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Ian McDonald: WorldCon Guest of Honour (Part 2)

Posted on Friday, August 9th, 2019

This month, Ian McDonald is going to be a Guest of Honour at WorldCon in Dublin. Last week, we highlighted some of Ian’s series, and today we want to take a look at his stand-alone novels. You’ll notice a theme in the short intros, below, in that most of Ian’s novels have won and been nominated for a great many awards.

Let’s start with THE DERVISH HOUSE (most recent covers at the top), first published in 2009. This novel racked up an impressive number of awards and nominations — including winning the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, BSFA Best Novel Award, and coming in 3rd for the Locus Award for Best SF Novel. Published in the UK by Gollancz, and in North America via the JABberwocky eBook Program, here’s the synopsis…

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. 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 new Europe, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided.

The Dervish House is seven days, six characters, and three interconnected story strands all woven around the common core of the old dervish house of Aden Dede. A terror attack, a vision of djinn, a commodities scam, a hunt for half a miniature Koran that holds the key to new technology, and a quest for a creature from Arabic legend — that may not be so legendary after all.

Here are just a few of the great reviews THE DERVISH HOUSE has received…

‘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

‘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… McDonald, who is a native of Scotland, has an uncanny ability to write about other cultures authentically. He is a painstaking researcher and while he cannot always write with absolute authority, his dedication to making settings and characters feel alive is incredibly impressive… 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

BRASYL, which also won the BSFA Award for Best Novel, was first published in 2007, did for Brazil what Ian’s acclaimed RIVERS OF GODS and CYBERABAD DAYS did for India in British science fiction. Published in the UK by Gollancz, and in North America via JABberwocky, here’s the synopsis…

Be seduced, amazed, and shocked by one of the world’s greatest and strangest nations. Past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, come together in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling.

Sao Paulo 2031. Rio 2006. The Amazon 1732.

Three characters, three stories, three Brazils, linked across time, space, and reality in a hugely ambitious story that will challenge the way you think about everything.

Here’s some of what critics have written about BRASYL since it was published…

‘BRASYL is classic McDonald: a deep thinking, high-paced adventure story, exploring the quantum universe, combining sassy, believable characters with a captivating delight in language and storytelling. McDonald inhabits the Brazil – or rather, the Brazils – of this world and sweeps you along as no other writer in the field could manage.’ — Guardian

‘A beautiful story, one that cries out to be read again and again. McDonald’s light is still shining brightly, and considering the consistent quality of his titles, we say long may it burn.’ — SciFi Now

‘British author McDonald’s outstanding SF novel channels the vitality of South America’s largest country into an edgy, post-cyberpunk free-for-all… RIVER OF GODS (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.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘Ian McDonald’s BRASYL, with its three storylines, is as close to perfect as any novel in recent memory. It works because of great characterization, but also because McDonald envisions Brazil as a dynamic, living place that is part postmodern trash pile, part trashy reality-TV-driven ethical abyss… and yet also somehow spiritual… McDonald’s novel is always in motion. This movement extends through time and alternate realities in ways both wonderful and wise, as the three storylines interlock for a satisfying and often stunning conclusion. McDonald has found new myths for old places; in doing so, he has cemented his reputation as an amazing storyteller.’ — Washington Post

NECROVILLE, which was published in the US as TERMINAL CAFE, was first released in 1994. Currently published by Gollancz in the UK, here’s the synopsis…

In the Los Angeles ghetto of Necroville, the yearly celebration of the Night of the Dead – where the dead are resurrected through the miracle of nanotechnology and live their second lives as non-citizens – becomes a journey of discovery and revelation for five individuals on the run from their pasts.

With his customary flair for making the bizarre both credible and fascinating, McDonald tosses aside the line of demarcation between living and dead in a story that confronts the central quandary of human existence: the essence of non-being.

‘McDonald’s lush prose paints a vivid and credible Armageddon. World-building SF that’s punk, funky, and frightening: a fantastic acid trip to the end of the world.’ — Kirkus

‘McDonald, who won the Philip K. Dick Award for KING OF THE MORNING QUEEN OF THE DAY, reveals the workings of his bizarre society through the exploits of five friends as they search for the meaning of life in the Necroville at Los Angeles on the Night of the Dead. Sorting through five points of view requires some patience, but it is well rewarded. In the best science fiction tradition, McDonald provokes reexamination of current societal standards through the prism of another time and place.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘McDonald revels in the creation of brilliantly described near-futures and lushly exotic settings, and has more ideas in a book than most writers dream up in a lifetime… free-wheeling, mind-spinning novel… In NECROVILLE, decay sits next to fabulous invention, terrible privation next to limitless possibility… offers a graphic dystopian vision.’ — Guardian

The next four novels we’ll take a look at are all published via the JABberwocky eBook Program. Here are their details…

OUT ON BLUE SIX (1989)

Hundreds of years from now, the world is perfect. The Compassionate Society guarantees happiness, peace and total personal fulfillment to its citizens, and those less than satisfied are guilty of Paincrime.

Among them, count cartoonist Courtney Hall, who runs afoul of the Ministry of Pain when one of her cartoons hits a little too close to home. Pursued by the relentless Love Police, she drops down a rabbit hole into a counter-world of rebels, artists and enhanced raccoons.

Out on Blue Six is a fast, funny, bizarre story of an almost-Utopia–and almost-Utopias make the best dystopias.

KING OF MORNING, QUEEN OF DAY (1991)

In Ireland, three generations of young women fight to control the powers coursing through their blood: the power to bring the mystical Otherworld into our world, and change it.

Emily, Jessica and Enye must each face their dark side of human mythoconsciousness – and their own personal histories. But the forces of faerie are ever treacherous…

Filled with vivid, passionate characters you will never forget, King of Morning, Queen of Day is a spellbinding fantasy of the real Ireland.

THE BROKEN LAND (1992)

Grandfather was a tree, Father grew trux, in fifteen colours. Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them…

The Land is a living, breathing, sentient world, where careful skills and talent can manipulate its very substance into a myriad different shapes and forms.

This is the world in which Mathembe Fileli grows up, until the conflicts tearing her country apart shatter her village, her home and her family and scatter them to the four winds. Can Mathembe reunite her family in a world full of angels, talking trees, squalor and glory?

SACRIFICE OF FOOLS (1996)

They’re ancient, power, enigmatic, and here.

Eight million alien Shian have come to Earth. Not as conquerors, or invaders, but as settlers. In exchange for their technology, they’re given places to live.

One of those places in Northern Ireland, where eighty thousand Shian settlers disrupt the old, poisonous duality of Northern Irish life. The Shian remain aloof from the legacy of violence — until a Shian family is murdered down to the last child.

Humans and aliens seem on a collision course, unless Andy Gillespie, ex-con, now Shian translator, can hunt down the killer before they strike again. But that’s not so easy in Northern Ireland…

In addition to these stand-alone novels, Ian is also the author of two collections, which are also available via the JABberwocky eBook Program:

EMPIRE DREAMS, published in 1988…

Published simultaneously with Desolation Road, the Empire Dreams collection coincided with the author’s nomination for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1985.

It collects seven stories in one anthology which is sure to delight fans of Ian McDonald’s full length work.

First published in 1994, here’s the synopsis for SCISSORS CUT PAPER WRAP STONE…

Words can control you, words can make you act against your own will… and words can kill.

Ethan Ring discovers computer graphics with profound effects on human minds — fracters. Dark political forces want his power, and Ethan must face the consequences of his creation, and his actions.

In search of redemption, he embarks on an ancient thousand-mile pilgrimage, but can he ever escape the forces that once controlled him, and can he resist the power of the deadly images tattooed onto his hands?

You can read an excerpt from EMPIRE DREAMS here.

Ian’s most recent stand-alone book is the BSFA Award-winning (Shorter Fiction) novella, TIME WAS, which was published recently by Tor.com…

A love story stitched across time and war, shaped by the power of books, and ultimately destroyed by it.

In the heart of World War II, Tom and Ben became lovers. Brought together by a secret project designed to hide British targets from German radar, the two founded a love that could not be revealed. When the project went wrong, Tom and Ben vanished into nothingness, presumed dead. Their bodies were never found.

Now the two are lost in time, hunting each other across decades, leaving clues in books of poetry and trying to make their desperate timelines overlap.

‘[E]ntrances readers with this multigenerational novella of two time-crossed lovers who can only meet for brief moments separated by several years… beautiful writing… Fans of science fiction who enjoy a dash of history and legend will savor this tender story.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘This slender, poignant queer romance incorporates time travel and hints of hard science into a story as devastatingly sad—which isn’t to say bleak—as anything you’ll read this year.’ — B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog (Best SFF Books of the Year So Far, 2018, Honourable Mention)

Ian McDonald: WorldCon Guest Of Honour (Part 1)

Posted on Friday, August 2nd, 2019

Ian McDonald is a Guest of Honour at this year’s WorldCon, to be held in Dublin from August 15-19. We thought this would be a great time, therefore, to highlight some of his amazing, critically-acclaimed and award-winning novels. His most recent series, Luna, has been getting a lot of attention as new translation editions are released. (Ian’s conquest of the world continues at quite the impressive pace!)

Given how substantial his backlist is, we’re going to split this into two posts (the second will go up next Friday). Today, we’ll take a look at Ian’s other series.

One of Ian’s most critically-acclaimed series is India 2047, which includes RIVER OF GODS and CYBERABAD DAYS. Published in the UK by Gollancz, the novels are also available as eBook in the US (via JABberwocky’s eBook Program). Here’s the synopsis for RIVER OF GODS…

August 15th, 2047. Happy Hundredth Birthday, India … On the eve of Mother India’s hundredth birthday, ten people are doing ten very different things. In the next few weeks, all these people will be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. From gangsters to government advisors, from superstitious street-boys to scientists to computer-generated soap stars, River of Gods shows a civilization in flux – a river of gods.

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.

Ian has two novels set on a future Mars: DESOLATION ROAD and ARES EXPRESS. Available now, published by the JABberwocky eBook Program.

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’s first series was Chaga, which includes CHAGA/EVOLUTION’S ROAD, KIRINYA, and TENDELEO’S STORY. The trilogy is now available as eBooks, published by JABberwocky. The first two books have also been published in Germany, by Heyne.

On the trail of the mystery of Saturn’s disappearing moons, network journalist Gaby McAslan finds herself in Africa researching the Kilimanjaro Event: a meteor-strike in Kenya which caused the stunning African landscape to give way to something equally beautiful – and indescribably alien. Dubbed the ‘Chaga’, the alien flora destroys all man-made materials, and moulds human flesh, bone and spirit to its own designs. But when Gaby finds the first man to survive the Chaga’s changes, she realizes it has its own plans for humankind… Against the backdrop of Mount Kilimanjaro, McDonald weaves a staggering tale of keen human observation and speculation, as the Kilimanjaro Event changes the course of the human race by exposure to something beyond its imagination.

Everness is Ian’s YA sci-fi trilogy: PLANESRUNNER, BE MY ENEMY, and EMPRESS OF THE SUN. First published by Jo Fletcher Books in the UK and Pyr Books in North America, the series has now been reissued through the JABberwocky eBook program (UK and US). The series offers younger readers a perfect entry point into McDonald’s work — sci-fi that is both intelligent and action-packed, this series is also accessible and thoroughly entertaining. Here’s the synopsis for the first book…

There is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one among billions of parallel earths.

When Everett Singh’s scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer: the Infundibulum, the map of all the parallel earths, the most valuable object in the multiverse. There are dark forces in the Plenitude of Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it. They’ve got power, authority, the might of ten planets—some of them more technologically advanced than our Earth—at their fingertips. He’s got wits, intelligence, and a knack for Indian cooking.

Everett must trick his way through the Heisenberg Gate that his dad helped build and go on the run in a parallel Earth. But to rescue his dad from Charlotte Villiers and the sinister Order, this Planesrunner’s going to need friends. Friends like Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, her adopted daughter, Sen, and the crew of the airship Everness.

Can they rescue Everett’s father and get the Infundibulum to safety? The game is afoot!

The Everness series has also been published in a number of foreign territories.

Ian McDonald’s LUNA: WOLF MOON available now in paperback in the US

Posted on Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019

A new trade paperback edition of Ian McDonald‘s critically-acclaimed second Luna novel, WOLF MOON, is out today in the US! Published by Tor Books, here’s the synopsis…

A Dragon is dead.

Corta Helio, one of the five family corporations that rule the Moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed.

The remaining Helio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parent’s violent deaths, is now a ward — virtually a hostage — of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished from the surface of the moon.

Only Lady Sun, dowager of Taiyang, suspects that Lucas Corta is not dead, and more to the point — that he is still a major player in the game. After all, Lucas always was the Schemer, and even in death, he would go to any lengths to take back everything and build a new Corta Helio, more powerful than before. But Corta Helio needs allies, and to find them, the fleeing son undertakes an audacious, impossible journey — to Earth.

In an unstable lunar environment, the shifting loyalties and political machinations of each family reach the zenith of their most fertile plots as outright war erupts.

WOLF MOON was nominated for the Locus Award, and was an NPR Best Book of the Year.

Tor Books has published all three novels in the Luna series in North America. The trilogy is published in the UK by Gollancz, and is available in an ever-growing number of translated editions around the world.

Here is just a small selection taken from the novel’s aforementioned critical acclaim…

‘… powerful sequel… compelling throughout. Each of McDonald’s viewpoint characters is made human in fascinating and occasionally disturbing detail, and the solar system of the 22nd century is wonderfully delineated. Fans of the first volume will love this one and eagerly look forward to the next.‘ — Publishers Weekly

‘A Howling Good Read… No one builds a world like Ian McDonald does. Piece by piece and brick by brick. Spare, simple, elegant when he needs to be…, deep and meaty when he wants to be…, he does his work like an artisan pulling a sculpture from stone. There are no wasted moves, nothing that isn’t vital because, in the end, everything is vital. Everything matters… it is fascinating, all of it. Because McDonald has made a world that is ruthless in its consistency and living, breathing reality, and then made characters who are not just living in it, but wholly and fully of it… McDonald’s corporate war is a gorgeous thing, fought with every tool available… McDonald is able to wrap the biggest events in constellations of the smallest so that a cocktail party here, a discussion of ’80s retro fashion (all mall-hair and WHAM! T-shirts), a love story and a day at work for a guy who cleans solar panels all build and coalesce to form the background radiation of life in this unstable future. Every moment with his characters makes them precious, real and alive.’ — NPR

‘The fights and vengeance that follow are more vicious and intricate than anything in Game of Thrones, full of great acts of self-sacrifice and viciousness alike, brave cavalry charges and last stands, cowardice and avarice. McDonald’s great gift is to hold the micro- and macro-scale in his hand at once. Starting with his debut novel, 1988’s Desolation Road, McDonald has used his intense, finely crafted and small personal stories of his vast casts of characters as the pixels in an unimaginably vast display on which he projects some of the field’s most audacious worldbuilding — never worldbuilding for its own sake, either, but always in the service of slyly parodying, critiquing or lionizing elements of our present-day world.’ — Boing Boing

‘Luna: New Moon was a “magnificent bastard of a book,” as I put it in my review. Part two, it’s my pleasure to tell you, is just as awesome, and just as masterfully nasty.’ — Tor.com

‘NEW MOON was one of the most interesting sci-fi novels of 2015, with smart ideas on humanity and economies matched by street smarts, political brawls and murder in the streets. LUNA: WOLF MOON turns that up to eleven – it’s a fascinating story, which is also a tense, enthralling read.’ — Sci-Fi & Fantasy Review

Ian McDonald’s LUNA series available now as an Italian Omnibus!

Posted on Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

Ian McDonald‘s critically-acclaimed Luna series is now available in a brand new omnibus edition in Italy! Published by Mondadori’s Oscar Fantastica imprint as LUNA: LA TRILOGIA, here’s the synopsis…

NEL XXII SECOLO LA LUNA è stata ormai colonizzata dall’uomo e industrializzata. Le sue preziose risorse – l’elio-3, il carbonio, il ghiaccio e i metalli rari – vengono estratte ed esportate sulla Terra. A controllare il proficuo commercio sono i “Cinque Draghi”, cinque famiglie tanto potenti quanto spietate e pronte a tutto pur di difendere la propria posizione e i propri privilegi. La società spaziale è tornata alle lotte e ai valori feudali, come sa bene Adriana Corta, a capo di una delle corporazioni, che è riuscita a sottrarre il controllo dell’elio-3 alla Mackenzie Metals. Ormai anziana, deve difendere la florida azienda di famiglia dai moltissimi nemici che si è fatta negli anni. Ma basta un niente, nel difficile ambiente lunare, perché le mutevoli lealtà e le macchinazioni politiche dei cinque clan raggiungano il punto di rottura e si scateni una guerra dagli imprevedibili risultati

Una saga grandiosa, ricca e stratificata di echi letterari, da Martin al García Márquez di Cent’anni di solitudine. Un’acclamata trilogia, piena di avventura, che ci spingerà a guardare con occhi nuovi al nostro solo apparentemente innocuo e pacifico satellite.

Mondadori’s Urania imprint has also published the three novels individually in Italy: LUNA NUOVA, LUNA PIENA, and LUNA CRESCENTE.

The Luna series is published in the UK by Gollancz, in North America by Tor Books: NEW MOON, WOLF MOON, and MOON RISING. The series is also available in a growing number of international, translated editions. Here’s the English-language synopsis for the first novel…

In Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, the scions of a falling house must navigate a world of corporate warfare to maintain their family’s status in the Moon’s vicious political atmosphere.

The Moon wants to kill you.

Maybe it will kill you when the per diem for your allotted food, water, and air runs out, just before you hit paydirt. Maybe it will kill you when you are trapped between the reigning corporations-the Five Dragons-in a foolish gamble against a futuristic feudal society. On the Moon, you must fight for every inch you want to gain. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon’s newest “dragon,” Adriana has wrested control of the Moon’s Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family’s new status. Now, in the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation-Corta Helio-confronted by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana’s five children must defend their mother’s empire from her many enemies… and each other.

Here are just a few of the great reviews the series has received so far…

‘McDonald… begins his superb near-future series… scintillating, violent, and decadent world. McDonald creates a complex and fascinating civilization featuring believable technology, and the characters are fully developed, with individually gripping stories. Watch for this brilliantly constructed family saga on next year’s award ballots.’ — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) on NEW MOON

‘Mafia-style mining families clash in a compelling fantasy that offers up all the pleasures of a cut-throat soap opera in space…That McDonald is able to spin a compelling story from this unforgiving set-up is testament to his skill as a writer… One thing Luna does exceptionally well is to puncture Old Heinlein’s assumption that a frontier society based on the primacy of the family and a disregard of conventional laws would end up like idealised smalltown America. Luna argues that any realistic future colonisation of the moon will be much more The Sopranos than The Waltons. LUNA is as gripping as it is colourful, and as colourful as it is nasty.’ — Guardian on NEW MOON

‘No one writes like Ian McDonald, and no one’s Moon is nearly so beautiful and terrible… Ian McDonald’s never written a bad novel, but this is a great Ian McDonald novel… McDonald has ten details for every detail proffered by other sf writers. Not gratuitous details, either: gracious ones. The fashion sense of William Gibson, the design sense of Bruce Sterling, the eye for family drama of Connie Willis, the poesie of Bradbury, and the dirty sex of Kathe Koja and Samuel Delany… McDonald’s moon is omnisexual, kinky, violent, passionate, beautiful, awful, vibrant and crushing. As the family saga of the Cortas unravels, we meet a self-sexual ninja lawyer, a werewolf who loses his mind in the Full Earth, a family tyrant whose ruthlessness is matched only by his crepulance, and a panoply of great passions and low desires. LUNA: NEW MOON is the first book of a two-book cycle. Now I’m all a-quiver for the next one.‘ — BoingBoing

‘Luna: New Moon was a “magnificent bastard of a book,” as I put it in my review. Part two, it’s my pleasure to tell you, is just as awesome, and just as masterfully nasty.’ — Tor.com

‘… powerful sequel… compelling throughout. Each of McDonald’s viewpoint characters is made human in fascinating and occasionally disturbing detail, and the solar system of the 22nd century is wonderfully delineated. Fans of the first volume will love this one and eagerly look forward to the next.‘ — Publishers Weekly on WOLF MOON

‘NEW MOON was one of the most interesting sci-fi novels of 2015, with smart ideas on humanity and economies matched by street smarts, political brawls and murder in the streets. LUNA: WOLF MOON turns that up to eleven – it’s a fascinating story, which is also a tense, enthralling read.’ — Sci-Fi & Fantasy Review

‘McDonald concludes his Luna space opera trilogy in triumphant style… The political intrigue never feels too abstract or removed from 21st-century Earth. Readers will appreciate the care McDonald takes with both worldbuilding and characterization, and will enjoy little touches such as giving an assassin the job title of Corporate Conflict Resolution Officer… fans of the prior books will find this wrap-up rewarding.’ — Publishers Weekly on MOON RISING

‘The Luna trilogy is a masterpiece of worldbuilding. Ian McDonald has created an incredibly developed, complex and astonishingly plausible future for the Moon… What stands out, though, are its threads of gorgeous storytelling… as a whole, this is an extraordinary trilogy. Ian McDonald always writes beautifully. I love what he has to say. I’ll always remember his vision of the Moon, which at times is horrifying and violent and yet at others is so heartwarming and wondrous.’ — For Winter Nights on MOON RISING

‘… cinematic set-pieces… so much fun to read… these entertaining, and intelligent novels, capped off by the very satisfying Luna: MOON RISING, have been about establishing a society, a community, a family that looks to the future, that lives and prospers in an environment that must always be treated with respect.’ — Locus (Ian Mond)

The DRACHENMOND rises…

Posted on Monday, July 8th, 2019

Ian McDonald fans in Germany rejoice! Today, Heyne publishes DRACHENMOND, the highly-anticipated German edition of the third Luna novel! Here is the synopsis…

Einhundert Jahre in der Zukunft: Die fünf Drachen, die einflussreichen Familienclans, haben die Herrschaft über den Mond unter sich aufgeteilt. Aber jedes Haus will noch ein wenig mehr Macht, ein wenig mehr Einfluss an sich reißen – und dazu ist ihnen jedes Mittel recht: Eheschließungen, Verschwörungen, Erpressung und sogar Mord. Doch dann taucht ein neuer Spieler auf dem politischen Parkett der Mondgesellschaft auf – und aus im Verborgenen geführten Scharmützeln wird offener Krieg…

Heyne has also published the first two novels in the series in Germany: LUNA and WOLFSMOND.

The critically-acclaimed Luna series — NEW MOON, WOLF MOON and MOON RISING — is published in the UK by Gollancz, in North America by Tor Books, and widely in translation. Here’s the English-language synopsis for the third novel…

A hundred years in the future, a war wages between the Five Dragons — five families that control the Moon’s leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in their power to claw their way to the top of the food chain — marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations.

Through ingenious political manipulation and sheer force of will, Lucas Cortas rises from the ashes of corporate defeat and seizes control of the Moon. The only person who can stop him is a brilliant lunar lawyer, his sister, Ariel.

Witness the Dragons’ final battle for absolute sovereignty in Ian McDonald’s heart-stopping finale to the Luna trilogy.

Here is just a small selection taken from the fantastic reviews the series has received so far…

‘McDonald concludes his Luna space opera trilogy in triumphant style… The political intrigue never feels too abstract or removed from 21st-century Earth. Readers will appreciate the care McDonald takes with both worldbuilding and characterization, and will enjoy little touches such as giving an assassin the job title of Corporate Conflict Resolution Officer… fans of the prior books will find this wrap-up rewarding.’ — Publishers Weekly on MOON RISING

‘The Luna trilogy is a masterpiece of worldbuilding. Ian McDonald has created an incredibly developed, complex and astonishingly plausible future for the Moon… What stands out, though, are its threads of gorgeous storytelling… as a whole, this is an extraordinary trilogy. Ian McDonald always writes beautifully. I love what he has to say. I’ll always remember his vision of the Moon, which at times is horrifying and violent and yet at others is so heartwarming and wondrous.’ — For Winter Nights on MOON RISING

‘A Howling Good Read… No one builds a world like Ian McDonald does. Piece by piece and brick by brick. Spare, simple, elegant when he needs to be…, deep and meaty when he wants to be…, he does his work like an artisan pulling a sculpture from stone. There are no wasted moves, nothing that isn’t vital because, in the end, everything is vital. Everything matters… it is fascinating, all of it. Because McDonald has made a world that is ruthless in its consistency and living, breathing reality, and then made characters who are not just living in it, but wholly and fully of it… McDonald’s corporate war is a gorgeous thing, fought with every tool available… McDonald is able to wrap the biggest events in constellations of the smallest so that a cocktail party here, a discussion of ’80s retro fashion (all mall-hair and WHAM! T-shirts), a love story and a day at work for a guy who cleans solar panels all build and coalesce to form the background radiation of life in this unstable future. Every moment with his characters makes them precious, real and alive.’ — NPR on WOLF MOON

‘The fights and vengeance that follow are more vicious and intricate than anything in Game of Thrones, full of great acts of self-sacrifice and viciousness alike, brave cavalry charges and last stands, cowardice and avarice. McDonald’s great gift is to hold the micro- and macro-scale in his hand at once. Starting with his debut novel, 1988’s Desolation Road, McDonald has used his intense, finely crafted and small personal stories of his vast casts of characters as the pixels in an unimaginably vast display on which he projects some of the field’s most audacious worldbuilding — never worldbuilding for its own sake, either, but always in the service of slyly parodying, critiquing or lionizing elements of our present-day world.’ — Boing Boing on WOLF MOON

‘Luna: New Moon was a “magnificent bastard of a book,” as I put it in my review. Part two, it’s my pleasure to tell you, is just as awesome, and just as masterfully nasty.’ — Tor.com on WOLF MOON

‘McDonald… begins his superb near-future series… scintillating, violent, and decadent world. McDonald creates a complex and fascinating civilization featuring believable technology, and the characters are fully developed, with individually gripping stories. Watch for this brilliantly constructed family saga on next year’s award ballots.’ — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) on NEW MOON

‘LUNA: NEW MOON is the best moon novel I’ve seen in many years, but it’s also something of a piece with the recent movement on the part of Paul McAuley, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others to confine novels to the solar system, out of a realistic assessment that this is likely all we’ll have to work with – but McDonald takes this a step further. Possibly the most chilling lines in the book for an SF reader come from Adriana herself, in her own narrative: ‘‘There was no law, no justice,’’ she writes, ‘‘only management. The moon was the frontier, but it was the frontier to nothing. There was nowhere to run.’’ Inasmuch as it challenges one of the cherished master narratives of SF, in which the moon is only a stepping-stone, and despite what it owes to the tropes of ’70s-era social melodrama, McDonald’s novel has some formidable SF stingers not far beneath its densely textured surface.’ — Locus

‘Smart, funny, passionate and at times quite dark, McDonald brings the touch we’ve seen in RIVER OF GODS and DERVISH HOUSE to an entirely new culture as it evolves in a distant hostile place where business or family rules all… it’s terrific. My only complaint: it leaves you wanting the second book right now!’ — Jonathan Strahan on NEW MOON

Short Fiction Watch: Aliette de Bodard, Ian McDonald & Lavie Tidhar among the BEST SF OF THE YEAR…

Posted on Friday, July 5th, 2019

Today we have a bit of a smorgasbord of short fiction to draw your attention to, from Aliette de Bodard, Ian McDonald, and Lavie Tidhar.

Let’s start with Aliette de Bodard, who has stories featuring in three different publications (pictured at the top). First, Aliette has a story in MISSION CRITICAL, an anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan, due to be published by Solaris. Here’s the collection’s synopsis…

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM…

Life is fragile. The difference between success and failure can come down to nothing – the thread of a screw, the flick of a switch – and when it goes wrong, you fix it. Or someone dies.

Mission Critical takes us from our world, across the Solar System, and out into deep space to tell the stories of people who had to do the impossible.

And do it fast.

In addition to this, Aliette has stories in the latest issue of Clarkesworld (“Two Sisters in Exile”, also available online), and also the first anthology from New Accelerator (“A Dance of Dust and Life”).

THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR: VOL. 4 has stories from Aliette, Ian McDonald, and Lavie Tidhar. Published by Night Shade Books, here’s the relevant content…

“Ten Landscapes of Nili Fossae” by Ian McDonald (2001: An Odyssey in Words, edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter)
“The Buried Giant” by Lavie Tidhar (Robots vs. Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)
“Among the Water Buffaloes, a Tiger’s Steps” by Aliette de Bodard (Mechanical Animals, edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller)

Ian McDonald is the author of, most recently, the Luna series — NEW MOON, WOLF MOON, and MOON RISING — published by Gollancz (UK) and Tor Books (US). He is also the author of the novellas TIME WAS and the forthcoming THE MENACE FROM FARSIDE (Tor.com).

Lavie Tidhar is the author of a number of award-winning and critically-acclaimed novels and novellas, including UNHOLY LAND (Tachyon), CENTRAL STATION (Tachyon), A MAN LIES DREAMING (Hodder/Melville House), THE VIOLENT CENTURY (Hodder/Tachyon), OSAMA, and his first novel for young readers, CANDY (Scholastic).

Aliette is also the author of the Dominion of the Fallen series, published by Gollancz in the UK and Roc Books in North America (1-2): THE HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS, THE HOUSE OF BINDING THORNS, and the upcoming THE HOUSE OF SUNDERING FLAMES. She is also the author of IN THE VANISHERS’ PALACE (JABberwocky), THE TEA MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE (Subterranean Press/JABberwocky), and OF WARS, AND MEMORIES, AND STARLIGHT (Subterranean Press).

Ian McDonald’s third LUNA novel out now in Spain!

Posted on Thursday, July 4th, 2019

MOON RISING, the third novel in Ian McDonald‘s critically-acclaimed Luna series is out now in Spain! Published by Nova in Spanish as LUNA ASCENDENTE, here’s the synopsis…

Luna ascendente, la esperada continuación de Luna, por uno de los mejores autores de ciencia ficción del mundo.

Un centenar de años en el futuro se libra una guerra entre los Cinco Dragones, las cinco familias que controlan las principales empresas industriales de la Luna. Todos los clanes se desviven por trepar hasta lo más alto de la cadena alimentaria con estrategias como matrimonios de conveniencia, espionaje industrial, secuestros y asesinatos masivos.

Gracias a su ingeniosa manipulación política y a su fuerza de voluntad, Lucas Corta consigue emerger de las cenizas de su empresa destruida y hacerse con el control de la Luna. Y la única persona que puede pararlo es una célebre abogada lunar: su hermana Ariel.

Ian MacDonald nos hace partícipes de la última batalla de los Dragones por la soberanía absoluta en el trepidante final de la trilogía «Luna».

Nova has also published the first two novels in the series in Spanish: NEW MOON and WOLF MOON, as LUNA NUEVA and LUNA DE LOBOS.

The series is published in the UK by Gollancz, in North America by Tor Books, and widely elsewhere in translation. Here’s the English-language synopsis for MOON RISING…

A hundred years in the future, a war wages between the Five Dragons — five families that control the Moon’s leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in their power to claw their way to the top of the food chain — marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations.

Through ingenious political manipulation and sheer force of will, Lucas Cortas rises from the ashes of corporate defeat and seizes control of the Moon. The only person who can stop him is a brilliant lunar lawyer, his sister, Ariel.

Witness the Dragons’ final battle for absolute sovereignty in Ian McDonald’s heart-stopping finale to the Luna trilogy.

Here are just a few of the reviews the series has received since it started…

‘Mafia-style mining families clash in a compelling fantasy that offers up all the pleasures of a cut-throat soap opera in space…That McDonald is able to spin a compelling story from this unforgiving set-up is testament to his skill as a writer… One thing Luna does exceptionally well is to puncture Old Heinlein’s assumption that a frontier society based on the primacy of the family and a disregard of conventional laws would end up like idealised smalltown America. Luna argues that any realistic future colonisation of the moon will be much more The Sopranos than The Waltons. LUNA is as gripping as it is colourful, and as colourful as it is nasty.’ — Guardian on NEW MOON

‘Smart, funny, passionate and at times quite dark, McDonald brings the touch we’ve seen in RIVER OF GODS and DERVISH HOUSE to an entirely new culture as it evolves in a distant hostile place where business or family rules all… it’s terrific. My only complaint: it leaves you wanting the second book right now!’ — Jonathan Strahan on NEW MOON

‘McDonald… begins his superb near-future series… scintillating, violent, and decadent world. McDonald creates a complex and fascinating civilization featuring believable technology, and the characters are fully developed, with individually gripping stories. Watch for this brilliantly constructed family saga on next year’s award ballots.’ — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) on NEW MOON

‘Luna: New Moon was a “magnificent bastard of a book,” as I put it in my review. Part two, it’s my pleasure to tell you, is just as awesome, and just as masterfully nasty.’ — Tor.com on WOLF MOON

‘The fights and vengeance that follow are more vicious and intricate than anything in Game of Thrones, full of great acts of self-sacrifice and viciousness alike, brave cavalry charges and last stands, cowardice and avarice. McDonald’s great gift is to hold the micro- and macro-scale in his hand at once. Starting with his debut novel, 1988’s Desolation Road, McDonald has used his intense, finely crafted and small personal stories of his vast casts of characters as the pixels in an unimaginably vast display on which he projects some of the field’s most audacious worldbuilding — never worldbuilding for its own sake, either, but always in the service of slyly parodying, critiquing or lionizing elements of our present-day world.’ — Boing Boing on WOLF MOON

‘A Howling Good Read… No one builds a world like Ian McDonald does. Piece by piece and brick by brick. Spare, simple, elegant when he needs to be…, deep and meaty when he wants to be…, he does his work like an artisan pulling a sculpture from stone. There are no wasted moves, nothing that isn’t vital because, in the end, everything is vital. Everything matters… it is fascinating, all of it. Because McDonald has made a world that is ruthless in its consistency and living, breathing reality, and then made characters who are not just living in it, but wholly and fully of it… McDonald’s corporate war is a gorgeous thing, fought with every tool available… McDonald is able to wrap the biggest events in constellations of the smallest so that a cocktail party here, a discussion of ’80s retro fashion (all mall-hair and WHAM! T-shirts), a love story and a day at work for a guy who cleans solar panels all build and coalesce to form the background radiation of life in this unstable future. Every moment with his characters makes them precious, real and alive.’ — NPR on WOLF MOON

‘… cinematic set-pieces… so much fun to read… these entertaining, and intelligent novels, capped off by the very satisfying Luna: MOON RISING, have been about establishing a society, a community, a family that looks to the future, that lives and prospers in an environment that must always be treated with respect.’ — Locus (Ian Mond) on MOON RISING

‘McDonald concludes his Luna space opera trilogy in triumphant style… The political intrigue never feels too abstract or removed from 21st-century Earth. Readers will appreciate the care McDonald takes with both worldbuilding and characterization, and will enjoy little touches such as giving an assassin the job title of Corporate Conflict Resolution Officer… fans of the prior books will find this wrap-up rewarding.’ — Publishers Weekly on MOON RISING

‘The Luna trilogy is a masterpiece of worldbuilding. Ian McDonald has created an incredibly developed, complex and astonishingly plausible future for the Moon… What stands out, though, are its threads of gorgeous storytelling… as a whole, this is an extraordinary trilogy. Ian McDonald always writes beautifully. I love what he has to say. I’ll always remember his vision of the Moon, which at times is horrifying and violent and yet at others is so heartwarming and wondrous.’ — For Winter Nights on MOON RISING

New German cover for Ian McDonald’s DRACHENMOND!

Posted on Friday, June 28th, 2019

Due to be published by Heyne next month in Germany, there is a new cover for Ian McDonald‘s third Luna novel, MOON RISING! Published in German as DRACHENMOND, here’s the synopsis…

Einhundert Jahre in der Zukunft: Die fünf Drachen, die einflussreichen Familienclans, haben die Herrschaft über den Mond unter sich aufgeteilt. Aber jedes Haus will noch ein wenig mehr Macht, ein wenig mehr Einfluss an sich reißen – und dazu ist ihnen jedes Mittel recht: Eheschließungen, Verschwörungen, Erpressung und sogar Mord. Doch dann taucht ein neuer Spieler auf dem politischen Parkett der Mondgesellschaft auf – und aus im Verborgenen geführten Scharmützeln wird offener Krieg…

Heyne has also published the first two novels in the critically-acclaimed Luna series; and it is published in the UK by Gollancz, in North America by Tor Books, and is available in a growing number of translated editions. Here’s the English-language synopsis for MOON RISING…

The continuing saga of the Five Dragons, Ian McDonald’s fast-paced, intricately plotted space opera pitched as Game of Thrones meets The Expanse

A hundred years in the future, a war wages between the Five Dragons — five families that control the Moon’s leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in their power to claw their way to the top of the food chain — marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations.

Through ingenious political manipulation and sheer force of will, Lucas Cortas rises from the ashes of corporate defeat and seizes control of the Moon. The only person who can stop him is a brilliant lunar lawyer, his sister, Ariel.

Witness the Dragons’ final battle for absolute sovereignty in Ian McDonald’s heart-stopping finale to the Luna trilogy.

Here is just a small selection taken from the reviews the series has received so far…