It's 2047, a hundred years after India gained independence from Britain, River of Gods is set in a country now broken into smaller nations. There hasn't been a monsoon season in years, resulting in a parched region with a Ganges trickling through Varanasi after being dammed upstream - a dam that has two nations on the edge of war.

The world is a different place in 2047. Genetic modification is everywhere, including superchildren and gender neutralizing body modifications. Artificial intelligence operates at different levels, some of them above the limits banned by international treaty. Otherwise, much of India is still poor, water is even more scarce, and the caste system carries on with only a few adjustments.

However, the Americans have found something deep in space. An object that causes a lot of questions and sends a specialist in search of her former lover. In India, someone else finds him first, someone with a strange past and who might not be completely human. Meanwhile, Mr. Nandha, one of the Krishna Cops, is hunting aeai's (artificial intelligence) with his team.

A winner of the British Science Fiction Association award and a nominee for both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Hugo Award, River of Gods is a wild ride through a futuristic Indian culture. The complexity of the story, presenting normal human lives and emotions intertwined with decades of advancements, presents a believable backdrop against which events unfold.

Eric Drexler introduced the world to nanotechnology in his first book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. In his newest book, Radical Abundance, Drexler presents a range of information, informing the reader of the process of nanoscale manufacturing, current efforts and research (and hurdles), and the benefits to science, society, and the planet once we achieve the reality of nanoscale fabrication.

Drexler presents APM (atomically-precise manufacturing) as the next revolution, the first three being agriculture, industrial, and information. This revolution will be powered once we control "the molecular machinery of life (using) proteins that can fit together to form motors, sensors, structural frameworks, and catalytic devices..." By using natural systems to construct from the atomic level towards larger and more complex products, we can manufacture efficiently, using common chemical substances in place of minerals and metals acquired through ecologically damaging mining, and to create materials we cannot visualize today.

In Drexler's future, APM solves many of the societal issues that create poverty, ecological disasters, and conflict. It's an important work that gives us a future to look forward to when so many visions are broken and dystopian.

Why do we try to predict the future? According to Dan Gardner, it's because of our human need to protect ourselves that we are constantly attempting to recognize risk before the lions, tigers and bears descend upon us. In Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions are Next to Worthless and You Can Do Better, Gardner provides historical insights on the types of futurists able to make the most reliable predictions. Guess what? Those predictions don't come from experts in a field, they come from people with a wide range of knowledge looking at trends from different angles.