Folio SF has published a new edition of Ian McDonald‘s CYBERABAD DAYS. Published in French as LA PETITE DÉESSE, here’s the synopsis…
En 2004, lan McDonald publiait en Angleterre un roman d’une ambition peu commune dans le paysage de la science-flction contemporaine, Le fleuve des dieux, un livre aux multiples intrigues situées dans une Inde de 2047 balkanisée et soumise à une sécheresse sans précédent. Le prix de la British Science Fiction Association a récompensé ce roman et son édition française a reçu le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire et le prix Bob Morane.
En 2009, lan McDonald a rassemblé, sous le titre La petite déesse, les sept nouvelles et courts romans qu’il avait écrits sur cette même Inde du futur. On y découvre, souvent par le biais du regard d’enfants, un sous-continent où les hommes sont quatre fois plus nombreux que les femmes, où se côtoient des gens d’une extrême pauvreté, des intelligences artificielles et des stars virtuelles, tous confrontés à des menaces d’un genre nouveau.
CYBERABAD DAYS is published in the UK by Gollancz, and in the US by Pyr Books. Here’s the English-language synopsis…
The world: ‘Cyberabad’ is the India of 2047, a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water-wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity and a population where males out-number females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. Cyberabad is a collection of 7 stories:
The Little Goddess. Hugo nominee Best Novella 2006. In near future Nepal, a child-goddess discovers what lies on the other side of godhood.
The Djinn’s Wife. Hugo nominee and BSFA short fiction winner 2007
A minor Delhi celebrity falls in love with an artificial intelligence but is it a marriage of heaven and hell?
The Dust Assassin. Feuding Rajasthan water-rajas find that revenge is a slow, subtle process.
Jasbir and Sujay go Shaadi. Love and marriage should be plain-sailing when your matchmaker is a soap-star artificial intelligence
Sanjeev and Robotwallah. What happens to the boy-soldier roboteers when the war of Separation is over?
Kyle meets the River. A young American in Varanas learns the true meaning of ‘nation building’ in the early days of a new country.
Vishnu at the Cat Circus. A genetically improved ‘Brahmin’ child finds himself left behind as he grows through the final generation of humanity.
Here’s just a small selection from the great reviews CYBERBAD DAYS received…
‘McDonald excels at conveying, in a gorgeous melange of sensory impressions, an India transformed by AIs, nanotech, robots and cybernetics: the subcontinent is chaotic and lurid, shot through with devotion to eternal Hindu gods and divided by internecine conflict. McDonald gives a refreshing take on the future from a non-western viewpoint.’ — Guardian
‘McDonald gives sci-fi its sense of wonder back, and creates a landscape in which nothing can be taken for granted.’ — Independent
‘One of the great pleasures of science fiction is the escape it offers readers from commonplace, everyday surroundings into strange new worlds, and nobody does it better than Ian McDonald. Although CYBERABAD DAYS is set on Earth, and only a few decades into the future, McDonald’s vision of a newly repartitioned India, warring over water and at the cutting edge of technologies based on artificial intelligence, is practically hallucinogenic in style and intensity.’ — Times
Folio also publishes Ian’s BRASYL, ROI DU MATIN, REINE DU JOUR (KING OF MORNING, QUEEN OF DAY), LE FLEUVE DES DIEUX (RIVER OF GODS) and LA MAISON DES DERVICHES (THE DERVISH HOUSE).
