River of gods
As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business--a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj--the waif, the mind reader, the prophet--when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden. In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. River of Godsteems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures--one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.
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What Hacker News says
- River of Gods by Ian McDonald
Indian politics 100 years following independence, forbidden AIs that pass a predefined threshold and policemen that chase them, individuals who have all their gender indicators surgically removed ...
An amazingly saturated piece of writing
- For sci-fi with some Indian spice have a look at River of Gods by Ian McDonald
- I agree - it's kind of hard to capture the spirit of it when things have changed so much in the meantime. I'd certainly want to watch it though.
However, I would LOVE to see a film adaptation of one particular more recent cyberpunk-style novel, River of Gods by Ian McDonald. It's staggeringly brilliant, and recent enough that it wouldn't be dated in the same way.
- To make that short:
“Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”
― Ian McDonald, River of Gods
But I think is quite unlikely, that they go from dumb to almighty without visible transition.
- There seems to be a western fascination with the idea of breaking India into different countries. River of Gods, a sci-fi novel by Ian McDonald, imagines India as 12 separate nations.
I don't ascribe this to malice, but to sheer bewilderment. From a rational perspective, India should not really exist. It is just too large and heterogeneous to stick together.
When I was in the US, some people asked me if I "speak Indian". The rational brain assumes that if they speak French in France, Italian in Italy and German in Germany, they must speak Indian in India.
Half an hour later, I figured out why the west never can and never will understand India
- Past: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, Current: River of Gods by Ian McDonald, Planned: Delivered from Distraction by Edward Hallowell
