Cyberabad Days
McDonald, Ian. Cyberabad Days: Return to the India of 2047. New York City: Pyr, 2009. French translation La petite déesse et autres nouvelles d'une Inde future. Paris: Denoël (Lunes d'encre), 2013.[1]
Story collection following River of Gods, q.v.
Several serious reviews,[2] including Annalee Newitz, "'Cyberabad Days' Blasts Into India's High Tech Future." Gizmodo, 16 February 2009,[3] and Karen Hellekson in SFRA Review #289 (Summer 2009): pp. 16-17.[4]
Newitz summarizes and draws attention to elements relevant here, with the collection generally set:
at the periphery of McDonald's [...] novel of future India, River of Gods. McDonald has long been fascinated in his fiction with the way high technology mutates – and is mutated by – culture in developing worlds. In several stories here, he imagines when India's obsession with male superiority is combined with biotech to produce a population where males outnumber females 4 to 1. [* * *]
Probably the strongest stories in the volume are "The Djinn's Wife" [...] and "The Little Goddess" [...]. Both concern the evolving relationships between humans and aeais [pronounced phonetically, that would be AI's]. In "The Little Goddess," a Tibetan woman who spent her childhood performing the role of a goddess in a temple discovers that her schizophrenia-influenced neurology makes her the perfect cognitive mule for smuggling illegal aeais across the country. And in "The Djinn's Wife," a dancer becomes the first human to marry an aeai. Though she can't touch him, he can burrow inside her brain to give her the best hands-off orgasms ever. And when they fight, he can literally turn the entire networked city against her.[5]
In her review, Hellekson calls attention to how
the ancient history of India runs through all of these stories, even as characters undergo body reforming, place hardware in their heads, and in other ways link their bodies to the machine. Cars have aeais [AI's], but aeais may also appear as people. Women’s hands form traditional mudras,[6] now keyed to evoke a reaction from a machine. Everyone wears a lighthoek coiled behind an ear, granting them access to a shared virtual world. Everywhere there is the body, and the machine, and their intersection. (p. 17)
In Hellekson's reading the saturation of the culture by technology provides connections among people
even as it spawns a form of intelligent life that seeks to transcend our world. McDonald makes Indian mythology and practice literal by attaching it to the technological: one can literally attain transcendence by becoming bodhisoft;[7] an aeai can share consciousness with a human, peering out of a technologically emplaced literal third eye. Yet gods and goddesses are recognized inside humans, creating a riotous mix of human, [... divine], and machine. (p. 17)
Definitely see for motif of transferable consciousnesses, e.g., one "former wife" "temporarily downloaded in [... another] woman's brain."[8]
RDE, finishing, 18Feb21