisher : Gollancz (17 Sept. 2009)
- Language : English
- File size : 1324 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 617 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 414,391 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 1,313 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- 1,483 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction
- 2,253 in Cyberpunk
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis’s childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story “The Island of the Dead” in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing fulltime.
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An author I will be looking out for in future.
"The cab to the hotel had driven axle-deep through streets awash with floodwater and floating trash. The cows stood mired to the hock. Cycle rickshaws ploughed through the dancing brown liquid, throwing up beery wakes. She watched a rat swim across the taxi's path, brave head held high." [p340]
This skill extends to the way he describes the advanced features of the world: virtual reality headsets, killer robots, nanotechnology, surgery which has created a third gender, and a wildly-popular soap opera in which all the characters are played by artificial intelligences. In a metafiction twist, this extends to the actors playing the characters, because the gossip about the soap is at least as important as the show itself. And if characters in a story don't have to be human, then perhaps this could extend to other fields where personalities could do with a little artificial enhancing - such as politics? (this part of the story reminded me of Neal Stephenson's 1994 SF thriller "Interface", wherein the main character "is more than a perfect [presidential] candidate. He's a special effect").
Besides assuredly portraying each character in his varied cast (despite mentioning the nipples of just about each female character), the author does a good job at describing future technology and science using some plausible-looking vocabulary. This includes Calabai-Yau manifold, Zero-point energy and M-Star theory, although I wasn't sure if "Boltzmon" on the penultimate page was intended to be "Boltzmann", or instead to allude to that name. In an audacious move, the artificial intelligences (which end up playing a crucial role in the story) are named phonetically as 'aeais', a name which at first glance looks Indian. There's a link between the relationship they have with humans and the one that we (or at least the Indians in the story) have with gods which is cleverly teased out.
Not all of the threads in this complex story get tied up, and some characters turn out to be more relevant to the main story than others, but this is a book which is so overflowing with ideas, memorable exposition and stimulation that I'll be thinking of it for a long time after having put it down.
The Nutes were an interesting idea. A bio-engineered third sex. Speaking of which, the sex in here is appalling, as was the attempt to set up a "cool" Music/Club Scene.
The most interesting parts were the 3rd gen A.I's and the Artifact. Underdeveloped threads and wasted opportunities. The thrust of the book lay elsewhere, however.
Top reviews from other countries
I loved that these things were brought into focus even as the story grew to a crescendo (referenced multiple times within the book having a nice meta level I enjoyed) with the start of the book taking long inhalations of fiction for each character that become short, small breaths until the fiction finally shudders and stops altogether. With each chapter growing shorter and shorter until the last part of the book is just one, with each separation between the characters also getting shorter and shorter. It was really effective for me and in a lot of ways I enjoyed it as much as the semi-same writing techniques used in Cloud Atlas, one of my most favorite books of all time, actually.
Small events in each person's daily life slowly unravel into a much grander plot that puts these individuals lives in a completely different context by the end. What starts as the slice of life in India and Thailand and Australia, and other places somewhat slowly but without deliberation weaves these people in and out of their own peripheral. Some never meeting at all but all causing ripples that will alter the other individuals in the story.
In the end the story ended in a great place, which was a roller coaster ride for me. I was like oh oh oh, this is how I would end it and actually got a little annoyed as it progressed that this wasn't going to be the ending. And felt that it wasn't doing that to pay fanfare to nihilistic readers in the genre, but then managed to exceed my expectations in the deviation anyways. Which, is pretty incredible I think. The author truly knows their craft, in my opinion.
This hits all the check marks for me, the human condition, larger questions at play, inclusive and diverse content. Stupendous world building, great prose, and a well loved and realized foreign culture in the future. There is literally like 15 pages of terms he uses all pretty much colloquial to India and it reads so well! Spirituality and religion takes aim against technology, how it shapes and molds us even as we engineer it. How technology could surpass us and yet represent humanity and personify it better then we often do. There's a new gender, treated well (from my lens, hopefully I am correct). lots of cool tech, and cyberpunk doing what it does best with really good extrapolating. For a 2006 especially, this is a staggering achievement.
There is a lot predicted in this text with the relationship between US and India, for example.
Another reviewer has complained that it's a British person's lame attempt at representing Indian culture. I'm not Indian myself, but would like to make some comments. For a start, having worked with Indians for 17 years and, for the last 9 years, in a workplace that is about 80% Indian, I've learned that there is no such thing as Indian culture; there are only Indian cultures. There are so many differences in terms of religion, food, customs and language. On top of that, this is set close to 30 years from now. Cultures and values change, especially in countries that are rapidly developing, as is India. The book might not depict his Indian culture, but it might show pieces of one possible future one.
As I said, just do it.
Some of the developments seem to be quite reasonable given our present day world. For example, India is no longer a single nation, but rather, has been balkanized into smaller states similar to those that existed before the Raj. Some humans have found ways to change themselves biologically so that they avoid the problems of being either male or female. At the same time, many elements of this society are recognizable and unchanged like the undercurrent of hatred between Hindus and Muslims on the subcontinent.
And picture a society trying to cope with artificial intelligence, not wanting to abandon it, but not wanting to let it get out of hand. And picture a Hindu policeman whose job it is to track down possibly self-aware a.i.'s and who calls each of the programs that he uses to do the job by the name of a Hindu god whose area of expertise relates to the god's role in the older society.
In this world, there is a soap opera that everyone watches, where not only are some of the characters on the show a.i.'s, but some of the actors are a.i.'s. Moreover, the public seems just as concerned about the private lives of the actors, including the a.i.'s, as any current-day fan.
McDonald writes beautifully, occasionally deliberately confusing us as to what is happening with the result that we have a feeling of insight when we suddenly understand. And luckily the author furnishes us with a glossary of Indian words, although one may want to photocopy the list to avoid flipping back and forth as one encounters unfamiliar terms. McDonald also tells the story from the points of view of several characters that are different enough that we are not confused by them, but rather understand what is going on better than any character. Initially it's hard to see the relationship or purpose of these characters but as the book comes together we see how individual lives shape and are shaped by events and other lives.
As you may have guessed, I enjoyed this book, found it exciting, and had my mind challenged to understand how the future is shaped by the past.