Scott's Reviews > Cyberabad Days

Would you like to visit 2047 and see the high-tech powerhouse that India could become? Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days will take you to the subcontinental future, from the hot, crowded streets of Varanasi to the cool mountain lakes of Kashmir, via a series of stories that are some of the best in Science Fiction.

McDonald has already shown us that he can blend SF and developing world culture in scintillating ways with Brasyl and River of Gods and he does so again to tremendous effect here, delivering futuristic short stories and novellas with an Indian flavor as pungent and memorable as the spice markets of Old Delhi. Like its predecessor, Cyberabad Days is a seething ants-nest of SF concepts, vibrant color and subcontinental perspectives.

McDonald's India of 2047 has fractured into numerous competing states, New Delhi having finally lost control of its myriad peoples and cultures. Military assault drones patrol borders and cut down insurgents with flechette launchers and nano-edged blades. Varanasi, capital of the new state of Bharat, is the epicentre of an industry producing dangerously high-level artificial intelligences, some of which are the cast of India's best-rating daytime soap. Krishna cops, armed with both physical and virtual weaponry, hunt rogue AIs, enforcing international anti-AI pacts pushed by a faraway conservative US government. Meanwhile, underlying all of this, decades of sex-selective abortion has reduced the number of women in India to a destabilizing twenty percent of the population, upending centuries of marriage traditions and leading some to abandon the mating-race altogether, voluntarily becoming a strange, sexless third gender.

Amongst this chaos ordinary and not-so-ordinary people are working, looking for love, fighting against the encroachment of technology into every aspect of existence and trying to find their place in life. McDonald explores the lives of both the powerful and the weak, from a pizza stall boy to the girl-child embodiment of a Hindu God to a genetically enhanced 'Brahmin' whose lifespan will be measured in centuries. Each story is consistently engrossing, inventive and thought provoking- exactly what I want from my SF.

As with any story collection there are works that shine brighter than others, but on the whole Cyberabad Days is top quality stuff. McDonald is a master of genuinely exciting SF and his nano-edge sharp writing skills constantly delighted me.

I traveled to the subcontinent earlier this year and McDonald took me right back to the crowds of Delhi and the mountains of the Himalaya, but with the addition of sundry layers of futuristic SF awesomeness and thought-provoking questions of technology, humanity and culture. What more could you ask of a book than it not only entertain you, but also transport you to faraway physical, temporal and intellectual places?

4.5 stars.