Planesrunner: Ian McDonald's YA debut is full of action-packed multidimensional cool, airships, electropunk and quantum physics

Ian McDonald has spent the past two decades blowing the lid off of science fiction with his poetic, dense, lavish novels that span the universe from Mars to Africa, from the future to the past, from Brazil to India to Turkey. Now McDonald has begun a second career as a young adult novelist with his Everness series, the first volume of which is Planesrunner, which goes on sale today.

Planesrunner is the story of Everett Singh, a moderately unhappy schoolboy in London whose divorced, quantum physicist dad is kidnapped before his eyes one night. Everett embarks on an epic quest to find out what happened to his dad, a quest that is complicated by his mother's hostility to her ex-husband, a police cover-up, sinister visits from the head of the Imperial College physics department, and mysterious, threatening strangers who tail him through the streets of London.

But Everett is convinced that he saw what he saw, and that his father is in peril -- not least because his Dad's server has emailed him a firmware update for his tablet that turns it into an n-dimensional directory of the multiverse, an insurance file on a dead man's switch that was sent to Everett when his dad was offline for a critical amount of time. Everett can't outwit the forces of evil forever -- but he can choose the way he is captured, and he does, and that's how he manages to escape through an interdimensional portal and penetrate a parallel electricpunk universe where there is no oil, but where coal-fired manufactories turn out the carbon nanofiber necessary to support a global industry of freewheeling electrified airships.

On the run in another London, Everett gets embroiled in the politics of international airship traffic, living in the autonomous zone around Hackney where the airships dock, spying on the interdimensional ministry where he believes his father is being held, joining a ragtag airship crew and making their fights his own -- even as he tries to solve the seemingly impossible problem of liberating his father.

Planesrunner is smashing adventure fiction that spans the multiverse without ever losing its cool or its sense of style. Ian McDonald is one of the greats of science fiction and his young adult debut is everything you could hope for: romantic, action-packed, wildly imaginative and full of heart.

Planesrunner

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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flowergardenslayer

But is it thought provoking? I think THAT is the hallmark of all good fiction.
Chris Lites

Everett? Clever.
http://twitter.com/Glich Glich

WTB audible.com version?
Chuk

Wow, McDonald doing YA. If I didn’t already have kids, I would have some just so I could make them read this.
(Plus I’m going to read it myself.)
Pope Ratzo

Why does Ian McDonald have time enough on his hands to write a YA novel? He needs to get cracking on another grown-up book.
Matthew Caron

I bought this purely based on the strengths of Dervish House. Its the only MacDonald I’ve read, but it was sooo good. This one is at the bottom of my list, at the moment, but I’m looking forward to reading it.
http://profiles.google.com/itwasgood Ben Harten

After reading this post I hopped right over to Amazon to buy this for my kindle.. but alas.. no e-edition is available… highly disappointing.. especially when coming from sci-fi writers….

Any expectation of a kindle version coming soon?