Why I didn't like River of Gods

[andrewducker]

I recently read an Ian McDonald novel, in which a disparate group of people wander through a nanotech-inspired world, where politics has overriden technology and holds advanced forms of life in subservience and limited form.  Their lives criss-cross as they (knowingly and unknowingly) bring about the future of the world.  It was fantastic.

It was called Necroville (Terminal Cafe in the US).

I then read another Ian McDonald novel, in which a disparate group of people wander through a nanotech-inspired world, where politics has overriden technology and holds advanced forms of life in subservice and limited form.  Their lives criss-cross as they completely unknowingly do fuck-all to do with anything actually to do with the overall plot.  It was rather disappointing.

It was called River of Gods.

I _loved_ the writing in River of Gods.  I liked the characters.  I liked the background.  But nothing _anyone_ in the book did really made any difference to the outcome.  The individual stories were generally pretty nicely written, but didn't really go anywhere or reach any kind of conclusion, and the one story that did have a conclusion (that of the AIs) was affected by precisely one decision in the entire book - and that decision wasn't made for any particularly good reason.  Politics flowed back and forth in a chaotic manner, and I felt like we got interesting glimpses of various characters as they were moved around like chess pieces, but as they mostly came across as pawns in a greater game and we never got to see anything from the perspective of the 'people' moving the pieces, I was left with the feeling that none of it really mattered.

Comments

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Jivanjee _trys_ and fails. In fact pretty much everyone tries to get something and messes it up in some way (either through their own fault or because of circumstance). It might be very retro of me, but if I don't tend to turn to SF for stories of people trying and failing - I find them generally unsatisfactory on an emotional level.

You know, I can almost empathise with what you say here. I tend to prefer books about people trying and succeeding myself. But in this book, given the plot [and yes, it *had* a plot], all of them couldn't have succeeded. Simply because their goals were mutually exclusive. So the book ended in some success stories [Vishram and his dad, Khan, Najia and Tal, Nandha and Odeca] and some failures. And that still leaves us with characters who neither succeeded nor failed, but found their lives changed by the event. Taken together, I found the resolution satisfying. Not how *I* would have done it, but certainly internally consistent with the book and its setting.