Author: Ian McDonald
Cover Artist: Stephan Martiniere
Publisher: Pyr
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: February 2009
Cyberabad Days is a collection of short fiction set in the same future as McDonald’s novel River of Gods, published in 2004. It is set in India in 2047, one century after it declared it’s independence. I have not read this novel, it isn’t required to understand the stories in this collection even if it will probably make things a little easier on the reader if you have. After reading this collection I am very curious about this book. I guess my to read list has grown longer again.
Cyberabad Days contains seven stories, all but one published before in various magazines and anthologies, set in the 2040s in various places in India. The country has split up in a number of smaller states in a violent episode in the 2020s. I guess the main character from Vishnu at the Cat Circus describes it better than I could.
I can understand the War of Schism: that India was like one of those big, noisy, rambunctious families into which the venerable grandmother drops for her six-month sojourn and within two days sons are at their fathers’ throats. And mothers at their daughters’, and the sisters feud and the brothers fight and the cousins uncles aunts all take sides and the family shatters like a diamond along the faults and flaws that gave it its beauty.
Vishnu on the War of Schism – Vishu at the Cat Cirsus
Of course in it’s long history India has rarely been united as one state and it certainly isn’t one nation. The idea that it is one county may just be colonial wishful thinking. Given the social, religious and ethnical stresses on the country, a further division of what was British India is not such an unlikely scenario. Even if it doesn’t seem to be imminent. In his divided India McDonald sets a number of stories that describe the impact of rapid technological development on a developing nation. Issues such as environmental pressures, demographic change, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and communication technology are discussed in the various stories through the eyes of mostly young characters.
In Sanjeev and Robotwallah we meet a young boy who becomes obsessed with robots ever since witnessing a number of battle robots in action near the village he grows up in. Robotics and artificial intelligence have made huge advances. War is no longer a matter of soldier against soldier, robots do the actual fighting. They do need to be remotely controlled to an extend though. After one of the wars lays waste to the fields that feed his village Sanjeev moves to the city. There he meets a number of teenage boys who control the battle robots he’s seen. He looks up to them, their life fascinates him. But one day the war ends. Ultimately this story is about what happens to soldiers one the war is fought. Usually not a pretty sight.
The new nations of India are in the process of building a nation, as they put it. In Kyle Meets the River we see this process though the eyes of a young boy who’s father is hired to provide the expertise these new nations are missing. Kyle lives in a closed and high security part of the city of Varanasi (Benares), the new capital of Bharat. Violence is a daily occurrence in the city so Kyle leads a very sheltered life. The only contact he has with the local population is though his friend Salim, the son of an upper-class Bharati who can afford to have his son move in the same circles as Kyle. The young boy is curious about the nation his father is building. With his local friend he sets out to see the wider world and causes a full scale security alert in the process. Varanasi in the 2040s feels like Baghdad today.
More violence in the story The Dust Assassin, this time a dispute between two powerful families in Jaipur. It is not the focus of the story but it appears to be a dispute over water rights and control of water resources in part. The young girl in the story grows up being told she is a weapon against the family her family is arguing with. She isn’t told how though. When the other family gains the upper hand in the conflict she is the only one of her family who survives. Determined to find out how she is to be a weapon to end the conflict she tries a number of different approaches. The truth is not quite what she imagined. I guess the bio-engineering part of the story has a larger impact but the scarcity of water and what it does to this relatively dry part of India is what interested me most.
The preference for boy children leads to demographic crisis on a huge scale in McDonald’s future India. Advances in medicine have made it possible and relatively easy to ensure the sex of a child. This practice results in a situation where there are as many as four men for every woman. An Eligible Boy describes Jasbir search for a bride amid this fierce competition. Gender imbalance is already a problem in some parts of the world. It is scary to think how much medical science could contribute to this problem.
The Little Goddess takes us to Nepal. A young girl exhibiting the 32 traits of perfection is take away from her parents to grow up in a monastery. Until the time she first bleeds she is considered a goddess. Eventually the time comes when she has to go back to the outside world. The very trait that made her perfect in religious eyes, I suppose you could say she is autistic, makes it hard to settle back into society. A long search looking for her place in the world begins. I thought this was a rather unsettling story, not so much because of what the main character does but more because how society treats her.
For his story The Djinn’s Wife McDonald received a Hugo Award for best novelette in 2007. The story largely deals with the impact of advanced artificial intelligence on society. A young dancer meets the powerful artificial intelligence A.J. Rao, serving as a diplomat in a water related conflict between Awadh and Bharat. Under severe diplomatic and economic pressure from the US many states, some of them on the Indian subcontinent, have imposed restrictions on artificial intelligence and banned AIs as advanced as A.J. Rao entirely. Rao is an admirer of her art and romance blooms. Their marriage is gold for the gossip magazines, but it is not without it’s problems. McDonald makes this story into an interesting parallel between AIs and Djinns.
The final story in the collection is Vishnu at the Cat Circus. It deals with the life of Vishnu. He is a Brahmin, a genetically engineered human who only ages half as fast as a normal man. He can expect a long healthy life and is gifted with superhuman memory and intelligence. He is the hope of his family but he is also their second son. His older brother is jealous and after an attempt to get rid of the rival they grow up separate. Life as a Brahmin is not easy. His intelligence far outpaces his physical development, leading to sexual frustrations during the teenage years. His mother may have high hopes for Vishu but he sees matters differently. As Vishu tries to lead his own life, technology passes him by though. He must face up to the possibility that he may be obsolete before his body has fully matured. Again a rather disturbing vision of what bio-engineering could do to society. I think Vishnu is probably the most interesting character of the collection. His story gives a bit more background on McDonald’s future India. It provides some of the context for the earlier stories for someone who hasn’t read River of Gods.
Cyberabad Days is not a light read. McDonald introduces a lot of technological concepts and deals with complex social issues. The setting will also not be familiar to many readers. All this stuffed into relatively short works of fiction are something of a challenge to the reader. Cyberabad Days is an intense read. I thought the picture of India McDonald paints fascinating. The the contrast between traditional India and modern technology in particular attracted me. Although the city itself isn’t important in the stories, the reference to on of India’s IT centres in the title of the collection is well chosen. The development of technology is of course highly speculative but the author does cover many of the challenges India, divided or not, will face in the coming decade. Not a light read, but definitely a rewarding one. It will take me a while before I get around to it but I am going to see how McDonald handles these themes in a novel length work.
