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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : M : McDonald, Ian
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In his SF novel Ares Express, Ian McDonald brings magic realism to Mars as he did in Desolation Road (1988)--but now the wonders and marvels are harnessed to a driving story line. Indeed the feisty but cute heroine, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honeybun Asiim Engineer 12th, knows she's in a story that's hurtling like an express train to some apocalyptic climax ...This Mars has been terraformed by orbiting clouds of reality-bending machines called Angels. Its red deserts are criss-crossed with railway tracks carrying gigantic fusion-powered trains whose engines are the size of ocean liners. One such is Catherine of Tharsis, run and inhabited by generations of Sweetness's family. When they arrange an unwelcome marriage she escapes into adventure, pursued by her witchy Grandma.
Sweetness is someone rather special, as a green-skinned prophet tells her, and so is the ghost twin who talks to her from mirrors. A fake evangelist with a flying cathedral sees her as the key to real apocalypse. Then there's the quantum time traveller, the town blighted by a dream plague, the card-sharp whose stakes are years of life, the artists building giant domestic furniture in Martian deserts, the anarchist saboteurs humiliating wrongdoers with "massive practical jokes", and many more colourful inventions. McDonald's imagination is rich, lurid, often wildly comic.
As Armageddon impends, armies drop from orbit, and space weaponry slashes lilac paths across the sky, there's hand-to-hand aerial fighting with Sweetness in the thick of things, while down below Grandma and the big locomotive break all rules and records with a 300mph rescue dash. Breathless excitement, artfully concluded. Great fun. --David Langford
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Ian McDonald has been putting his own glittering, poetic spin on SF themes and styles since his 1988 magic-realist novel debut Desolation Road. His 1995 Chaga described the first repercussions of an alien biotechnology that spreads from a meteor-strike in Kenya, transforming Earthly ecosystems into something frightening and wonderful. Kirinya is the sequel, with Chaga's reporter heroine Gaby McAslan stranded with her now grown daughter in what ought to be an African utopia of freedom from want, indefinitely extended life, and magical new abilities ... but which is poisoned by the politics of fear. First World powers, terrified by these changes, want to seal off and forget the mutated southern hemisphere: the equator is a new Berlin Wall, murderously defended. Meanwhile benevolent alien processes continue in space, in the "Big Dumb Object" now balanced between Earth and Moon, and the ongoing transformation of Venus into something that cannot be predicted. Gaby is uniquely placed to follow the tortuous, bloody path through political compromise, complex African factionalism, aggressive US imperialism and a cluster of shocking new weapons and surprises--all eventually leading to the hope of a new, sane world order. It's finely written and uncompromisingly knotty, with no easy answers. Though there's room for another sequel, Kirinya ends satisfyingly. Recommended. --David Langford
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Ian McDonald has been putting his own glittering, poetic spin on SF themes and styles since his 1988 magic-realist novel debut Desolation Road. His 1995 Chaga described the first repercussions of an alien biotechnology that spreads from a meteor-strike in Kenya, transforming Earthly ecosystems into something frightening and wonderful. Kirinya is the sequel, with Chaga's reporter heroine Gaby McAslan stranded with her now grown daughter in what ought to be an African utopia of freedom from want, indefinitely extended life, and magical new abilities ... but which is poisoned by the politics of fear. First World powers, terrified by these changes, want to seal off and forget the mutated southern hemisphere: the equator is a new Berlin Wall, murderously defended. Meanwhile benevolent alien processes continue in space, in the "Big Dumb Object" now balanced between Earth and Moon, and the ongoing transformation of Venus into something that cannot be predicted. Gaby is uniquely placed to follow the tortuous, bloody path through political compromise, complex African factionalism, aggressive US imperialism and a cluster of shocking new weapons and surprises--all eventually leading to the hope of a new, sane world order. It's finely written and uncompromisingly knotty, with no easy answers. Though there's room for another sequel, Kirinya ends satisfyingly. Recommended. --David Langford