Giornata dedicata all'autore di Luna Piena, di recente uscito per Urania Jumbo Mondadori
Dello stesso autore è uscito da poco per Kipple Ares Express, seguito di Desolation Road
La copertina originale:
La copertina della prima edizione italiana curata da Mondadori e uscita per Urania Jumbo:
River of Gods
by Ian McDonald
The River of Gods is the Ganga, flowing down from the Himalayas through the north Indian plain to the Bay of Bengal. After consecutive years of drought, the illegally built dam at Kunda Khadar has become the focal flashpoint of a rapidly brewing war between India and Awadh, one of its neighbouring states. This is August 2047, the 100th anniversary of India's independence, and the monsoon is three years and two months late. Acute political, social and ecological catastrophes loom. For many writers this sort of scenario would provide the basis for an entire novel, so it will convey some idea of the sheer complexity and scale of Ian McDonald's new novel to point out that the drastic effects of global warming are something of a sideshow in this book.
The narrative is divided between 10 main characters and a host of lesser ones: a gangster, an ambitious political aide, a stand-up comedian, a set designer for a virtual-reality soap opera, a quantum scientist, a journalist, and so on. Through following these lives, which gradually intersect, the main story emerges.
A wandering asteroid captured in Earth's gravitational field is found to have an AI message buried in its heart. The AI is older than the solar system itself, yet it carries digitised pictures of the three people who can decode it. The stand-up comedian is plucked out of his chaotic life in London to inherit control of his family's power-generating business in Varanasi, just at the time when zero-point energy becomes practicable. The political aide, groomed for highest office, is trapped in his guilty liaison with a sexually neutered lover, groomed in the other sense. The journalist who springs the trap on him has been set up by the government's main political opponent, himself a figure of such evanescence that many think he is an AI construct.
Meanwhile, the thirsty crowds riot, armies move, slow missiles creep up horribly on opposing forces, businessmen wrangle and connive, lovers meet clandestinely, robotic debt-collectors pounce from the sky, India is 208 for 5 in the second Test match, and on the southwestern horizon the dark clouds of the belated monsoon move symbolically towards the climax.
In terms of ideas, intellectual scope, detail, inventiveness, risk-taking and sheer scale, McDonald's novel is one of the most ambitious I have read in recent years. It is also a staggering achievement, brilliantly imagined and endlessly surprising, the characters intriguing and psychologically convincing, their dialogue brisk and naturalistic, the grasp of Indian customs and nuances impressive, the sex scenes unusually spicy, the politics subtle and plausible, and much else besides.
However (and there is often a "however", even in the most friendly of reviews), this is not the totality of the book. Everything above is true, and truly meant, but it also has to be said that River of Gods is fiendishly difficult to follow. From the outset the reader is thrown into a tautly described and enormously complicated mise en scène, with little help to find the way. Although McDonald's prose is clear and exact, it is embedded with distracting extras. This is high social science fiction, perhaps the highest kind: John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar for the digital generation. Social SF depends on info-dumps: everything is strange, which is really the point. And info-dumps are what we get. Here's the sort of thing: "Over a glowing schematic of Pasta-Tikka Inc information system, Saraswati traces the unlicensed aeai back to the neural fizz of Kashi, then ratchets up level by fractal level into the dendritic blur of the Janpur localnet, Malaviri node, sublocation Jashwant the Jain (all his little cyberpooches, ghostly skeletons knobbly with actuators and chipset arrays: Jashwant himself is a saggy blue bag of naked flesh)."
Almost from the first lines, the white noise of this chaotic future is blaring from the loudspeakers, the plot and the language and the technology and the social assumptions combining in a confusing roar. References to other things clutter almost every sentence, many of them indigenously Indian. (There's a glossary of Hindi terms, but most of the ones I was mystified by and had to look up weren't there.) The language of this culture is a blend of English, anglicised Hindi, hindi-ised Anglo, street slang, jargon from the worlds of computing, maths and techno, media shorthand, and several disjunctive linguistic inventions. The pronoun for a "nute" (a sexual neuter) is "yt", which makes a kind of sense, but still trips the reader the first 50 times yt occurs.
It is not a page-turner book; it is a turn-page-back book. The first 100 pages are a terrific slog, requiring intense concentration and Post-its sticking out of the top every two or three pages behind you. For entirely different reasons, the last 100 pages, when the plot is coming to its awe-inspiring conclusion, are even harder to follow. Few novels require you to take a quiet lie-down every now and then, but this is one of them. It virtually commands a second reading.
However (and this is the other kind of "however"), none of this detracts from what McDonald has brought off here. River of Gods is a brave, brilliant and wonderful novel. No one should be deterred by the difficulties I have described, because conquering them is just one of the substantial rewards to be found and relished.
Christopher Priest's novel The Separation won the 2003 Arthur C. Clarke award!