Ian McDonald

Mangara

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Hello all! I did a search and it didn't turn up any results so I thought I'd make a thread for discussion on this authors work.

Ian McDonald (born 1960) is a British science fiction novelist, living in Belfast. His themes include nanotechnology, postcyberpunk settings, and the impact of rapid social and technological change on non-Western societies.

Novels to date:

Desolation Road (1988) :
It all began thirty years ago on Mars, with a greenperson. But by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every conceivable abnormality from Adam Black's Wonderful Travelling Chautauqua and Educational 'Stravaganza (complete with its very own captive angel) to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar. Its inhabitants ranged from Dr. Alimantando, the town's founder and resident genius, to the Babooshka, a barren grandmother who just wants her own child-grown in a fruit jar; from Rajendra Das, mechanical hobo who has a mystical way with machines to the Gallacelli brothers, identical triplets who fell in love with-and married-the same woman.

Out on Blue Six (1989)

In a totalitarian future controlled by the Compassionate Society, the Ministry of Pain, and the Love Police, cartoonist Courtney Hall finds herself a fugitive. Her only escape is to an underground society--a society of violence and decadence Courtney must traverse to realize her dreams.

King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991)
The dangerous allure of the faerie lover manifests itself through three generations of women in this tour-de-force by the author of Desolation Road ( LJ 2/15/88). The spirits that haunt Ireland's Bridestone Wood first claim Emily Desmond in the early 1900s; in the 1930s, working girl Jessica Caldwell follows the man of her dreams into a dreamlike world; and in the near future, writer Enye MacColl battles the invisible forces of faerie. McDonald's power as a storyteller lies in his stylistic versatility and intensity of language as well as in his capacity to create vivid and memorable characters.

The Broken Land (1992)
Highly-acclaimed and award-winning author Ian McDonald pens a powerful novel about political and religious oppression, set in a far-future Earth that bears startling resemblances to our own. This riveting world-building novel offers a haunting allegory for the bitter strife tearing apart such places as South Africa and Northern Ireland.

Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (1994)

Ethan Ring is a former graphic design student with a dark and powerful secret. As an undergraduate, he and some classmates developed the ultimate in high-concept visual art: computerized images capable of bypassing rational thought and controlling the mind of the perceiver, whether for good or ill. When the reigning intelligence agency gets wind of Ethan's handiwork, he is forced into its service via the most potent of the images being tattooed on the palms of his hands. Now on a spiritual pilgrimage through twenty-first-century Japan, a guilt-ridden Ethan grapples with the responsibility his power implies and determines to use it for the greatest good by ridding the country of its ubiquitous crime syndicate. A past winner of sf's Campbell Award for best new writer, McDonald now ranks among the genre's leading stylists. In this brief but surprisingly satisfying tale, the full range of his versatile talent is on display as he merges Zen philosophy with cyberspace performance art in a high-tech contemplation of good and evil. A rare combination of suspenseful storytelling and thought-provoking ideas.

Necroville (1994)
In the 21st Century, nanotechnology has revolutionized the laws of birth and death. The resurrected dead account for almost one third of the human population, and the backbone of its workplace. They have their own culture and their own ghettos, the Necrovilles. And the Day of the Dead is their night.

Five young people enter Necroville to fulfil a pact, each knowing or in search of something. As their paths cross, and they find themselves drawn ever deeper into the lives of the dead, each one will find themselves forever changed.

Chaga (1995)
On the trail of the mystery of Saturn's disappearing moons, network journalist Gaby McAslan find herself in Aftrica researching the Kilimanjaro Event: a meteor which landed in Kenya causing the striking African landscape to give way to something equally beautiful - and indescribably alien. Dubbed the Chaga, the alien flora destroys all man-made materials, and moulds human flesh, bone and spirit to its own designs. And when Gaby McAsland finds the first man to survive the Chaga's changes, she realizes it has its own plans for humankind.

Sacrifice of Fools (1996)
They're ancient, they're enigmatic, they're alien and they're here. Eight million of them. The Shian arrive on Earth in 2001, not as conquerors, but as settlers and refugees, seeking a world to colonize. In exchange for access to their highly advanced technology, they are given the right to stay here and now live alongside humanity, outwardly similar but inwardly deeply different, a challenge to all mankind's established notions of society, family, gender, sex and law.

In Ireland, a Shian community eighty thousand strong is brought in as a massive experiment in social engineering, a way of breaking the historic pattern of a bipolarized society. The consequences are far-ranging and unpredictable.

The community remains aloof from that country's enduring legacy of division and violence... then a prominent Shian family is brutally murdered, down to the last child, and human and alien cultures find themselves on a collision course.

Between them stands Andy Gillespie, ex-con and aspirant to the mysteries of the Shian law, the unlikely hero in a hunt for a serial killer that takes him through strange sub-cultures, corrupt religious sects and sinister political oragnisations, with the police and paramilitaries hot on his heels.

Andy Gillespie is determined to win justice for the Shian - but Shian justice always comes at a price...

Kirinya (1997)
The end of the universe happened at around ten o'clock at night on 22 December 2032. It's just that humanity hasn't realized it yet. And the Chaga, the strange flora deposited from the stars, is still busy terraforming the tropics into someone else's terra. Gaby McAslan was once a hungry news reporter who compromised her relationship with UNECTA researcher Dr. Shepard for the sake of her story…but Gaby is no longer a journalist and she doesn't want to be a full-time mother, even though her child Serena is her last link with Shepard. Gaby's fire has gone out; she's gone soft. But the massive political and military upheavals that are rocking the world are about to drag her back into the action.

Tendeléo's Story (2000)
A story of alien invasion so unexpected and so compellingly told through the eyes of a young Kalenjin girl, Tendeleo, who grows up along it's edges and within it, who loses her entire world and gains even more, just as half the Earth itself is lost, transformed, and re-born.

There are so many levels to this too-short-novel: the nature of humanity's relationship to the planet, a person's faith under inconceivable crises, the love for family, the fragility of civilization and the endurance of nature...and family, the limitless character of acceptance and adaptation, the power of home.

A rich, poetic, dark, alluring, harsh, compelling, and ultimately uplifting tale, that enriches and transcends the genre.

A personal draw to this story: the Kenyan district wherein the novella begins and ends is the same district I lived in back in the late '80's. My three children have Kalenjin roots. The author does a fine and respectful job of properly portraying the language, people, and culture of the area (although he does mix the languages of KiKalenjin and KiSwahili on occasion) (Jeff Bullard, Goodreads).

Ares Express (2001)
A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colourful, witty SF novel; Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet's circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future - or futures - of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas and trains as big as city blocks.

River of Gods (2004)
Hugo Award nominee, Clarke Award nominee, winner of the BSFA award
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.

Brasyl (2007)
Hugo Award nominee, winner of the BSFA award
Think Bladerunner in the tropics...

Be seduced, amazed, and shocked by one of the world's greatest and strangest nations. Past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, come together in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling.

Three separate stories follow three main characters:

--Edson is a self-made talent impressario one step up from the slums in a near future São Paulo of astonishing riches and poverty. A chance encounter draws Edson into the dangerous world of illegal quantum computing, but where can you run in a total surveillance society where every move, face, and centavo is constantly tracked?

--Marcelina is an ambitious Rio TV producer looking for that big reality TV hit to make her name. When her hot idea leads her on the track of a disgraced World Cup soccer goalkeeper, she becomes enmeshed in an ancient conspiracy that threatens not just her life, but her very soul.

--Father Luis is a Jesuit missionary sent into the maelstrom of 18th-century Brazil to locate and punish a rogue priest who has strayed beyond the articles of his faith and set up a vast empire in the hinterland. In the company of a French geographer and spy, what he finds in the backwaters of the Amazon tries both his faith and the nature of reality itself to the breaking point.

Three characters, three stories, three Brazils, all linked together across time, space, and reality in a hugely ambitious story that will challenge the way you think about everything

The Dervish House (2010)
Hugo Award nominee, Clarke Award nominee, winner of the BSFA award

ISTANBUL: QUEEN OF CITIES. Here histories, empires, and continents meet and cross. It is the mid-twenty first century and Turkey is a proud and powerful member of a European Union that runs from the Atlantic to Mt. Ararat.

In the sleepy Istanbul district of Eskiköy stands the former whirling dervish house of Adem Dede. Six characters' lives revolve around it.

A retired economist from the Greek community is hired into a top-security think tank, but keeps a dark secret from another century.

A nine-year-old boy, confined to a silent world by a heart condition where any sudden sound could kill him, becomes a reluctant detective.

A rogues trader sets up the deal o the century smuggling contraband gas but discovers it's only the tip of an iceberg of corporate fraud.

An art dealer takes an offer she can't refuse--a genuine legend of old Istanbul--and finds herself swept up in ancient intrigues and rivalries.

A slacker finds his life forever changed after an act of urban terrorism gives him the ability to see djinn--and they're just the start.

A young marketing graduate has five days to save a family nanotechnology start-up with a new product that may just change the world.

Over the space of five days of an Istanbul heat wave, these lives weave a story of corporate wheeling and dealing, Islamic mysticism, political and economic intrigues, ancient Ottoman mysteries, a terrifying new terrorist threat, and a nanotechnology with the potential to transform every human on the planet.
 
There is a thread about Ian MacDonald that i made but a new thread talking about him is good thing and so we can talk about here anyway to get new fresh discussions.
 
Currently reading the Dervish House, really loving his writing style, and his non-western SF locations. Anyone read his more recent stuff and enjoyed it?
 
Currently reading the Dervish House, really loving his writing style, and his non-western SF locations. Anyone read his more recent stuff and enjoyed it?

Have you read River of Gods by him? I'm interested in what you think of Dervish House because it seems like a Turkish version of that. I really enjoyed how well he captured future India that book i read of his.
 
Currently reading the Dervish House, really loving his writing style, and his non-western SF locations. Anyone read his more recent stuff and enjoyed it?

I think "River of Gods", "Brasyl" and "The Dervish House" are all excellent books, River of Gods is probably one of the best SF novels of the last decade.

I haven't read much of his earlier work. I did read his first novel, "Desolation Road", last year, but while it had some good writing in it and plenty of interesting ideas I wouldn't say the storytelling was as good as in his later books. Anyone have any other recommendations among his earlier books, I bought "Necroville" recently, and the premise sounds interesting but I haven't really heard much about it.

Have you read River of Gods by him? I'm interested in what you think of Dervish House because it seems like a Turkish version of that. I really enjoyed how well he captured future India that book i read of his.

I agree his portrayals of futuristic India/Brazil/Turkey are all excellent (although I'm always a bit curious how locals might feel about them). Have you read "Cyberbad Days"? It's a collection of stories in the same setting as River of Gods, I thought there were some very good stories in it, although I had mixed feeling about the concluding story which is a semi-sequel to River of Gods.
 
I think that is what I am liking so much about the Dervish house, the non western setting in a near future. Its really well researched (or appears to be) and I'm glad to hear Brasyl and River of Gods is up to par also!
 
I tried reading his debut novel Desolation Road when i finished River of Gods but it was not near the same prose,the same level of his writing and the smart future SF i expected from him. Too much debut novel flaws for me. I was annoyed that i couldnt finish that book knowing how good The River of Gods was.

Anyone else who had similar trouble with his earliest books?
 
I tried reading his debut novel Desolation Road when i finished River of Gods but it was not near the same prose,the same level of his writing and the smart future SF i expected from him. Too much debut novel flaws for me. I was annoyed that i couldnt finish that book knowing how good The River of Gods was.

Anyone else who had similar trouble with his earliest books?
I've just read Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone which is, I think, his fifth book (novella really) and whilst it was a very interesting premise and I did I like it, there were too many flaws for me to rate it very highly. I did like it enough to try something else by him and so will probably go for something later in his canon. Possibly his recent New Moon which looks like an interesting idea.
 
I've just read Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone which is, I think, his fifth book (novella really) and whilst it was a very interesting premise and I did I like it, there were too many flaws for me to rate it very highly. I did like it enough to try something else by him and so will probably go for something later in his canon. Possibly his recent New Moon which looks like an interesting idea.

Maybe I will read it next to of his novels too, I feel he has shown that he is very interesting, smart writer and I must find more of his books that challenge me, give depth of characters, story. Few authors I give a second chance and even fewer I give a third chance but I adore smart sf like few books of all my fav type of books.
 
Maybe I will read it next to of his novels too, I feel he has shown that he is very interesting, smart writer and I must find more of his books that challenge me, give depth of characters, story. Few authors I give a second chance and even fewer I give a third chance but I adore smart sf like few books of all my fav type of books.
I'm much the same and the one of his I read - Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone - was certainly clever but maybe not fully thought through. So I think I'll probably give him another shot. Not quite sure when though as I have a big pile of books waiting...:)
 
Well i havent had time to read him in 3 years thanks to my huge pile of books to read so now the time is ripe to read him again ;)

Hopefully i can praise highly the Moon book to you when i have read it.
 
Well i havent had time to read him in 3 years thanks to my huge pile of books to read so now the time is ripe to read him again ;)

Hopefully i can praise highly the Moon book to you when i have read it.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts
:)
 

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