This collection of seven stories is subtitled “Return to the India of 2047,” but what it really is is a return to the India of McDonald’s 2004 novel River of Gods. The novel won the British Science Fiction Association Award, as did one of the stories, and it would not surprise me to see this collection nominated as well. McDonald displays the assurance of a mature talent immersed in his fictional world — yes — but also the deep, multi-layered understanding of an intelligent and compassionate man immersed in the 21st Century.

First, the world. Cyberabad Days is essentially cyberpunk, keeping company with William Gibson’s Idoru and Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Nanotech has blurred the line between hardware, software, and wetware; AI is here and scaring the pants off a lot of people; programming is the new oil; information is the new gold. Unlike many of Gibson’s heroes, however, McDonald’s protagonists are not the web-jockeys and hackers, the people getting dirty on the pipelines or in the mines. McDonald is mostly writing about the people affected by the new economy a few steps away from production, the people who have to live in the world others are building, and tearing down, all around them. He is writing about the inheritors, and inheritance is one of the themes running through these stories.

He is also writing about India one century after the nation achieved independence from the British Empire, and, in his fictional future, just a few years after the nation fragments into half a dozen nation-states — another inheritance, of a kind. A bold move, you might even say a risky move, for a white guy living in Northern Ireland to be writing about India. He isn’t coy about it; with one exception, his characters are all Indian, Hindu and Muslim. He is an outsider writing with an insider’s perspective, and that turns out to be one of the great strengths of these stories. Because what he is showing us is a society so complex, so fractured and yet so bound into interdependence, that everyone is both an insider and an outsider in their own country.

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In this elegant collection of stories Eugie Foster bridges the gap between the traditional fairytale and historical fantasy. Throughout the collection she alternates between re-tellings of Chinese and Japanese legends and original stories with elements drawn from the same deep wells. There is a formality to the writing that suits the traditional strain, giving a timeless authority to all the stories without making them unapproachable. On the contrary, they are charming to read.

The first story, one of the strongest, called “Daughter of Botu,” opens with a rabbit giving us a lesson in Buddhism: Buddha teaches us that this existence is one of suffering. And of all the Middle Kingdom, my people, the Clan of Botu, bears the greatest burden of suffering. We are fodder for all — tiger and owl, fox and man — and only those with fleet limbs, strong hearts, and good fortune survive. This is practically a template for all the stories and legends in the book: “Life is hard, but with a bit of quick action and good luck you might pull through.” In this story, the young rabbit finds her way into the human world in order to save her mother and grandmother from starvation. She finds love, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption at a cost — all of them themes that recur in Foster’s stories. Likewise recurring are the characters whose courage, loyalty, and trust in the teachings of Buddha, gods, grandmothers and ghosts sees them through to the sometimes bitter end.

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