MACLEOD, Ian R
The multi-award winning author of The Light Ages, House of Storms, The Great Wheel and a host of short stories and novellas, Ian R. Macleod has become one of the most distinctive and exciting voices in British science fiction – a fact born out by his most recent novel Song of Time (PS Publishing) winning the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award…
- Visit Ian R. MacLeod’s web site
- Read Ian R MacLeod: an Appreciation by Jay Tomio
- Ian R. Macleod on Wikipedia
- John Berlyne’s review of The Light Ages
- John Berlyne’s review of House of Storms
- John Jarrold’s interview with Ian at Infinity Plus
“I have that science-fictional point of view. I always wanted to know what the elves were doing in Lothlorien when they weren’t singing. What were the sanitary facilities like? J.R.R. Tolkien was an enormous influence on me. I read him at a very impressionable time, and I’ve reread the books many times since. I started off as a teenager reading adventure books by popular novelists like Nevil Shute and Alistair MacLean, and then my sister’s boyfriend introduced me to John Wyndham and Isaac Asimov, and there seemed to be so much more there. Then I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I was off. The ‘70s were a very good time to be reading SF, because SF was evolving. When I’d enjoyed Asimov, I could move on to Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany and J.G. Ballard and so on. Dangerous Visions came out. Robert Silverberg was really pushing the boundaries with work like Dying Inside and ‘Born With the Dead’. There was this concern about all of the things that interested me, and done in a very stylish and compassionate way. Real people, real settings, and also with Silverberg, this relentless logic. I started reading T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare relatively late in my academic career. Fortunately, they weren’t thrust down my throat when I was 12.“