River of the Gods by Ian McDonald

I read about this book in a couple of places, caught the cover art on io9.com in a review about the different SF cover art recently and the quality of same, and became interested in it.

The link is to the Kindle edition, but finding it as a softcover at amazon.ca seemed a challenge. It could be available as a hardcover. Or perhaps through other vendors via amazon.ca.

It seems interesting for a variety of reasons. One is it deals with India - one of the world's largest and most diverse countries. This huge country has a breadth of social class, of economic class, of technological levels, of religions, and of cultural and linguistic groups that is pretty staggering.

McDonald's book projects that forward into 2047 and, according to the reviews I've read, makes some reasonable projections about how things might develop politically, culturally and technologically. He tries to address issues like a coming water crisis, the ongoing balkanization of our world's large powers, population growth, and the challenges to culture and to society introduced by biotechnology and the advances of computer technology.

Evolving A.I.s are a topic McDonald addresses, as well as the contrasts between the highest of high-tech and the lowest of low-tech experiences the future India. India already has this division and the continuing uneven development of wealth and technology does seem likely to foster an even wide continuum in the future.

I'm adding this book to my 'want to buy' list. I'm going to try to find it in trade paperback or hardcover format. I'm avoiding the whole 'Do I want a Kindle?' or not question yet.

I'm not married to proprietary DRM solutions and I want to be able to loan a friend a copy of a book. I also want to be able to read it twenty years down the road and I'm unconvinced the current Ebook reader technology will allow this. So, for now, I think, no Kindle.

The only really pressing or prevasive argument for one is the vast size of my library and the weight of moving it. Right now, my bookshelves for game books, fiction and non-fiction total 12 floor to ceiling bookcases that are 30" wide on average and an additional 3 half height shelves. Some of those, for novels, are stacked double depth. That's a lot of weight to move and Ebooks would lighten things up considerably.