Most Popular Books by Ian McDonald

The scions of a falling house navigate a world of corporate warfare to maintain their family''s status on the Moon in this thrilling space opera. 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. Perfect for fans of Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken Macleod alike. Praise for Luna: New Moon "McDonald''s never written a bad novel, but [ Luna: New Moon] is a great one." —Cory Doctorow "With an action narrative driving this political commentary, Luna is actually a fantastically fun read as well as an important one. "— Los Angeles Review of Books "McDonald creates a complex and fascinating civilization featuring believable technology, and the characters are fully developed, with individually gripping stories." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

World-hopping, high-action adventure starring a smart boy with computer skills and a tough girl who pilots a blimp The airship Everness makes a Heisenberg Jump to an alternate Earth unlike any her crew has ever seen. Everett, Sen, and the crew find themselves above a plain that goes on forever in every direction without any horizon. There they find an Alderson Disc, an astronomical megastructure of incredibly strong material reaching from the orbit of Mercury to the orbit of Jupiter. Then they meet the Jiju, the dominant species on a plane where the dinosaurs didn''t die out. They evolved, diversified, and have a twenty-five million year technology head-start on humanity. War between their kingdoms is inevitable, total and terrible. Everness has jumped right into the midst of a faction fight between rival nations, the Fabreen and Dityu empires. The airship is attacked, but then defended by the forces of the Fabreen, who offers theEverness crew protection. But what is the true motive behind Empress Aswiu''s aid? What is her price? The crew of the Everness is divided in a very alien world, a world fast approaching the point of apocalypse. From the Hardcover edition.

Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald''s Desolation Road, this novel is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet''s circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future - or futures - of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas and trains as big as city blocks. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Think Bladerunner in the tropics... 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. Three separate stories follow three main characters: Edson is a self-made talent impresario one step up from the slums in a near future São Paulo of astonishing riches and poverty. A chance encounter draws Edson into the dangerous world of illegal quantum computing, but where can you run in a total surveillance society where every move, face, and centavo is constantly tracked? Marcelina is an ambitious Rio TV producer looking for that big reality TV hit to make her name. When her hot idea leads her on the track of a disgraced World Cup soccer goalkeeper, she becomes enmeshed in an ancient conspiracy that threatens not just her life, but her very soul. Father Luis is a Jesuit missionary sent into the maelstrom of 18th-century Brazil to locate and punish a rogue priest who has strayed beyond the articles of his faith and set up a vast empire in the hinterland. In the company of a French geographer and spy, what he finds in the backwaters of the Amazon tries both his faith and the nature of reality itself to the breaking point. Three characters, three stories, three Brazils, all linked together across time, space, and reality in a hugely ambitious story that will challenge the way you think about everything.

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business — a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj — the waif, the mind-reader, the prophet — when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden. In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation. River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures — one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.

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. REVIEWS "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... Desolation Road pays homage to David Byrne''s Catherine Wheel, to Ray Bradbury''s entire canon and to Jack Vance, blending all these disparate creators in a way that surprises, delights, then surprises and delights again." – Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) "McDonald''s first novel, it absolutely bowled me over when it came out, and while I have read everything he''s published since, and admire all of it and like most of it, this remains my favourite... some of the most beautiful prose imaginable... If you ever want to demonstrate how different science fiction can be, what an incredible range and sweep of things are published with a little spaceship on the spine, Desolation Road is a shining datapoint, because it isn''t like anything else and yet it is coming from a knowledge of what the genre can do and can be and making something new out of it." – Jo Walton (Tor.com) "This is the kind of novel I long to find yet seldom do. Desolation Road is a rara avis... Extraordinary and more than that!" – Philip José Farmer

It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st 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. This is the age of carbon consciousness: every individual in the EU has a card stipulating individual carbon allowance that must be produced at every CO2 generating transaction. For those who can master the game, who can make the trades between gas price and carbon trading permits, who can play the power factions against each other, there are fortunes to be made. The old Byzantine politics are back. They never went away. The ancient power struggled between Sunni and Shia threatens like a storm: Ankara has watched the Middle East emerge from twenty-five years of sectarian conflict. So far it has stayed aloof. A populist Prime Minister has called a referendum on EU membership. Tensions run high. The army watches, hand on holster. And a Galatasary Champions’ League football game against Arsenal stokes passions even higher. 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. From the Hardcover edition.

When fourteen-year-old Everett Singh''s scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves a mysterious app on Everett''s computer giving him access to the Infundibulum--a map of parallel earths--which is being sought by technologically advanced dark powers that Everett must somehow elude while he tries to rescue his father.

A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR SCIENCE FICTION 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. Luna 1. Luna: New Moon 2. Luna: Wolf Moon 3. Luna: Moon Rising

"[A] multigenerational novella of two time-crossed lovers . . . Fans of science fiction who enjoy a dash of history and legend will savor this tender story." — Publishers Weekly 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. "With echoes of H. G. Wells''s The Time Machine . . . Time Was weaves an exquisite spell of love, war and quantum physics that is timeless in its appeal." —Nina Allan, award-winning author of The Silver Wind "McDonald''s gift for storytelling is on full display as he captures the emotional nuances of a decades-long love while exploring issues of military and scientific might and the state of the contemporary book industry." — Booklist

In The Menace from Farside, Ian McDonald returns to his elegantly wound solar system of the twenty-second century, full of political intrigue and complicated families. Remember: Lady Luna knows a thousand ways to kill you, but family is what you know. Family is what works. Cariad Corcoran has a new sister who is everything she is not: tall, beautiful, confident. They''re unlikely allies and even unlikelier sisters, but they''re determined to find the moon''s first footprint, even if the lunar frontier is doing its best to kill them before they get there. Praise for Ian McDonald''s Luna series "McDonald''s never written a bad novel, but Luna: New Moon is a great one."—Cory Doctorow "With an action narrative driving this political commentary, Luna is actually a fantastically fun read as well as an important one. "— Los Angeles Review of Books At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"A spell-binding tale of intrigue and empathy." — SF Site "A powerful and effective story." —Jo Walton 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...

"For all the enjoyable intrigue he concocts, McDonald never lets us forget that the Moon is a frontier that basically just wants to kill us." ― Chicago Tribune 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 off 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. Luna: Wolf Moon continues Ian McDonald''s saga of the Five Dragons. "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." ― Boing Boing

Everett Singh has escaped with the Infundibulum from Charlotte Villiers but at a terrible price. His father is lost, banished to one of the billions of parallel universes of the Panoply of All World, and Everett and the crew of the airship Everness have taken a wild Heisenberg Jump to a frozen earth far beyond the Plenitude of Known Worlds, he plans to rescue his family. It''s deadly chase from the frozen wastes of iceball earth; to Earth 4 (like ours, except that the alien Thryn Sentiency occupied the moon in 1964); to the dead London of the forbidden plane of Earth 1, where the remnants of humanity battle a terrifying nanotechnology run wild. Everett has the love and support of Sen, Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, and the rest of the crew of Everness, but will that be enough when your deadliest enemy isn''t the Order or the world-devouring nanotech Nahn—it''s yourself. Because the villainous Charlotte Villiers is always one step ahead. Praise for Be My Enemy "Absolutely triumphant sequel... tremendous action scenes, cunning escapes, genius attacks on the ways that multidimensional travel might be weaponized, horrific glimpses of shadowy powers and sinister technologies... a gifted ear for poesie that makes the English language sing, the unapologetic presumption of the reader''s ability to understand what''s going on without a lot of hand-holding, and a technological mysticism that never explicitly says when the literal stops and the fantasy starts..." — Boing Boing "Smart, clever and abundantly original, with suspense that grabs your eyeballs, this is real science fiction for all ages. More! More!" — Kirkus "WA blast from start to finish. As far as I''m concerned, Ian McDonald could write another dozen or so of these Everness novels, and I''d happily read them all." — SF Signal

Winner of the Philip K Dick Award "Filled with wondrous language, marvelous events." — Science Fiction Chronicle 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. "McDonald''s power as a storyteller lies in his stylistic versatility and intensity of language as well as in his capacity to create vivid and memorable characters. Highly recommended." — Library Journal "A brilliant book." —Charles de Lint

Auf dem Mond ist der Mensch die tödlichste aller Gefahren Achtzehn Monate sind seit dem Tod Adriana Cortas vergangen. Die Corta Helio Corporation ist zerschlagen und die mächtigste Familie des Mondes ruiniert. Die vier verbliebenen Drachen, wie die einflussreichen Clans auf dem Mond genannt werden, wittern ihre Chance und liefern sich einen erbitterten Kampf um die Vormachtstellung in der High Society des Mondes – es ist ein Machtspiel voller Verführung, Lügen und Intrigen. Ein Spiel, das die Menschen auf dem Mond schon bald an den Rand eines Krieges bringen wird ...

A time-traveling, futuristic saga of a family trying to outlast and remake a universe with a power unlike any we''ve seen before. When Raisa Hopeland, determined to win her race to become the next electromancer of London, bumps into Amon Brightbourne—tweed-suited, otherworldly, guided by the Grace—in the middle of a London riot, she sets in motion a series of events which will span decades, continents and a series of events which will change the world. From rioting London to geothermal Iceland to the climate-struck islands of Polynesia, from birth to life to death, from tranquillity to terror to joy, Raisa’s journey will encompass the world. But one thing will always be true. Hopeland is family—and family is dangerous. Also by Ian McDonald The Luna Series Luna: New Moon Luna: Wolf Moon Luna: Moon Rising At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This collection of seven stories and a thirty-one thousand word original novella revisits the vivid world of near future India that McDonald so successfully depicted in River of Gods (a BSFA Award winner). Readers will discover a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. This future India has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. Includes one Hugo Award nominee and one Hugo Award winner. From the Trade Paperback edition.

"At once disturbing and beautiful . . . superbly realized." — The Times (London) 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? "Ian McDonald takes on all the atrocity and strife of the 20th Century, radically displaces it, and dares to envision a means of change. It''s a brilliant achievement." — Locus "McDonald is a superior writer." — Booklist