Livre d'Or

I think you need some social context: read up about Hijra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)).

India is far stranger than we can imagine: there are a number of gender-orthogonal castes and society's attitudes to them are, I suspect, somewhat more ambivalent than the things that we sometimes read, in English, in a Western context, related to us second-hand by Anglo-Saxon authors. The view that 'nutes are almost universally hated and regarded as freaks' misses a point about the caste system: it has a place for everyone, a community and an identity, and even if the majority regard you with loathing and contempt, they will allow you space to exist. This internal apartheid isn't quite the same as tolerance - and it is often accompanied by abominable injustice and enforced economic inequality - but it isn't anything like the exterminative hatred that exists in societies that seek cultural uniformity and have no mechanisms for accommodating diversity.

Urban middle-class Hindus don't like Hijras but that's not quite the same as hating them, and no-one's bothered to ask what other disadvantaged castes might think. A nute subcaste might well find a similar niche. Or, as in the book, carve out a new one defined by social inferiority but still achieving economic security based on superior education and arcane technological abilities.

Still, India isn't just the urban middle class. Brahmins might hate and loathe the future nutes if their education, technological aptitude, and administrative skills make them an economic threat; but they might equally co-exist in a hypocritical fog of public condemnation concealing near-universal private accommodations of illicit sex and undisclosed technological services.

I would agree that some of the technology in River of Gods is improbable but I always allow some leeway in a well-written 'future world' because there will indeed be some completely off-the wall innovations, and a great many adaptations of technologies we have today, that we would struggle to believe or even recognise if confronted by them in the present day. After all, no-one wrote a convincing '2008' in the late 20th Century that has turned out anything like our own daily life.

Further reading?

McDonald's short story The Dust Assassin is set in a slightly different India, with the 'nute' caste developed in subtly different ways: and, despite the short form, his story paints a very rich community with a truly wonderful sense of culture and depth.