But vengeance may lie in other directions - if she even wants it anymore. Assured by her father before his death that she is a literal weapon, she undertakes martial arts training. The Azads wipe out the Jodhra clan except for Padmini, our young heroine, who goes into hiding with her nute retainers – a third gender artificially created and complete with its own methods of sexual gratification. The Jodhra and Azad clans have been at war – a literal shooting war at times – in Jaipur for a long time, sometimes over water. “The Dust Assassin” has the air and plot of a fairy tale. However, with the frequent terrorism in the Cantonment, Iraqi’s Green Zone is unnecessarily brought to mind in a way that adds nothing to the story. Young Kyle first spends a lot of time viewing the massive artificial ecosphere simulation that features in River of Gods before he sees the equally strange world of India beyond the compound’s wall. India is viewed from the perspective of an American boy, his parents living in the Cantonment, a diplomatic compound of Westerners helping to build the newly independent nation of Bharat. I think that’s because its plot owes too much to the recent Iraqi War and the story’s initial appearance in the themed Forbidden Planets anthology.
“Kyle Meets the River”, while a decent story, is the weakest of the book. It’s a type of war that may be physically safer, but the boys find, like many a veteran of the past, that society may not have much more use for them after the peace. It’s about a brief time in a man’s life when, as a Japanese anima obsessed youth, he teleoperated the robots of that war. “Sanjeev and the Robotwallah” covers the War of Separation when India breaks up into several countries from the nation we know. However, I do think the one story original to this collection, the concluding novella “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”, will have added pleasures if you’ve read the novel.Įach story concentrates on one or more aspects of McDonald’s India, and they mostly take place at various times before the novel’s events. I read three of these seven stories before I read the novel, and they were satisfactory on their own. While it’s set in the same future India as McDonald’s vivid River of Gods, a world of old and new gods, soap operas, water wars, mech wars, gender imbalance, and new genders, it is in no way necessary to read that novel first. Review: Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald, 2009. Another retro review, a follow up to River of Gods, and from May 18, 2010.
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