Sounds cool.. from Express India’s Mc Fiction
It was over lunch at an Indian restaurant in London that writer Ian McDonald was inspired to choose Varanasi as the backdrop for his next page-turner. My then-editor at Simon and Schuster, John Jarrold and I were wondering why is there so little SF set in, and about India, says author McDonald in an email interview.
When he began writing the book in 1999, he realised that even the SF novels written in Britain draw on the American worldview that the future only happens in the US, Japan and China. Recently nominated for the Hugo award, one of the most sought after trophies in the sci-fi category, River of Gods revolves around the control of an all important dam, moving to an impending war between Artificial Intelligence (AI) robots and the human race. Hes even thrown in a soap with virtual actors designed by Tal, a nute or the SF version of an Ardhanaariswara (half-male half-female), into the plot. The central characters-a cop named Krishna, who fights AI and Shiv, an ovary farmer, have obvious links to Hindu mythology. Im enormously attracted to Hinduism because, to the Abrahamic religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, a perfectly functioning polytheism in the 21st century is a strange and bizarre thing. While the diversity and seeming contradictions are interesting, there is also Siva, the oldest god in the world, says McDonald.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 