2007 BSFA – BRASYL by Ian McDonald

McDonald returns to the same formula he used in River of Gods (and later in The Dervish House) and places interesting speculative concepts in the context of a developing country. I think I’ve already made it clear that I’m a fan of this formula: it forces sf writers to confront issues of historical and cultural context that I’ve complained can be absent from the genre. A book like Rainbow’s End isn’t really that different from McDonald’s work, but McDonald’s settings give his novels a liveliness that is absent from Vinge’s familiar SoCal. That said, whenever an author employs a formula like this, they have to be wary of using it as a gimmick. In Brasyl, McDonald is a lot closer to falling into that trap than in his other works.

McDonald tracks three different stories throughout the novel. One takes place in roughly the present day (2006) and involves a reality show producer in Rio de Janeiro named Marcelina Hoffman. Reality programming is a weird phenomenon that feels like something out of sf satire from the ‘70s, so it fits in rather well. Hoffman is the purveyor of the especially dangerous, edgy and salacious type of reality show, and as she works to get a show on the air that would humiliate a geriatric footballer, she begins to notice that someone with her likeness is sabotaging her. In 2032, we meet a young cyberpunk named Edson, who works out of the favelas (slums) of Sao Paulo, and trades different identities to commit petty crimes. He falls in love with quantum computing anime girl and also notices a weird doubling that throws his life into chaos. Finally, we swashbuckle into the early-eighteenth-century Amazon with a Jesuit priest named Luis Quinn and a French scientist named Robert Falcon. Quinn is on a mission to find another missionary who has gone Kurtz with some of the Indians upriver, and he encounters an Amazonian plant that seems to allow people to see into other realities. The stories do eventually interconnect (via some quantum theories that McDonald seems to be found of) into a vast conspiracy that hints at something every bit as vast and epic as River of Gods.

It’s a fun story, and, if you’ve read my Stephenson reviews, you know I’m a sucker for the cyberpunk meets history angle. In fact, this does feel at times like a Stephenson knock off – a blend of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle – but a really good one. McDonald even shares Stephenson’s frenetic and irreverent prose style. If you’re a Stephenson fan who’s looking for more, go read this novel right away.
Still, because it felt a little derivative (albeit, of something daringly original…this book still feels very different from 99% of the sf out there), and because I never quite engaged with the characters (I’m just never going to be able to sympathize with a reality show producer, no matter how well-drawn she is as a character), I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as River of Gods.

Most importantly, I feel like the setting is wasted a little bit. Brazil has taken knocks in the past for not living up to its vast resources and geopolitical advantages; McDonald often quotes the saying that “Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.” So, as a failed “country of the future” there should be a lot to say about the country’s future. We never get much of a sense of that. There are vivid details of the beautiful settings from Rio’s dramatic hills to the big cities’ gang-controlled slums (the great film City of God is referenced heavily) to the majesty of the Amazon. It’s all there, as is capoeira, and samba, and football. But, you could still rewrite it into the US without any significant alterations to the plot. It all feels a bit like window-dressing. I guess I wanted something epic on a world politics level in the same way that River of Gods was.

I feel like I’m doing the thing again where I spend my whole review complaining about a book I really liked. There’s a ton of fun action here, the setting is cool, and there’s some high-level existentialist quantum-physical sf stuff before it’s all said and done. I enjoyed this book a lot, and it’s my clear favorite of the three books I read published in 2006 (the others being Rainbow’s End and Nova Swing). It’s just overshadowed by some of the other landmark novels of the decade, including McDonald’s own.

Grade: B+

2004 BSFA – RIVER OF GODS by Ian McDonald

I reviewed McDonald’s novella “Vishnu at the Cat’s Circus” for the 2010 Hugos and speculated that I might like it better once I was introduced to the wider world. The answer is “yes.” McDonald’s India of 2047, it’s centennial celebration (the novel has the unusual subtitle Happy Birthday India), is a fascinating setting, and it allows him to explore familiar post-cyberpunk themes in a way that few authors I’ve read have matched.

As I mentioned in my “Vishnu” review, McDonald’s futurism tends towards the optimistic (there’s a bit of my old foe, the singularity, at play here). Artificial Intelligences, called “aeais,” are common, but their sophistication is capped by international law pushed by the U.S. Still, they have wide applications in warfare, administration, science, and entertainment (a virtual soap opera called Town and Country plays a key role). There have also been genetic advances, including the slowly aging but long-lived and brilliant Brahmin (covered more in “Vishnu”). Meanwhile, India still suffers from old ethnic conflicts and the environmental problems of climate change and its own diverse geography. The novel centers around Varanasi, an ancient city and Hindu religious center. The region is in a three year drought and a water war looms while fundamentalist Hindus are on the verge of rioting.

McDonald introduces his world through a very broad cast of characters. There’s the comedian who inherits an Indian tech company, a mercenary, a cop who hunts rogue aeais, his beautiful and neglected young bride, a young reporter, a Muslim politician, a surgically created neuter, and a pair of western theoretical physicists, lured into the plot by a strange object found in space. As tensions in the region rise, these characters collide in various, often unexpected ways. Ultimately, hints point to the fact that all of the characters are caught up in the manipulations of powerful aeais.

It’s a very well-written and exciting novel with some incredible imagery, befitting the dramatic setting. There’s always the danger with a novel set in India that we get into some hardcore orientalism (see Song of Kali), but I think McDonald is pretty savvy in avoiding that here. It’s an honest portrayal of the place’s beauty, diversity, and rich history that doesn’t white wash its contradictions and violent history of religious strife. It also has a few sex scenes worthy of the kama sutra; it seems that I only mention sex scenes on this blog to criticize them, so I’ll give McDonald some credit for being…inventive.

It took a little time in the first section for me to get all of the characters straight, but once I did, the next several hundred pages blew me away. This novel was fantastic for most of its run. The end was a little shaky, and I’m beginning to realize that this is a trend in cyberpunk novels, or at least the ones based on AI/singularity. I think the problem is that these plots always run towards apotheosis, which is difficult to portray in a satisfying, or original, way. It’s not a bad ending by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the incredible five-hundred pages that precede it.

Grade: A

2011 Campbell Winner, Hugo Nominee: Novel - THE DERVISH HOUSE by Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald has made a splash in the past decade with a simple but effective formula: take a broad cast of characters, put them in a near-future setting of a developing nation, and add the ramifications of an important technological trend. River of Gods gave us AI in India, and Brasyl gave us quantum computing in, well, Brazil. Both of those novels did quite well in the awards circuit, and I’ll be covering both of them in the fall, but neither won the Hugo. Now, McDonald has his best chance yet with The Dervish House, which explores the effects of nanotechnology on the Turkey of the 2020s.

As I said, there is a formulaic element to these books, but it’s a really good formula. For instance, the big cast of characters with separate but interconnected stories allow McDonald to explore several different aspects of his near future, non-(semi?)-Western society. We get an ambitious young couple – the man is trying to make a fortune on oil from an irradiated Iran; the woman is trying to strike it rich finding an impossible-seeming artifact. We also have an even younger woman seeking to start a marketing career with a nanotech DNA-reprogramming start-up firm. And then there’s a delinquent who begins to believe he can see djinn after he survives an apparent suicide bombing and gets drawn into a group of Islamic fundamentalists. And then there are the typical (for McDonald) outsider characters, an elderly Greek scholar who fears ethnic cleansing in his beloved Istanbul, and an adventuresome boy with a life-threatening heart condition. McDonald weaves all of these stories together and moves them towards a thrilling climax that underlines the possibilities and dangers of nanotech.

I think this is the odds-on favorite to win, but I did find the book somewhat uneven. Most of the characters aren’t particularly likable, others aren’t all that interesting. The trader Adnan Sarioglu is neither, and yet he gets a great deal of the book’s space. The Greek Georgios Ferentinou is by far the most interesting character, and I wished that he’d get a little more of the novel's focus. Of course, the most important character is Istanbul. McDonald employs some of the best prose in science fiction today, and he uses it here to convey a rich sense of the history and geography of one of the world’s great cities. I’ve never been there, unfortunately, but my Turkophile father-in-law has been there often. He read the book, and said that McDonald captured the city perfectly.

There are actually a lot of similarities in setting and story with one of last year’s winners, Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, though McDonald is far more optimistic than Bacigalupi. I like that, but it does lead McDonald wrong at times. For instance, 2027 seems a bit early for most of the technological developments shown here, which is a consistent problem for McDonald (see last year’s novella). This and my lack of interest in some of the characters keep me from giving this my highest grade, but I did enjoy it quite a bit, especially the excellent writing, and it’s a strong frontrunner for me so far.

Grade: B+

2010 Hugo nominee, novella: "Vishnu at the Cat Circus" by Ian McDonald (CYBERABAD DAYS))

This novella is part of the short story collection Cyberabad Days, which recently received a special citation from the Philip K. Dick awards and takes place in the same world as McDonald’s award-winning River of Gods (which is on the docket for future review). All of these stories take place in a divided India in the middle of the twenty-first century. Nanotech and genetic engineering are common, especially among the middle and upper class, and there are also powerful sentient computers, called “aeais” – basically, this future India is on the verge of a “singularity.”

This novella follows the titular Vishnu, a genetically engineered boy. A “brahmin,” Vishnu is super-intelligent and destined to live twice as long as a normal human. Unfortunately, he also ages at half the rate. In his teens, he’s a sexually confused prepubescent. In his twenties, he’s become an influential figure while still an adolescent. To add insult to injury, technology makes him obsolete before he reaches adulthood.

It’s a chilling depiction of genetic manipulation, and it also depicts a very rich world. It’s an incredibly dense work, with political, social, and technological changes introduced on every page. I have doubts that the world will change that much in my lifetime, and this is going to be a common complaint with me and stories about “singularity.” But, I’m willing to go with it, and McDonald’s focus on the developing world, quite well-realized, adds a welcome twist.

I got the impression that Vishnu was a new character but that his story was heavily integrated with material from River of Gods (I guess I’ll know for sure when I get to that novel, probably next year). As a preview for that novel, however, this novella certainly had me intrigued. I’ve complained in the past that short fiction leaves me wanting more; in this case, it’s nice to know that there actually is more. I’m not sure how well this novella stands on its own though.

Grade: B-