Days of Cyberabad

The collection takes us back to the vibrant world of futuristic India, vividly depicted by Ian McDonald in the novel «River of Gods». In this India, split into a dozen city-states from Kerala to the sources of the Ganges in the Himalayas, millennia-old traditions are oddly intertwined with high-tech, and the roots of local cyberpunk, permeating the caste system, extend to the Hindu pantheon, which still counts many thousands of deities. Men in this society outnumber women four to one, and genetically modified children mature twice as slowly as usual. Climate change leads to dreadful droughts and wars for water, fought with combat robots, but ordinary people remain attached to their beloved soap operas — even though they are created entirely by AI. This is a world of the future — in many ways already here.