A follow up to the excellent novel River of Gods, you don't have to have read that to read this. This is a collection of short stories set in the same imagined future India, but it really works on a much higher level than that. The stories are all different. All about different characters from different strata of society. They are not related, each story stands alone. But read together in this order they convey a meta-narrative of acceleration that is surprisingly thrilling and feels, when you'v...

If you liked Ian McDonald's River of Gods, you'll love this collection of short stories set in his cyberpunk, near-future India universe. I liked this better than the novel-- the writing in each short was tight and incredibly focused, exploring everything from war to social castes to life after humanity's singularity. I can't praise this anthology enough, it's the best sci-fi I've read in some time.

A collection of stories set in Mcdonald’s future India, which he used for his excellent novel River of Gods. These stories are told with the realpolitik science fiction of John Brunner, the magical realist tone of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the widescreen imagination of Iain M. Banks. The fairy tales “Dust Assassin” and “Little Goddess” and the dark novella (original to the collection) “Vishnu at the Cat Circus” are the main prizes here. Some of the short pieces are sketches (though the world i...

A fascinating collection of short stories from Ian McDonald, set in and around the India from his novel 'River of Gods'. Some stories tie in to the novel, others merely skirt around it, but all share the same vibrancy and rich detail, creating a bizarre mix of rustic mother India and hi-tech cyber-Bharat. My favourite of the stories is probably The Djinn's Wife, though An Eligible Boy and Sanjeev and the Robotwallah are both close contenders. I think it's because of how nice the slice of life pi...

India of 2047 is fractured into a dozen states, some in conflict with the others with water rights or their differing recognition of the legality of artificial intelligence, and trying to cope with how new technology is altering things. Genetically engineered children, remote piloted robot warriors, artificially intelligent soap opera characters (and the artificially intelligent actors who portray them) and more can be seen shaping the world in big ways and small, affecting the lives of individu...

McDonald is amazing as always. He seamlessly blends the little 'eyekicks' required of the genre without tedious exposition or sacrificing his elegant and unaffected prose style. Most authors, even good ones, can score at best two out of three. McDonald hits the trifecta, over and over again.My only recommendation would be to read RIVER OF GODS first, then this one, then all the rest you can get your hands on.

These short stories do a lot to flesh out the universe first introduced in River of Gods. McDonald's near future India boasts one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, and nine million gods - encompassing both the Hindu pantheon and teeming clouds of post-humans and aieis. I'd already read "Sanjeev and Robotwallah" in what seems like every sci-fi collection published in the last couple of years, and had enjoyed getting a small second taste of what was going on in India of 2...

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)As I've mentioned here several times before, there are many of us science-fiction fans who believe that the industry has entered a whole new "age" in the last ten years, one major enough to be compared to the four eras that came before it (to be specific, the historic "Golden Age" of the 1930s and '4...

This is a collection of short stories set in the same brilliantly realised future India as River of Gods. I'd already read "The Little Goddess", "The Djinn's Wife" and "Sanjeev and Robotwallah" in other collections and loved them, although I felt the third was weaker than the other two.My favourite of the stories was "Vishnu and the Cat Circus", which provides an excellent timeline for the other stories and for River of Gods, as well as providing a lot of background information, including a lot

As in Robert Heinlein's justly-famed opening to The Door into Summer, "The door dilated," Ian McDonald packs a megaton of worldbuilding into a one-word package, with the appearance of the neologism "robotwallah" in the title of the lead story of this collection.But that's the kind of thing that McDonald is good at... solid future worldbuilding, evoked with pyrotechnic prose but centered on characters with emotional depth and resonance. He even handles with grace the quixotic task of taking on th...

...Cyberabad Days is not a light read. McDonald introduces a lot of technological concepts and deals with complex social issues. The setting will also not be familiar to many readers and McDonald stuffs is as many non English words, social, cultural and religious peculiarities and science fictional concepts as he can get away with. All of this put into relatively short works of fiction poses something of a challenge to the reader. It also makes Cyberabad Days an intense and immersive read. I tho...

In his two full-length novels, Brasyl and River of Gods, Ian McDonald has sculpted universes so amazingly rich and detailed that readers couldn't help being caught up in these tales of worlds on the cusp of new evolutionary leaps and societal upheaval. For days after finishing both of his prior books I would awaken from dreams set in the far-flung locale of a future India on the eve of its Centenary or the porous membranes between variant realities in the Rio of tomorrow. It was with great antic...

I thought Ian McDonald's "River of Gods" was a superb SF novel when I read it a few years ago so I was curious to see whether this collection of short stories set in the same mid-21st Century India setting would be as good.I would say McDonald's writing is just as good at it is in his recent novels and he has a great ability to pack in a lot of excellent world-building and characterisation into a relatively small number of words. His vision of an India caught between tradition and advanced techn...

Awesome. The final novella is a crowning achievement. Highly recommended.

Read over a few months

a mixed bag - some very good stories, a couple very badly written. Alas, the last tale, (and the only one directly related to the characters in ""River of Gods""), is one of the weakest stories in the book. The action seems like it was quickly tacked onto a separate narrative - perhaps pushed on the book by the publishers looking to justify the term ""sequel"". This is in no way a sequel. It is a collection of stories set in the same universe as "River of Gods"

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, deliveri...

Cyberabad Days is a good collection of short stories set in the same future India as River of Gods. The last story in particular follows some of the events of the novel and even goes beyond them. In fact, I'd say it surpasses it. While that does make for a strong and awesome short story, it sort of cheapen the value of the novel a bit.

McDonald paints a fantastically rich picture of a fractured, near future India mired in political upheaval, with a generally bleak backdrop of poverty, resource exhaustion, environmental devastation, terrorism and war. The stories however are not generally tales of woe and desperation, but rather of the emergence of new, immersive technologies and their disruptive and transformative effects. Several follow children or young adults, essentially coming of age tales, paralleling their journey into

Master craftsman at work. This is every bit as good as the magnificent River of Gods. Like Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, this book takes you to India and lifts you right out of where you are. Like them, it's written so seamlessly that the author never gets in your way. You're watching through a perfectly clean window. But McDonald's India has robot soldiers and servants, wearable links to AIs, etc. right alongside the saddhus and ragged beggars and social rul...