Ian McDonald‘s critically-acclaimed, award-winning THE DERVISH HOUSE has been given a new cover in Japan! Published as 旋舞の千年都市, in two volumes, by Tokyo Sogensha, here’s the synopsis…
ナノテク革命と低炭素経済で空前の活況に沸く近未来。犠牲者ゼロの奇妙な自爆テロの真相とは？ テロ現場にいた謎のドローンを追う少年、ＡＩが飛び交う金融市場で世紀の一大詐欺を企むトレーダー、伝説の「蜜人」を探す美術商… 東洋と西洋、過去と未来が混じりあう巨大都市を舞台に、現代ＳＦ随一の実力派作家が、壮大にして緻密な未来世界のヴィジョンを描き出す。
キャンベル記念賞、英国ＳＦ協会賞ダブル受賞の至近未来ＳＦ！
THE DERVISH HOUSE is published in the UK by Gollancz, and in the US by Pyr Books. It has also been published widely in translation. Here’s the English-language synopsis…
It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shock waves from this random act of twenty-first-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. With a population pushing one hundred million, and Istanbul alone 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.
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.
As with all of Ian’s novels, THE DERVISH HOUSE has been showered with praise from a wide array of reviewers and peers. Here’s just a small taste…
‘A lush, complex and hugely entertaining novel.’ — Guardian
‘A writer with an unerring instinct for finding resonance between theme and location… a rich and assured novel that, like much of Ken MacLeod’s recent work, revels in the shiny precision of the airport tech-thriller, yet insists on putting forward disquieting ideas rather than offering all-too-neat reassurances that you can somehow put escaped djinns back in bottles. This is as good as contemporary literary SF gets.’ — SFX (5* Review)
‘I know what to expect from Ian McDonald: broad vistas, intricately imagined futures, poetic language that transports and delights, a blend of mysticism and science that thrills and moves. But no matter how much foreknowledge I bring to a new Ian McDonald, I am always, always startled and thrilled by the exciting, moving epic story I find inside… To read McDonald is to fall in love with a place and to become drunk with it… I you’ve never read him, you’re in for a treat. If you’re a fan like me, you’ll be delighted anew. What a wonderful, wonderful book.’ — BoingBoing
‘Thrilling… A master in his own right, McDonald has written some of the best SF of the last fifteen years… a mosaic of a story that can be admired for its finely-wrought pieces but not fully appreciated until the book is finished and looked at again from some distance. The biggest part of the thrill is wondering how the characters will inevitably intersect… Ian McDonald has crafted a gorgeously lush novel, oozing with exciting, relevant ideas, a love letter to the Queen of Cities, to all cities, really.’ — Tor.com
‘McDonald’s new book is a conscientious attempt to write the Other from the inside and accept the possibility that the Anglo world may be a sideline… a brilliant, jewelled machine of a novel in which lives trigger events in other lives, in a sequence that skirts chaos and disaster, but ends with gorgeous order.’ — Independent
Ian’s latest novel is the critically-acclaimed LUNA: NEW MOON, the first in a proposed trilogy — published by Gollancz in the UK, and Tor Books in the US.
