Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald Search Amazon for other books by or about Ian McDonald. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

In Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald returns to the world of his highly acclaimed River of Gods: it is the world, that is, of India in the year 2047. The country has been divided into sections as a result of political disintegration - it appears that the richer regions, swollen with the proceeds of outsourced cybertech development, have cut loose the poorer neighbours, with obvious implications for inequality, migration and armed conflict. People in this society can see for themselves the material and in some sense spiritual benefits of joining the cybernetic revolution and even if they cannot afford machine enhancements for themselves, they might aspire to save enough to purchase the same for their children - well, their sons, in fact. Extrapolating from today's trend, the future India has an enormous gender imbalance as sons are greatly to be preferred than daughters and the costs of enhanced children can be ruinous. The boys themselves, therefore, have to spend a great deal of time and effort seeking opportunities to find suitable female companions and the girls, aware of their rarity value, can afford to be very choosy.

In this society, characters struggle with the limits of humanity and the subtleties of the AIs (ae-ais, for whom the pronoun "yt" has been developed), while also suffering the slings and arrows of the reversals of fortune brought about by the rise and fall in popularity of long-standing cultural institutions. So, while some of the super-enhanced can become almost in reality godlike, those whose claims to fortune and fame are rooted in the past can find their success stripped away, cruelly, overnight: this is the fate of the little girl in The Little Goddess, who is first elevated and then has to suffer the miseries of descending to the mundane world and the fate of those whose lives are blighted by what they once had but can never achieve again. In another of the seven thematically linked short stories in this volume, Sanjeev and Robotwallah, the young protagonist seems to have reached the pinnacle of his desires as a member of the highly boosted combat troops keeping order on the mean streets but this too comes to an end and it is necessary for him to readjust his aspirations to a more tedious level.

The stakes, in these splendidly realized pieces, are high and the ability of social forces to crush the lives and hopes of individuals is just as high in the future as it is today and as it was in the past. One of the principal causes of the tragedies of daily life in India is the excess of unneeded people and the structural factors which prevent so many of those unneeded people becoming able to improve their prospects by any rational or legal means. It is to McDonald's credit that he is able to include these features into compelling tales of a future that seems at least in some ways to be very remote from today.