Product Description

August 15th, 2047. Happy Hundredth Birthday, India . . . On the eve of Mother India's hundredth birthday, ten people are doing ten very different things. In the next few weeks, all these people will be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. From gangsters to government advisors, from superstitious street-boys to scientists to computer-generated soap stars, River of Gods shows a civilization in flux - a river of gods. RIVER OF GODS is an epic SF novel as sprawling, vibrant and colourful as the sub-continent it describes. This is an SF novel that blew apart the narrow anglo and US-centric concerns of the genre and ushered in a new global consciousness for the genre.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29994 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

About the Author
Ian McDonald was born in Manchester in 1960. His family moved to Northern Island in 1965. He now lives in Belfast and works in TV production. The author of many previous novels including the groundbreaking Chaga books set in Africa Ian McDonald has long been at the cutting edge of SF. RIVER OF GODS won the BSFA AWARDin 2005.

Customer Reviews

At last.....!
This is the second book I've read of Ian McDonalds, the first being Brasyl, and as inventive and quirky as that was, this book is even better. For reasons that have never been entirely clear to me, the UK has IMO never produced a world-class sci-fi writer. With this book Ian McDonald changes all that, joining the ranks of Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson et al. This is a work of vaulting imagination which draws on the issues, technologies and geopolitical fault lines of today to yield a work which is fresh, fast-paced, and has that textual and linguistic richness that has eluded pretty much all other UK (and European?) writers in this genre. One could argue that this book is stylistically indebted to William Gibson, yet it is none the worse for that and besides which, McDonald is entirely his own man, with a facility for transporting the reader to a strange, yet entirely believable Indian sub-continent, albeit a fractured one, at once colourful, dark, sexy and not a little troubling for those of a nervous disposition. I cannot reccomend this work too strongly.