Ian McDonald at Tangled Web UK

Page Updated: 13/07/2007

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Ian McDonald - Page 1

27 Jun 07

About the Author

First British Edition Gollancz (2007)

Brasyl
Sao Paulo. 2032
A city with a neon heart A city of countless millions. A city of breathtaking wealth and life-stealing poverty. A city watched over by angels. Constant surveillance, the tracking of your every move, the ebb and flow of your money, of your life. A city where a thief could step out of the favelas and find himself trapped in the bewildering, lethal world of illegal quantum computing.
Rio de Janeiro. 2006
A city that lives on reality TV A city of watchers and watched. A city where an ambitious TV producer could find her next big hit and lose her life. And her soul.
Brazil, 1732
A country of Eden-like beauty. A country of gold and death. A country of madness and religion. A country where a Jesuit Father sent to find a rogue priest will find faith and reality taken to breaking point
'F**king brilliant. I'm as jealous as all hell- it's a beauty' Richard Morgan
‘An immense marvellous beast’ Financial Times
‘Outstanding… chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous’ Publishers Weekly
‘McDonald has outdone his prodigious self. A novel that makes magic from technology, alien worlds form the everyday. A novel of swordfights and humour and sheer poetry. I loved these people, I rooted for them. McDonald has so many writer tricks that I could read this book a hundred times and learn something new every time’ Cory Doctorow

First British Edition Simon & Schuster (2004)

Paperback - Pocket Books (2005)

River of Gods
August 15, 2047 - Happy Hundredth Birthday, India
One and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Mother India is all the things she has always been - beautiful and terrible, staggeringly poor and fantastically rich, unimaginably ancient and a leader of the technological revolution. Always changing, always the same.
On the eve of her hundredth birthday, ten people are doing ten very different things. In the next few weeks, they will be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.
As the gangster Shiv lets the holy river Ganges sweep away a bad night’s work, Mr Nandha prepares for another day as a Krishna Cop and his wife wonders how to pass the time. Shaheen Badoor Khan has no trouble occupying himself: the Prime Minister’s advisor has to deal with the failure of the monsoon, a potential war with Awadh, and the rabble-rouser N.K. Jivanjee.
Tomorrow, a stand-up comic will run a power company, a set designer will become a star, a young journalist will get the story of her life, and a scientist will land on an asteroid.
No one knows what will happen to Thomas Lull. Except Aj. Aj, the waif, the mind-reader, the prophet - the one who may hold the key to it all.
Ian McDonald has written a Great Indian Novel for the new millennium. River of Gods teems with the life of a nation choked with peoples and cultures - a war fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded - as the great river Ganges flows on.
‘He will be discovered with shouts of joy’ New Statesman
‘At once disturbing and beautiful; superbly realized’ The Times
‘Hugely readable’ Daily Mail
‘In terms of ideas, intellectual scope, detail, inventiveness, risk taking and sheer scale, McDonald’s novel is one of the most ambitious I have read in recent years. It is also a staggering achievement ... River of Gods is a brave, brilliant and wonderful novel’ Christopher Priest, Guardian
‘A triumphant panorama of mid-21st century India. Hugely adventurous and entertaining, sumptuously inventive and full of heart’ Locus
‘One hundred years after midnight’s children and the nation were born ... McDonald does it in style. River of Gods gathers pace quite superbly’ Starburst
‘One of the best SF books I’ve read this year’ Iain Banks

First British Edition Gollancz (2001)

Futures
The second Foursight anthology, edited and introduced by Peter Crowther
Four new novellas from the very best of British SF writers
Futures brings together new fiction from four of the very best SF writers working today. It is a snapshot look at why British SF is dominating the world market at the moment.
Whether describing a far future of alien domination, a very different present ruled by Imperial Roman families, the distant moons of the solar system brutally subjugated by Earth or an Africa changed out of all recognition by alien life, Futures presents four crystal clear examples of just why home-grown SF is going through such a boom.
Whether you are looking for the perfect introduction to the genre as a whole or want to pick up a brand new novella from your own personal favourite author Futures is the place to look.
Brought together by leading anthologist and editor Peter Crowther, Futures is an essential showcase of what makes British SF the dominant force in the genre as we enter the third millennium.
Reality Dust by Stephen Baxter
`Space Opera - the grind and the glorious, the truly operatic and infinite, worthy successor to tales of Greek gods and the Norse Sagas - is alive and well, and in very good hands. In short, Stephen Baxter is hard at work keeping and advancing the necessary forms and traditions, expanding the discourse in a way that both gladdens the heart and sends chills up the spines of his fellow writers’ Greg Bear
Watching Trees Grow by Peter F. Hamilton
`Peter Hamilton has written a murder story covering several centuries, in which the solution depends upon the sociology of immortal families evolved during the Roman Empire and upon forensic techniques that change massively during the course of the story. But Watching Trees Grow is a mystery and the surest way to really tell you what Hamilton has accomplished is to blow away all his secrets. You may want to read the story first’ Larry Niven
Making History by Paul McAuley
‘I find it surprisingly difficult to articulate why I so intensely admire Paul McAuley’s work. Perhaps the problem is simply that it is so uniformly excellent. Once I say that I admire his fine, clean, prose, the clarity of his plotting, the originality of his ideas, his understanding of science, and the quality of his characterisation, what else is there to say? To list his good qualities is the same as to list those things I like about science fiction’ Michael Swanwick Tendeleo’s Story by Ian McDonald
‘Ian McDonald’s Chaga stories remind me of J.G.Ballard’s ‘Vermillion Sands’ stories in the way they return repeatedly to a single vividly imagined background but approach it from a different point of view in each visit. What McDonald seems to be doing is reinventing for the new century a whole host of existing science-fictional concepts, transforming them through the power of his prose and the intensity of his vision just as the mysterious Chaga invaders have transformed the Africa of his stories. He leaves us much the richer for his efforts.

Paperback - Earthlight (2002)

Ares Express
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.
‘McDonald’s imagination is rich, lurid, often wildly comic . . . Breathless excitement, artfully concluded. Great fun’ amazon.co.uk
‘An engaging, page-turning, and frequently hilarious delight’ Vector

Paperback - Gollancz Millenium (1999)

Kirinya
The end of the universe happened at around ten o'clock at night on22 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 fulltime 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 action.
'One of the finest writers of his generation, who chooses to write science fiction because that is how he can best illuminate the world' New Statesman
'This is a huge and ambitious novel, the work of a supremely talented writer approaching the top of his game' SFX
'So outstanding a writer that he deserves reading beyond the science-fantasy market …He has such marvellous talent, so vivid an imagination. His prose sings and zings simultaneously' The Times

About The Author
Ian McDonald is the author of the critically acclaimed Chaga novels. Always noted for the beauty and brilliance of his prose style he won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for King of Morning, Queen of Day. He was born in Manchester in 1960 and moved to Northern Irelan in 1965. He now lives in Belfast and works in TV production.

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Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Brasyl (Gollancz, 2007) Jun 07

River of Gods (Simon & Schuster, 2004) Pocket Books Pbk Apr 05

Futures (Gollancz, 2001)

Ares Express (Earthlight, 2001) Earthlight Pbk Mar 02

Kirinya ( 1998) Gollancz Millenium Pbk Jul 99

Sacrifice Of Fools (Gollancz, 1996) Vista Pbk 1997

Tendeleo's Story Gollancz Millenium Pbk Mar 02

Chaga

Necroville

Speaking in Tongues

Hearts, Hands and Voices