Ian McDonald Books In Order

Desolation Road

Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award!

It all began 30 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 Chataqua and Educational Stravaganza complete with its very own captive angel to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar. It’s 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.

Ares Express

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.

Evolution’s Shore

It began in the year 2002 with strange activities on one of Saturn’s moons. Then came the meteor strike on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, followed by an alien infestation by a strange vegetative life form known locally as the Chaga. For Gaby McAslan and her SkyNet news team, this is the story of a lifetime and a golden chance at fame. As the Dark Continent becomes a frenzied backdrop of apocalyptic anticipation, Gaby fights to be the first to get to the truth behind the Chaga, only to come up against a wall of official secrecy. Suddenly rumors are spreading as fast as the Chaga: of people disappearing into the alien growth or being herded by U.N. troops into restricted ‘research’ camps. Soon it becomes clear that the real story is bigger than Gaby could every imagine a story that must be told even if it means betraying the man she loves. Is the Chaga an invasion or a gift? Does it mean destruction or evolution? Does it spell the final chapter for humanity…
or just the beginning of the most amazing story of all?

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.

Cyberabad Days

Extraordinary new fiction set in the future India of River of Gods. Ian McDonald’s River of Gods called a ‘masterpiece’ by Asimov’s Science Fiction and praised by the Washington Post as a ‘major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best SF novelists of our time’ painted a vivid picture of a near future India, 100 years after independence. It revolutionized SF for a new generation by taking a perspective that was not European or American. Nominated for the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and winning the BSFA Award, the rich world of this novel has inspired McDonald to revisit its milieu in a series of short stories, all set in the world of River of Gods. Cyberabad Days is a triumphant return to the India of 2047, a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate change induced drought, water wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. Cyberabad Days is a collection of seven stories, one Hugo nominee and one Hugo winner among them, as well as a thirty one thousand word original novella. As with everything Ian McDonald does, it is sure to be one of the most talked about books of the year. Featuring:Sanjeev and Robotwallah: Selected for both The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty Fifth Annual Collection and Year’s Best SF 13What happens to the boy soldier roboteers when the war of Separation is over?Kyle Meets the RiverA young American in Varanasi learns the true meaning of nation building in the early days of a new country. The Dust Assassin Feuding Rajasthan water rajas find that revenge is a slow, subtle process. An Eligible BoyAn Indian take on Cyrano de Bergerac. Love and marriage should be easy with an Artificial Intelligence matchmaker. The Little Goddess Hugo nominee Best Novella 2006In near future Nepal, a child goddess discovers what lies on the other side of godhood. The Djinn’s Wife Hugo Best Novelette and BSFA short fiction winner 2007A minor Delhi celebrity falls in love with an artificial intelligence but is it a marriage of heaven and hell?Vishnu at the Cat CircusA genetically improved Brahmin child finds himself left behind as he grows through the final generation of humanity. Cover Illustration Stephan Martiniere

The Broken Land

For almost 30,000 years The Land has been a dependency of The Empire Across The River. The Empire retains a mechanistic technology in the hands of the wealthy and the civil service, but The Land uses its dead, whose brains are linked to a massive data network. By the author of ‘Desolation Road’.

Kling Klang Klatch

At 5:00 a.m. on the greasy streets of a city that never sleeps, the dolls are on the hard stuff and the transport’s about to strike again. On the news it’s all bombs and killing machines the size of tenement blocks. The only consolation for a weary middle aged cop on his way home is a little illegal sugar and some sweet tenor sax. But that was before they found the body that looked like somebody had unzipped it then scooped out all its insides. And the three words scrawled on an alley wall. Three red words, so fresh they were still dripping. Kling Klang Klatch. It’s enough to knock out anyone’s stuffing. And in Toyland, that’s no joke. Kling Klang Klatch is set in a superficially glittering world that, if not exactly human, reflects humanity’s desires, corruption, and racism at a fundamental level. Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road blackly bizarre wit and David Lyttleton’s Punch razor sharp eye for detail have created a unique fantasy with a delicious streak of dark humor.

Necroville

In the 21st century nanotechnology can resurrect the dead, and by the year 2063 the dead account for a third of the world’s population. This novel, from the author of ‘Hearts, Hands and Voices’, is set in Necroville, the City of the Dead within 21st century Los Angeles.

Terminal Cafe

It is a few decades after a revolutionary technology has given humans the ability to resurrect the dead. The ever increasing population of the risen dead is segregated into areas called necrovilles. Here they have created a wild culture, untouched by the restrictions of the law except that the dead cannot stray into the realm of the living, nor the living into the teeming necrovilles, after nightfall. It is November 1, the Day of the Dead. Virtual artist Santiago Columbar, creator of drugs and ‘ware that melt and reconfigure reality for his many disciples, has grown bored with the realities at his command. There is one reality he has yet to try, the culmination of his life as an artist: He will venture into the forbidden streets of the Saint John dead town, and there walk willingly into the open arms of death. At Santiago’s invitation, four of his friends will meet in Saint John to record his death and resurrection. On their way to witness Santiago’s transformation, as the necroville erupts into the first volley of a revolution against the living, each will face danger and adventure in the wild streets of the dead…
and find that life has changed forever.

Brasyl

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 colour, 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 Sao 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

It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square. Welcome to the world of The Dervish House; the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union; a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million; Turkey is the largest, most populous and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It’s a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and Central Asia. Gas is power. But it’s power at a price, and that price is emissions permits. This is the age of carbon consciousness: every individual in the EU has a card stipulating individual carbon allowance that must be produced at every CO2 generating transaction. For those who can master the game, who can make the trades between gas price and carbon trading permits, who can play the power factions against each other, there are fortunes to be made. The old Byzantine politics are back. They never went away. The ancient power struggled between Sunni and Shia threatens like a storm: Ankara has watched the Middle East emerge from twenty five years of sectarian conflict. So far it has stayed aloof. A populist Prime Minister has called a referendum on EU membership. Tensions run high. The army watches, hand on holster. And a Galatasary Champions’ League football game against Arsenal stokes passions even higher. The Dervish House is seven days, six characters, three interconnected story strands, one central common core the eponymous dervish house, a character in itself that pins all these players together in a weave of intrigue, conflict, drama and a ticking clock of a thriller.

Watching Trees Grow / Tendeleo’s Story

Peter Hamilton brings his trademark flair for narrative sweep and epic ideas to a short novel that tells the story of an near immortal mankind that grew from the Roman Empire. Paired with WATCHING TREES GROW is TENDELEO’S STORY the Theodore Sturgeon award winning new Chaga short novel from the acclaimed Ian McDonald.

Speaking in Tongues

A collection of short fiction from the author of ‘Hearts, Hands and Voices’, ‘King of Morning, Queen of Day’ and ‘Desolation Road’, which was a runner up for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.