Back in 2015, the incomparable Ian McDonald (previously) published Luna: New Moon, a kind of cross between Dallas and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with warring clans scheme and fighting on a libertopian lunar colony where the only law is private contracts and you're charged for the very air you breathe; McDonald raised the stakes to impossible heights with the 2017 sequel Luna: Wolf Moon, and now, with the final volume, Luna: Moon Rising, McDonald proves that he despite the wild gyrations of his massive cast of characters and their intricate schemes, he never lost control.
I had my mind blown repeatedly by 2015's bumper crop of science fiction, but one novel stands out even so: Luna: New Moon, Ian McDonald's hybrid of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "The Godfather," an unlikely and spectacular success of a novel that left me drooling at the thought of a 2017 sequel, which drops today: Luna: Wolf Moon.
We've projected our political and spiritual longings on the Moon since antiquity, and it's been a talismanic home to science fiction's most ambitious dreams for generations. But no one writes like Ian McDonald, and no one's Moon is nearly so beautiful and terrible as Luna: New Moon.
Science fiction titan Ian McDonald's forthcoming novel Luna: New Moon is the subject of the latest installment of the always-great Coode Street podcast (MP3).
Ian McDonald's Everness young adult books are everything you want in YA: adventure, romance, wild ideas and tense victories that make you pump your fist at the sky. In Empress of the Sun, McDonald takes the series up about four notches and show's the sky's the limit. Cory Doctorow raves about Empress of the Sun.
One year ago today
Rep. Peter King calls for prosecution of journalists covering NSA whistleblower story: Reporters who publish stories that reference leaked classified information should be prosecuted by the state. That same day, King appeared on Fox News to demand that the state prosecute Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Edward Snowden story. — Read the rest
One year ago today
In case you missed: Bradley Manning has a voice: The Freedom of the Press Foundation this week released surreptitiously recorded audio leaked from the Bradley Manning military pre-court martial hearing at Fort Meade.
Five years ago today
DIY funerals:
A movement toward home after-death care has convinced thousands of Americans to deal with their own dead. — Read the rest
One year ago today
Susan Crawford should run the FCC!: She has just published an OpEd in the New York Times which could easily be titled 'If I were Chairwoman of the FCC' and she published a book called Captive Audience which details the way various incumbent broadband related companies have gamed the political process and behaved unfairly in protecting their turf. — Read the rest
For ten years, I've been singing the praises of Out on Blue Six, Ian McDonald's 1989 science fiction novel that defies description and beggars the imagination. It's been out of print for decades, but it's back in ebook form, and I was honored to be asked by McDonald to write the introduction for the new edition. — Read the rest
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. — Read the rest
Jason from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography sez, "I just got done with a new text-based interview, in fact, with British science-fiction author Ian McDonald, in which we talk in depth about his new novel 'The Dervish House' which Cory raved about last week, including a detailed look at the kind of research McDonald does in order to write books like these." — Read the rest
I've just finished Ian McDonald's new novel, The Dervish House. 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. — Read the rest
Ian McDonald's Desolation Road is one of my most personally influential novels. It's an epic tale of the terraforming of Mars, whose sweep captures the birth and death of mythologies, economics, art, revolution, politics. Its publication preceded Kim Stanley Robinson's brilliant Red/Blue/Green Mars books by years, but the two are very good companions, in that McDonald captures almost everything Robinson got (in a third of the number of pages), and adds the poetry and spirituality of Mars in the bargain. — Read the rest
Ian McDonald is one of science fiction's finest working writers, and his latest short story collection Cyberabad Days, is the kind of book that showcases exactly what science fiction is for.
Cyberabad Days returns to McDonald's India of 2047, a balkanized state that we toured in his 2006 novel River of Gods, which was nominated for the best novel Hugo Award. — Read the rest
Ian McDonald's Brasyl is his finest novel to date, and that's really, really saying something. There are McDonald novels — Hearts, Hands and Voices, Desolation Road, Out on Blue Six that I must have read dozens of times, as you might watch Gene Kelly dance over and over, seeing it but never quite understanding how he does it. — Read the rest
Ian McDonald's incredible, Hugo-nominated bollypunk novel, "River of Gods," has been published in the US by Pyr Books. Here's what I had to say about the UK edition:
River is the story of India's 100th birthday, when the great nation has fractured into warring subnations on caste, religious and cultural lines.
— Read the rest
I just finished reading Ian McDonald's latest novel, River of Gods," and my mind is whirling. River is the story of India's 100th birthday, when the great nation has fractured into warring subnations on caste, religious and cultural lines. Like McDonald's other great novels, the story is beyond epic, with an enormous cast of richly realised characters and a vivid, luminous vision of techno-Hinduism that beggars the imagination. — Read the rest
Just a quick plug for The Broken Land (originally published in the UK with the much better title Hearts, Hands and Voices), by Ian McDonald. McDonald is one of the great underappreciated science fiction writers of the twentieth century and this is one of his great, underappreciated novels. — Read the rest
Thinking about Ian McDonald for the post on logomarks below got me thinking about McDonald's stone-brilliant 1992 graphic novel, Kling Klang Klatch, illustrated by David Lyttleton. Unlike much of McDonald's most amazing work, Kling Klang Klatch is still in print, which makes me feel like there's maybe just a little justice in this universe. — Read the rest
Ian McDonald's Desolation Road is one of the books that has influenced me the most as a writer. Funny and sad and wildly imaginative, it characterizes the heyday of Bantam Spectra's groundbreaking work in the 80s. McDonald's just published a sequel, Ares Express and Earthlight, the sequel's publisher, has reprinted Desolation Road to accompany it. — Read the rest
