Apocalypse New Delhi

Orion Books

Rs 350

The new and thought-provoking SF from Ian McDonald,Cyberabad Days,is set in the India of 2047. In McDonalds dystopian vision,bitter wars are fought over water; crime,terror and separatism are rampant; divides between the few who have and the millions who have nothing have deepened to dangerous levels; and the nation has broken into fragments. Even human identities are becoming fragmented as more and more ways of escaping to simulated versions of reality become available. One and a half billion people struggle to live through interminable conflicts,chemical warfare,military occupation,a dangerously skewed sex ratio,and more. Most of all,they struggle to cope with social and technological changes that have engulfed them with fierce suddenness.

There is a lot of beer and pizza,but there are also robot wars,steel monkeys,exploding cat-missiles,shaadi nights in Delhi,and the possibility that mechanical robots might develop the capacity for feeling as human beings increasingly lose it. The steel monkey gave a strange,robot cry and was made to flee, says a young Rajput princess as she watches her fathers robot slaves carry out his whimsical command to destroy her mechanical companion. My life changed that day. My father knew that something between us had been taken apart like the artificial life of the steel monkey.

The vividly imagined elements of the novel make for a strange new world that is as richly textured as it is densely populated. But the sheer force of McDonalds imagining derives from the echoes of the contemporary world on which it is based. Wars may end,but the need for private security forces never ends. A boy lives with his expatriate parents in an Indian Cantonment and his father goes out every day in an armoured car to build a nation for the people out there,whether they like it or not.

The opening pages,in one of the most affecting scenes in the book,transport us first to a dusty village in northern India,and then as an implacable separatist war advances through the fields,killing crops and animals to the nearest big town,which is Varanasi. And when the last cow died and the wind whipped the crumbled leaves and the dust into yellow clouds,the people could put it off no longer. By car and pick-up,phat-phat and country bus they went to the city,and though they had all sworn to hold together,family by family they drifted apart in Varanasis ten million.

But surely there are hints of this defeat already happening every time a farm crumbles in debt,the farmer kills himself,and the family wearily hitches a ride out to the city to become lost in the citys millions.