Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 2 (2008), edited by Lou Anders, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 122, November 2016. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009). It is included in the collection Cyberabad Days (2009).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared Fast Forward 1 (2007), edited by Lou Anders. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer. The story is included in the collection Cyberabad Days (2009).

Read the full story for free here.

Hugo Award winning novelette in McDonald's India 2047 setting. Originally published in Asimov's July 2006. Anthologized in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume One (2007), Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), and Neil Clarke's More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017). Collected in Cyberabad Days (2009).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #82 July 2013. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Cyberabad Days (2009).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

A Hugo Award nominated novella set in McDonald's India 2047 setting. It was anthologized in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006) and Jonathan Strahan's Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005. It is included in the collection in Cyberabad Days (2009).

Hugo-nominated Novella

Vishnu at the Cat Circus is a novella set in the same world as Ian McDonald's 2004 novel River of Gods. It depicts a futuristic India in 2047, a century after its independence from Britain, characterized both by ancient traditions and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligences, robots and nanotechnology.

The genetically-improved Vishnu looks back on his life, in a story of a sibling rivalry with some very unexpected results.

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business: a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Ajthe waif, the mind reader, the prophet, when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.

In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.

River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures, one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.

Extraordinary new fiction set in the future India of River of Gods.

Ian McDonald's River of Gods called a "masterpiece" by Asimov's Science Fiction and praised by the Washington Post as a --"major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best SF novelists of our time"-- painted a vivid picture of a near future India, 100 years after independence. It revolutionized SF for a new generation by taking a perspective that was not European or American. Nominated for the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and winning the BSFA Award, the rich world of this novel has inspired McDonald to revisit its milieu in a series of short stories, all set in the world of River of Gods.

Cyberabad Days is a triumphant return to the India of 2047, a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water-wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas.

Cyberabad Days is a collection of seven stories, one Hugo nominee and one Hugo winner among them, as well as a thirty-one-thousand word original novella. As with everything Ian McDonald does, it is sure to be one of the most talked about books of the year.