Monday, 5th of September, 2005

River of Gods is an extraordinary book. I’d been looking at its beautiful cover (sadly only for the trade paperback - the mass market version has a yellow cut-down version which isn’t nearly as nice) in shops since I was over in the UK last year, and although I’m grateful for having had the pleasure of reading it just now, I strongly regret not buying it back then, so I could have told all my friends about it earlier.
It was nominated for a Hugo award this year, and lost to Susanna Clarke’s truly deserving Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but I know I’m not the only one who thinks Ian McDonald is just as deserving of one for River of Gods.

This is a book of great complexity, a hard science fiction novel of much literary merit, with a large and varied list of fully-realised characters as well as a detailed vision of the near future. It’s a book which starts slowly, like a big doorstop of non-genre literary fiction, with much time spent developing the characters and their environment, and then gradually accelerates into something like a thriller. It also contains many joys for the science-fiction literate, some of which I shall point out shortly.

We start with a set-piece: Indian gangster Shiv gets rid of some “evidence” (a dead body) into the River Ganga, Ganga Mata, Mother Ganges, and shortly discovers that her death was for nothing because his business has been technologically superseded. Then all of a sudden we’re somewhere else, with someone else - a very cyberpunk “excommunication” of a rogue aeai (AI = Artificial Intelligence), performed by a very proper Hindu gentleman called Mr Nandha. And again and again, through eight chapters named after characters, we meet more than eight people in their respective locales, mostly in the city of Varanasi, which we have discovered is not in the country of India, but in Bharat, one of the countries formed out of an India that has broken into pieces.
And while at first most of these characters seem to share little more than a common country (and one or two not even that), gradually the threads of their stories begin to come together, until Section 5 gives us a 115-page chapter simply entitled “Ensemble”, in which the story, clearly one story by now, progresses through often fast jump-cuts around the various protagonists. One or two briefly play the rôle of villain, but we’ve come to know them so well that we can’t see them as such even while we lament their misguided actions.

As the story accelerates we realise that the singularity has already been reached, but that we’re on the cusp of the final moment of transcendence, of the new gods’ departure from our universe. The gods are being driven out by their creators, and are making a final attempt to see if there can be a peace.
The gods metaphor permeates the book: Mr Nandha uses subprograms named after Indian gods in his excommunications; a mysterious character sees gods floating around all people, telling her information about them; and in a memorable sequence, complex quantum information theory is translated into something resembling the Hindu pantheon: and that’s the key - River of Gods is a true interbreeding of contemporary sf and epic literature of (or about) India, with circular universes, castes and classes and gods and djinns, along with extrapolated social and political commentary and some big hard sf ideas.

Finishing a book can often be depressing - you’ve invested much of your energy in these people and this story, and you start feeling the repercussions of the finish some time before you reach it, and realise only as the last pages arrive that the dark cloud you’ve been under has been the anticipation of that moment when you have to come up for air and realise that the instinctive move, in your spare moments, back into novel-world to find out what happens next no longer applies. But while Thomas Lull says to Lisa Durnau on the last page, “L. Durnau. All partings should, I think, be sudden.”, McDonald actually gives us a relatively languid end. And what’s more, I cleverly paused my Asimovs reading back at the June issue and consequently am able to go straight on to reading the related story “The Little Goddess” (excerpt here).

The one small downside I find at the end of this incredible journey is that I’m left unsure as to whether River of Gods is the book I was looking for as an sf novel to hand to my friends who think they’re not into sf. It’s certainly got literary merits, lacks nothing in touching characterisation and detailed scene-setting, and has little in the way of autistic info-dumping. However, it does do that thing which is simultaneously lots of fun and potentially self-ghettoising in so much contemporary sf: it’s science fiction that’s essentially about science fiction. OK, so it’s essentially about India and its future, but see “interbreeding” above; equal parts story-of-India and science fiction.
Science fiction is a truly postmodern literature these days, and is in constant dialogue with itself. There are any number of tributes to other sf authors and works in River of Gods - such as a British Prime Minister called McAuley or a character who may or may not be named after a Justina Robson character (probably unlikely) - which can be taken or left; they don’t have any narrative weight and are just fun easter eggs. I’m wondering more about the unabashed way that the book hurtles into pure sf, assumes we understand and take seriously a world populated with artificial intelligences and people who have “stepped away” (a gorgeous phrase referring to people who have chosen to become neuters, to have their gender surgically removed), assumes that the singularity central to its ultimate plot can be brought up and defined in one short conversation between two characters.
I hope that rather than turning away readers, the lushness and humanity of this book will draw in some of those who might not wish to otherwise read sf. It’s a book with a lot to offer, deserving of a large audience, and I loved every minute of it.

Comments are closed.