n the year 2047, the subcontinent of India, after its breakup, is a patchwork of competitive mini-states. Our focus is the state of Bharat, and its city of Varanasi, through which flows the eternal river Ganga. Through overlapping and interconnected narratives, we will witness a few wild weeks in the life of the nation. The surface tale is one of war and political machinations. But beneath this overt story lie several layers of personal magnitude. And one layer of cosmic significance. McDonald's deft master narrative shifts among multiple points of view, blending a number of social sets containing scores of characters.
Our first encounter is with a "badmash," or street hood, named Shiv, and his partner, Yogendra. Shiv traffics in stolen ovaries and is waxing sleek and self-satisified—until advances in medical science render his product exiguous. Saddled with debt, chased by his creditors, Shiv is forced to switch illegal specialties. Ultimately given the assignment of stealing a vital crypto key, Shiv will discover that friends can become enemies, and enemies become friends.
Next to be introduced is Mr. Nandha, the Krishna Cop. Nandha's task is corralling rogue "aeais" (AIs), software gone bad. Dedicated and humorless, Mr. Nandha is a whiz at what he does—but his diligence at work causes him to neglect his beautiful wife, Parvati—and the handsome gardener Parvati has employed soon is swept up in a love triangle. But Mr. Nandha is blind to all this, his attention elsewhere, for a Generation Three aeai, whose intelligence is tens of thousands of times greater than a human's, has manifested in Varanasi, and duty demands that it be found and "excommunicated."
Shaheen Baddoor Khan is private secretary to the ruler of Bharat, Sajida Rana, a tough woman in the mold of Indira Ghandi. Khan and Rana have the unenviable task of guiding restless Bharat through the tail end of a three-year drought and the protests led by one N.K. Jivanjee. A nice little diversionary war against neighboring Awadh would suit their purposes nicely. But as the war begins to spiral out of control, Khan's life is complicated by the revelation of his secret vice: a fetish for "nutes," bioengineeered third-gender beings. His secret will emerge thanks to the snooping of reporter Najia Askarzadah and the indiscretions of a nute named Tal.
Outside Bharat, life has its own surprises. Lisa Durnau, a cosmologist and cyberneticist, has been enlisted by the U.S. government and shown a secret. Out in space, an alien artifact dubbed the Tabernacle has been discovered. The artifact seems to want to communicate with Durnau, her old mentor Thomas Lull, and a mystery woman. Sent to India to find Lull, Durnau eventually learns the identity of the third contactee as well—and the woman's exact relationship to the Generation Three aeai.
Finally, Vishram Ray, the young heir to Ray Power company, must shepherd his firm's dangerous zero-point-energy researches to a successful conclusion if he and his company are to survive. But little does he know that his strongest backer is not human at all.
A vast panoramic future
Ian McDonald's superb new book is perhaps the best thing he's ever done—and that's saying a lot, considering that his many earlier novels and stories have been award nominees and acquired a faithful following. But what he has achieved here is a magnitude higher. He has stepped boldly into the shoes of another British writer, the late John Brunner. Specifically, that aspect of Brunner who produced that quartet of classic near-future widescreen extravaganzas: Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Brunner's accomplishment in these volumes was to limn the near future in meticulous, journalistic detail, from both above and below, with a savvy eye toward realpolitik shenanigans, changed cultural assumptions, jazzy future lifestyles and scientific advances. All this and more McDonald does as well.
His nutes and Brahmin children (the latter age at half the rate of baseline humanity), his aeais and Krishna cops, ably objectify the futuristic aspects of his world, while the unchanging dynamics of marital relations and political maneuvering ground us in the eternal. His people are highly individualistic, composed not of tics and gimmicks, but of genuine motivations and histories. The various love affairs resonate, making us happy when they succeed and sad when they fail. In building his cast, the first foundation of such an epic, McDonald proves himself a master.
And of course he does not neglect the speculative elements of his tale. The nature of the artificial intelligences and their means of escaping humanity's persecutions are all vigorously buttressed and worked out.
McDonald's prose is lush and sensual, occasionally erupting in quasi-stream-of-consciousness passages. Unlike Brunner, he does not really embrace a multi-media presentation, but the shifting number of POVs contributes to a similar range. At least to this non-native, his portrait of India rings out with authenticity and heft. In the cyberpunk canon—and McDonald is definitely upgrading cyberpunk here—India has been relatively neglected as setting and theme, and McDonald earns more credits for selecting and instantiating such a welcomely exotic milieu. In this he harks back to another New Wave writer, Brian Aldiss, who focused several stories on the subcontinent.
McDonald's use of both river imagery and deific motifs is assured and inspiring as well. By the time he posits that humanity is as much a god to the AIs as the AIs are to us, we are fully inclined to believe that McDonald is demiurge to both.
