River of Gods

Best of the Season, Best of A Thousand Years

Michael Berry of the San Francisco Chronicle offers his list of the Best Books of the Season, a suggested shopping list for SF&F fans. We’re delighted to see Ian McDonald’s masterwork, River of Gods, among the ten books listed:

“The author of King of Morning, Queen of Day and Kirinya delivers a panoramic tale of India on the brink of civil war as its 2047 centenary approaches. Set during a drought that threatens to tear the country apart, the intricate story is told from at least nine distinct viewpoints. The principals include a street thug who traffics in stolen ovaries, a stand-up comic who suddenly finds himself running an energy corporation on the brink of a world-altering breakthrough, a fugitive American expert on artificial intelligence, a cop who battles renegade software and a politician with an explosive obsession. As these characters interact with victims, rivals, lovers and family members, they also play their roles in a drama with cosmological consequences, facing off against deities — or the next best thing.”

Meanwhile, a slightly more ambitious list, blogger William Lexner lists his Best Books of the Millenium (so far). Happy to see two Pyr titles make the list:

“45. Infoquake by David Louis Edelman: Perhaps the best recent take on the dangers of widespread capitalism. A wonderous and scathing debut novel.

“5. River of Gods by Ian McDonald: The veritable proof I was searching for that science fiction is not dead.”

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Sitting Down with Ian McDonald: The Christian Bale of SF

Ian McDonald is interviewed on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, in a long, indepth piece that’s one of the best interviews I’ve read in some weeks. Ian talks about both River of Gods and the forthcoming Brasyl, as well as a host of other subjects. I highly recommend reading the whole interview, but here are some highlights for me:

On Brasyl:

It’s definitely not RoG2: that was one thing I wanted above all to avoid, but I think you’ll find it as rich, deep, dazzling and strange. India is in yer face. The culture slaps you the moment you step out of the airport (in fact, as the plane was touching down). Brazil creeps up on you, shakes its ass, gets you to buy it a drink and the next morning you wake up with your passport gone, your wallet lifted and one kidney replaces with a row of sutures. Peter Robb’s magisterial ‘A Death in Brazil’ carries the line ‘Brazil is one of the world’s greatest and strangest countries’, and it’s only a year after being there that the full understanding of that arrives. It is like nowhere else –certainly not in South America, in the same way that India is like nowhere else. And it’s history is more or less completely unknown in the rest of the West.

On his favorite novel from the Pyr catalog:

David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake. So fresh and good I shamelessly stole an idea from it: the whole premise of a future corporate thriller. I remember Lou Anders pitching this one at the Pyr panel at Worldcon in Glasgow and thinking, of course! It’s so bloody obvious! That’s a genius idea. It sent me back to an old novel by James Clavell called ‘Noble House’ about corporate intrigue in an old Anglo-Chinese trading company (it got made into a pretty dire TV miniseries), so that’s in the mix at the back of my head. Buy Infoquake, read it (I think The Steg already has). Give him the Philip K Dick award.

On growing the readership for SF:

I’m with Gollancz editor Simon Spanton when he talks about the ‘lapsed Catholic’ audience on this, those who once read SF but dropped away, because it wasn’t doing it for the, because they want more than juvenile lots and characters, because they want worlds and people and situations they can believe in, because media SF has so successfully colonised the low and fertile floodplain that it’s all people think of when they hear the words Science Fiction. This was a brief blog-bubble between myself, Paul McAuley, Lou Anders, Charlie Stross and Paul Cornell as a counterblast to the ‘back-to-basics’ movement advocating a return to Golden Age style space adventure. My position on this is well known: of course there’s always going to be a need for space-fic –what the general public think of and call ‘sci-fi’, and it may draw readers in at the bottom end, but it sure won’t hold them. ‘Mediaesque’ sci-fi may, in that sense, ‘save’ science-fiction, but it sure will lobotomise it. And there are a lot of general readers out there who will buy and enjoy science-fiction if they can convince themselves it’s not that geeky stuff…

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Two More Pyr books @ Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist

Patrick returns with two more reviews at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist. First, he says of Ian McDonald’s River of Gods that “only on the rarest of occasions will I encounter a work that totally blows my mind. Hence, I’m pleased to report that Ian McDonald’s River of Gods is one such works… Ian McDonald has written what could well be the best scifi novel in quite a while. River of Gods is definitely one of the books to read in 2006. For my money, it ranks among Hal Duncan’s Vellum and R. Scott Bakker’s The Thousandfold Thought as one of the best novels of the year.”

Earlier, he calls Joel Shepherd’s Crossover “a remarkable scifi debut,” adding that “the novel is a fast-paced thriller with enough action sequences to satisfy anyone. And yet, there is also enough political intrigue to give this book a convoluted and well-executed plot. In addition, Shepherd manages to imbue the darker moments with the right amount of humor to make your lips curl up into a smile on more than one occasion.”

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Science Fiction Gets Global with Two Novels of 21st Century India

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 13, 2006

CONTACT: Jill Maxick
800-853-7545 or jmaxick@prometheusbooks.com

Science Fiction Gets Global with Two Novels of 21st Century India

Amherst, New York—Science fiction authors have always been a forward-thinking group, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that they are turning their attentions to addressing the technological rise of the nation of India. Now, Pyr, the SF&F imprint from Prometheus Books, has published not one but two novels set in this emerging superpower.

Ian McDonald’s Clarke- and Hugo-nominated River of Gods, published March 2006, has been hailed as “a major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best SF novelists of our time” (Washington Post, May 28, 2006). Set in the year 2047, on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of a nation, River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures—one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. McDonald’s novel, like the best of speculative fiction, projects the India of today forward to the middle of the 21st century, to a time when artificial intelligences of almost godlike capabilities exist amid a country still torn between ancient superstitions and fantastic technologies.

As for his reasons for setting his science fiction in South Asia, McDonald says, “Sometimes you just stand up like a meerkat and see where the future is coming from. In this case: one billion English-speaking people, the world’s biggest democracy, education education education, a vibrant enterprise culture and six thousand years of history . . . Jai Hindustan!

Best-selling author Alan Dean Foster brings his vision to bear on an even-nearer future. With its subtitle “A novel of Near-Future India,” Sagramanda (to be published October 3, 2006) presents a fast-paced and gripping techno-thriller set in an India just around the corner from today. Foster imagines the fictional city of Sagramanda, city of 100 million—this is the story of Taneer, a scientist who has absconded with his multinational corporation’s secret project code and who is now on the run from both the company and his father. Sure to appeal to both SF fans and mystery/suspense enthusiasts, Sagramanda has been described as an “unpredictable thriller, whose multiple threads Foster juggles like the professional he is” (Publishers Weekly, August 21, 2006).

“One sixth of humanity lives in India and the other five-sixths hardly know anything about it,” says Foster. “I thought people should. They’d better.”

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Masterpieces & the Problematic Trilogy

The October/November 2006 double issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction has an On Books column from Norman Spinrad entitled “The Big Kahuna.” This time out, Spinrad reviews our books – John Meaney’s Resolution and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, along with Del Rey author Peter F. Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained.

Thematically, the piece is something of a follow-up to his earlier “Aussies, Brits and Yanks,” which appeared in the April/May 2006 Double Issue of Asimov’s and which was exclusively devoted to five Pyr titles – all reviewed quite favorably. In fact, Spinrad quotes extensively from that review in this one.

This time out, Spinrad is less than 100% about John Meaney, though it is worth noting that his criticisms of the work are more to do with what he sees as the marketing and economic realities of SF publishing today, which- as dictated by the major chains refusal to stock hardcover works with a price point over $25 – in his opinion force publishers to break works which should have been single mammoth tomes into a duology or trilogy format.

Spinrad says, “This presents the writer with a literary problem, it produces a paradox that is inherently impossible to resolve fully. To wit, do you presume that the only readership for books two and three are people who have already read book one–and worse, that the only readership for book three is those who have read the first two volumes? Or do you attempt to make each book a novel that anyone can pick up and read cold?”

Whichever way the author chooses to address these questions leads to compromise in Spinrad’s estimation, though he acknowledges that Meaney “does as good and clever a job of bringing the reader who missed the first two up to date without turning off the reader who hasn’t as perhaps can be done.” Along the way he praises Meaney for certain courageous narrative choices and even gives him points for making good on a promise that Frank Herbert never lived to fulfill in his own Dune series. (So, I’m pretty happy with his overall assessment.)

Now, I cannot speak as to what editorial pressures might or might not have shaped the Nulapeiron Sequence as the work was already available from its UK publisher (Bantam/Transworld) before I came on the scene. It was then, and remains today, one of my favorite works of hard science fiction from the last decade. Nor have I read Peter F. Hamilton’s duology, which Spinrad sees as suffering from the same problem. Though I must say Spinrad’s assessment of Pandora’s Star does pique my interest and turn me off for the very reason’s he states. (I may end up adding it to the enormous reading pile eventually, however, being tipped over the edge by learning here that Hamilton uses the speculative device of interstellar railway lines connecting commuters across the stars via wormhole traversing trains – an idea which fascinated me when I first encountered it back in 1992 in Ben Aaronovitch’s brilliant Transit, one of the best of the Doctor Who books from the Virgin line and a media tie-in work that managed that rare feat of being genuine speculative fiction. Come to think of it, Peter did look a bit like Colin Baker at Interaction last year. But I digress…)

Norman Spinrad does raise an interesting point, whether correctly or incorrectly applied in this case. I know that I would have much preferred Gene Wolfe’s recent Wizard Knight as the single book which Locus insists on calling it. And I did pick up the SFBC’s edition of Sean Williams’s and Shane Dix’s Geodesica, precisely because I wanted to read that work in its one intended volume. That and the collector that I am always prefer hardcovers to paperbacks. But it’s hard to fault publishers when they are up against the realities of what the chains will or will not bear – I think we’re all agreed that it’s certainly better to publish a Gene Wolfe work in two volumes than not at all – and I couldn’t truthfully promise you’d never, ever see such a contrived duology from Pyr. (None so far but never say never.) Nor is this phenomenon necessarily new – wasn’t The Lord of the Rings originally conceived as one tome? Still, I’m curious about Spinrad’s proposed alternative, as with his novel Russian Spring, which his French publisher elected to publish “as two volumes without hiding that this was one continuous novel and published them simultaneously. You could buy volume one and read it before you decided whether you wanted to go on, and if you did, you could buy the second volume immediately, or you could buy both at one time, or, in the case of Russian Spring, the two volumes in a fancy boxed set.” Would such a solution work over here? I don’t know, but it bears thinking about, and I’d love to hear some further discussion on the subject.

Meanwhile, I can’t say I’m anything but absolutely thrilled with Spinrad’s opinion that Ian McDonald’s River of Gods is “a literary masterpiece.” Spinrad writes that “I can’t think of a better science fiction novel I’ve read in years…. This novel is a masterpiece of science fiction by any meaningful standard and even some that are not.” Spinrad is certainly not the first to offer this sort of opinion, with the Washington Post proclaiming that River is “a major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best sf novelists of our time” and F&SF hailing the work as one of those once in a blue moon masterpieces like Neuromancer, Altered Carbon, or Perdido Street Station. Certainly, River of Gods is the book that has best plugged into the immediate zeitgeist (Charles Stross’s Accelerando sequence being the previous holder of that honor, though I would place their greatest impact as when his tales appeared in their original Asimov’s run as individual stories.) But it will be interesting to see if a) like Charlie’s Accelerando narrative, River of Gods gives rise/calls attention to any similar global/nonWestern centric works in its wake, in the way that Charlie kick started the recent wave of Vingean Singularity fiction to the forefront, and b) if decades hence McDonald’s masterpiece will indeed be remembered on a par with such classics as Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, or Neuromancer. Time will shortly answer that first question but we’ll have to wait a bit longer before we are sure of the latter.

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the Ultimate Science Fiction Novel

Christopher Priest (The Prestige, The Separation), in an interview in the June 2006 issue of Locus magazine, on the impact of reading Ian McDonald’s River of Gods:

“It’s like the ultimate science fiction novel: it’s got science, inventions, some terrific characters, wonderful locations, and some of the filthiest sex I’ve read. When you finish a book like that there’s the feeling of ‘Holy ****! Now what am I going to do?’ Why bother?’ In the old days, that would have stopped me writing. I’d have to recover for a couple of years before I could forget it.”

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