A Vision of the Future

I was browsing at Borders last night (as usual... Friday nights, I'm such a creature of habit) when I stumbled upon this visually striking cover. It is, of course, an imaginery vision of a city of India in the future.

The book description of Ian McDonald's 'River of Gods':

"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 Aj—the 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."

How is the book? I don't know. I didn't browse. I didn't buy it either.