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Title: River of Gods |
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Review of River of Gods
- As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their businessâa gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Ajâthe waif, the mind reader, the prophetâwhen 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 Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and culturesâone 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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Comments for River of Gods
- Posted on 2008-06-03
WOW!
This book is incredible! McDonald is one of my new favorite authors.
Note that there is a very helpful glossary in the back of the book for all the indian words. I unfortunately didn't realize this until I finished the book! (but was still able to get the gist via context)
Score: 5
- Posted on 2008-05-08
Of Men and Gods
By any definition, this is an AWESOME read! I'm 59 and have been reading science-fiction for 40 years: this is one of the best sci-fi stories I've ever read. Not an easy book, by any means...but well worth the effort if you take the plunge. It's got it all: a detailed cultural background, absorbing characters, A.I.s, alien artifact, destiny of Man, technology vs gods, action, and jaw-dropping twists and turns. I highly recommend it. I will read anything this man writes!
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-01-22
as real as it gets
Ian MacDonald's vision of the near future is so real you can taste it and smell it. The characters are as deep and real as any I've ever read. I won't discuss the plot in my review ... just begin reading this book with a clean slate and an open mind.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-01-10
Flawed but Worth Reading
Once or twice a year I like to try out a recent science-fiction title people are buzzing about, just to get a sense of developments in the genre. The stellar reviews and near-future Indian setting of this book caught my attention, so I dove into the sprawling story. Featuring ten main characters who appear in alternating chapters over the course of almost 600 pages, it's a lot to absorb. Like a bountiful buffet of Indian food, it's really too much for the senses -- you end up with a plate piled with a plethora of delicious tastes, all competing with and sometimes negating each other.
The story is far too complex to summarize adequately, but here are a sampling of the elements: A strange alien artifact older than the solar system is discovered in an asteroid and an English AI researcher is brought to space to examine it. Meanwhile, her former mentor and lover hides out in India as various powerful entities try to track him down to tap his expertise. At the same time, an Indian "Krishna cop" goes about his duties locating and destroying rouge AI entities while his wife seeks romance with her gardener. Also at the same time, the benevolent founder of a large Indian energy company suddenly resigns, leaving his sons to run it. One of the sons is a standup comedian, the other a cunning business shark, leading to an unexpected power struggle. Then there's Shaheen Badoor Khan, the top advisor to a prominent politician, and his secret sexual attraction to "nutes" (gender neutral people created through painstaking -- and painful -- microsurgery). There is a new caste of genetically engineered "Brahmins," a popular TV show starring digital personalities, wars conducted via weather, black market AI, ethnic street battle, and much much more.
Some of this stuff is great, and some of it isn't. Particularly compelling are the strands of the story that deal with the attempts of various AI entities to avoid being wiped out by humans who are afraid of losing control of the world. This touches on politics, society, morality, and also makes for some pretty nifty action sequences. The Indian setting is great, clearly well-researched, and vividly described. However, like a great deal of science fiction, the book is just too sprawling and unwieldy for its own good. There are far too many major characters, and several of them have little to no bearing on the main story. It seems like the author fell in love with each of them to such an extent that he wanted to explore the lives of even the more peripheral ones in much more detail than was necessary. All of which has the effect of dragging the book to a halt at times. Cutting several main characters and about two-hundred pages would improve it a great deal.
It also has to be said that the manner in which all the various storylines are suddenly tied together is both abrupt and underwhelming. And yet, despite these various flaws, it is worth reading if you're into contemporary science fiction. Structural problems aside, McDonald has a pretty deft way with words, and his ability to paint an imaginative near-future scene is fairly impressive. All in all, it's good enough for me to take a look at his other books and possibly give him another whirl.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2007-12-24
Not that good
I've got to say that I read the reviews, and saw the ratings score up there with this book and thought I'd give it a try. And that's where I went wrong.
It's not that this is a terrible novel. It's just that you REALLY, REALLY have to work at reading this book. You start out having to skip to the glossary at the back of the book to figure out what half of the words in Hindi mean. So, after you start jumping back and forth for a while, you have to get used to the author jumping back and forth with his characters. Yes, there are a lot as the other reviewers mention. And yes, they overlap and intertwine. That part of the novel is interesting. As is the setting and the times.
I thought the end was worth the ride. Was it completely work the effort it took to get to the end? It wasn't in my opinion. But you might have a different read than mine. Certainly there are enough readers who loved this book. Me, I just thought too much effort for just an ok plot line.
Score: 3