So much science fiction in intrinsically bound up with the achievements of Americans and Europeans -  inspired by the US / USSR space race, and the Americans landing the first man on the moon – that’s it’s a huge breath of fresh air to find a piece of SF so wholly unfocused on those nations as the starting point for the hi-tech scenarios it describes. River of Gods is a piece of near-future SF set almost entirely in the Indian subcontinent, and the fusion of Indian culture, language  and religion with highly advanced artificial intelligence makes for a fascinating combination.

In a similar style to Peter F. Hamilton, McDonald follows a diverse group of protagonists who are all, in their own way, central to the events that are going to unfold. Most are Indian, though not all: Thomas Lull, a genius academic who walked away from the rat race, and Lisa Durnau was his protege, now supervising the hugely advanced AI simulation of prehistoric earth. Other characters are a gangster, a cop who specialises in hunting rogue AIs, his wife, a top civil servant, a journalist, a stand-up cominc and a nute (a person who has had an operation to completely remove their gender, adopting the pronoun ‘yts’).

McDonald takes in the effects of global warming (a growing tension over water between the stats that used to make up India), genetic engineering and other future tech during the course of the book, but the crux of it all is Artificial Intelligences, or aeais as they are known. At some point in the not-too-distant past, the nations of the world came together to ratify protocols against developing aeais past a certain point – but the state of Bharat did not participate, and is now the centre of aeia development and innovation, taking jobs that others can’t. Now aeias are used for all manner of tasks, from systems automation to creating self-aware virtual soap actors who recite scripts in virtual worlds that run whether anyone is watching them or not. More seriously, aeias are vastly increasing their power and awareness. The discovery of an artefact on an asteroid passing close by the earth acts as a catalyst to re-unite Lull and Durnau and to try and discover how their faces came to be in an asteroid and what it’s got to do the aeais. The whole story is played out against the backdrop of the looming monsoon, which has been triggered after many years of drought by towing an iceberg in to the Bay of Bengal to somehow reboot the weather.

River of Gods is a wonderful book that does more than pay lip service to how Indian culture and technological proficiency might evolve in a hi-tech future – it really gets under the skin of how different societies evolve hand in hand with their technologies. It’s a convoluted tale that impressively combines the strands of the story in to a suitably powerful climax; and it’s also a thoughtful tale, about what might happen when we finally make machines that are more intelligent, in their own way, than we are. Highly recommended.

Note: originally published by Simon & Schuster in 2004, this book is now being re-published by Gollancz.

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