Tomorrow Elephant

I just finished reading River of Gods by Ian McDonald – a strong contender for this year’s Hugo Award.

Ian McDonald is perhaps my favorite living SF writer: he writes the kind of poetic prose that I’d like to aspire to, even though I know that it’ll take me years and years of hammering the keyboard with my fingers until they’re bloody stumps before I can string together a sentence that well. Also, at least among SF writers, his sex scenes are without peer. I’ve often said that if my life was a novel, I’d like it to be written by McDonald. And not just for the obvious reasons.

Pretty much every McDonald I’ve read has been extraordinary – King of Morning, Queen of Day, a postmodern play with Irish folktales, literary tradition and cyberpunk; Chaga and Kirinya, two parts of a trilogy still missing a conclusion about Africa transformed by alien nanotech, and Sacrifice of Fools, best described as Alien Nation done right, given a hefty rectal injection of attitude and set in Ireland. My favorite, though, is his first novel Desolation Road, a beautiful tale spun out of a seamless marriage of magic realism and SF, set in a baroque vision of Mars.

In River of Gods, McDonald continues his exploration of strange cultures on Earth. It’s a big book, as big as the future of India, with a cast of almost a dozen main characters from all walks of society. There’s political intrigue, domestic drama, Big Dumb Objects in space, Bollywood soap operas, gender issues, Krishna Cops chasing rogue AIs with deadly programs that incarnate themselves as Hindu gods… and McDonald being McDonald, a couple of pretty good sex scenes. All the stories here are leaves of the same tree and are more or less woven together in the end. Perhaps the huge cast does lessen the emotional impact of the ending a little – I wasn’t as gripped by River of Gods as by some of McDonald’s earlier books — there’s so much craftsmanship, ambition and richness of language that I had to read it slowly just to savour it.

Although there is sense of wonder and SF pyrotechnics aplenty here, in many ways River of Gods reminded me of something Neal Stephenson has been doing elsewhere lately: treating the past, or – as in this case – real-life foreign cultures in a science-fictional way. A lot of the strangeness of India in River of Gods comes not from the SF tropes, but India itself, painted with water of Ganga mixed with ashes and blood. And that’s the way it should be.