Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England by an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis's childhood home but has since moved into central Belfast where he now lives, exploring intrests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles and comic collecting.

He debuted 1982 with the short story "The Island of the Dead" in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988.

In 2000, Ian joined a Belfast production company, Extreme Productions, as a Network Development Researcher. This basically means coming up with lots of ideas.

Ian has also written a few short stories set in the same environment as Desolation Road. Desolation Road topped the 1989 Locus poll for best first novel in 1988 and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 1990.

Desolation Road Stories

These stories are set on a future colonized Mars, somewhat reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's Mars. At Intersection (WorldCon 1995) Ian mentioned wanting to get an anthology of "Desolation Road" stories published and I really hope that such a project gets done. There's also a TV series in the works. (1997-05-09: Together with a joint Australian-Indian-British production company, Ian is currently developing Desolation Road as a TV series. He describes it as "Northern Exposure on Mars".)
  • 1988 Desolation Road (novel)
  • 1992 Big Chair nt
  • 1992 The Luncheonette of Lost Dreams nt
  • 1995 Steam nt
  • 1997 The Five O'Clock Whistle nt
  • 2001 Ares Express (novel)
    Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's highly-praised Desolation Road, Ares Express 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. Driven away from teh locomotive that has always been her home by the thought of a boring marriage and an all-consuming wanderlust, she consults her dead twin, Little Pretty One, about her future. But that future will take in religious cults, artificial intelligences that are as gods - and the gods themselves.
    Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Red Planets of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and wooly magic-realist SF novel, with many bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas and trains as big as city blocks.  
    Un extrait (le premier chapitre, en anglais) chez l'éditeur Simon & Schuster : http://www.simonsays.com/subs/excerpt.cfm?isbn=0671037544&areaid=286
    Un autre extrait plus long, toujours en anglais

Fiche : Desolation Road