At the movies: Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny.

 

It's disheartening how I am not picking the hits this Summer. I mean, success has nothing to do with quality. But it shakes one's certainties. I very much liked this film.

So I read this: River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

Imagining India circa 2047, this is a rather remarkable SF novel. It has an expansive but not diluted collection of main characters, its technology is advanced but comprehensible, and its knowledge of human behavior is remarkably consistent with who we are and where we most likely are headed to.

There's a playful cleverness to McDonald's work, and his embrace of the complex sociopolitical forces at work in contemporary (and alternate future-contemporary) India is impressive. I'd love to see this in a cinematic context, but it would be hard to find a happy synthesis that can make allowancwes for some of the extremely nonvisual plot points. But this book is an utter delight, and I recommend it to anyone looking for an evocative SF experience.

Curses! Foiled again.

Well, it seems as if that plan I had for absorbing the knowledge of an alien civilization in order to take over the world but instead either transcending this plane of existence or dying horribly as my body incinerates from the inside out is over and done.

Oh well.