Genre: Fiction
A collection of eight stories, “Cyberabad Days” is a triumphant return to the India of 2047 (the India of ); a new, muscular superpower in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, strange new genders, and genetically improved children.
Genre: Fiction
NOMINATED FOR BOTH THE HUGO AND THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARDS
WINNER OF THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL
AUGUST 15, 2047—HAPPY HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY, INDIA
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 is an epic SF novel as sprawling, vibrant and colourful as the sub-continent it describes. This is an SF novel that blew apart the narrow anglo- and US-centric concerns of the genre and ushered in a new global consciousness for the genre.
“…a major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best sf novelists of our time.”
"[A] literary masterpiece… I can’t think of a better science fiction novel I’ve read in years… This novel is a masterpiece of science fiction by any meaningful standard… McDonald takes the reader to a level of immersion in the fine detail, texture, consciousness, pop culture, very being, of an extrapolated non-Western culture that is utterly awesome.”
“McDonald’s latest ranks as one of the best science fiction novels published in the United States this year.”
“Ian McDonald has been one of my favorite writers for some fifteen years now, and the amazing thing is, he’s getting even better.”
Genre: Fiction
A fantasy adventure following network journalist Gaby McAslan to Africa to research the Kilimanjaro Event – a meteor which landed in Kenya causing the African landscape to give way to the “Chaga”, an alien flora able to destroy all man-made materials and mould human flesh, bone and spirit.
Genre: Fiction
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.
“Ian McDonald’s is one of the books that has influenced me the most as a writer. Funny and sad and wildly imaginative… What a book!”
“This is the kind of novel I long to find yet seldom do. is a … Extraordinary and more than that!”
“Flavoured with a voice that blends the delightful prose of Jack Vance with the idiosyncratic stylings of Cordwainer Smith, this novel is, most of all, about the dusty town of Desolation Road in the middle of the red Martian desert. Episodic in scope, it would also work as short stories. An elderly couple get lost in the infinite space of their garden, a baby growing in a jar is stolen and replaced with a mango, a man called The Hand plays electric guitar for the clouds and starts the first rain for one hundred and fifty thousand years.”
Genre: Fiction
A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colorful, witty SF novel; Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald’s , 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.
Genre: Fiction
British author McDonald’s outstanding SF novel channels the vitality of South America’s largest country into an edgy, post-cyberpunk free-for-all. McDonald sets up three separate characters in different eras — a cynical contemporary reality-TV producer, a near-future bisexual entrepreneur and a tormented 18th-century Jesuit agent. He then slams them together with the revelation that their worlds are strands of an immense quantum multiverse, and each of them is threatened by the Order, a vast conspiracy devoted to maintaining the status quo until the end of time. As McDonald weaves together the separate narrative threads, each character must choose between isolation or cooperation, and also between accepting things as they are or taking desperate action to make changes possible. (2004), set in near-future India, established McDonald as a leading writer of intelligent, multicultural SF, and here he captures Latin America’s mingled despair and hope. Chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous, this must-read teeters on the edge of melodrama, but somehow keeps its precarious balance.
Won BSFA Award in 2008.
Nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Locus and John Campbell awards in 2008.