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Author: Ian McDonald | Website


Published Works & Book Reviews

Planesrunner

Multiple-award-winning author making his YA debut

There is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one of billions of parallel earths.

When Everett Singh's scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer. Suddenly, this fourteen-year-old has become the owner of the most valuable object in the multiverse—the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel earths, and there are dark forces in the Ten Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it. They've got power, authority, and the might of ten planets—some of them more technologically advanced than our Earth—at their fingertips. He's got wits, intelligence, and a knack for Indian cooking.

To keep the Infundibulum safe, Everett must trick his way through the Heisenberg Gate his dad helped build and go on the run in a parallel Earth. But to rescue his Dad from Charlotte Villiers and the sinister Order, this Planesrunner's going to need friends. Friends like Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, her adopted daughter Sen, and the crew of the airship Everness.

Can they rescue Everett's father and get the Infundibulum to safety? The game is afoot!

Reviewer: Tatiana
Review: Nov 1, 2011
Genre(s): YA / Teen, Science Fiction
"Planesrunner" is a first class teen science fiction novel, which I believe will appeal to the fans of such boy-oriented books as Paolo Bacigalupi's "Ship Breaker" and Scott Westerfeld's "Leviathan". Everett Singh's divorced father is a scientist whose area of expertise is the multiverse theory. According to his research, there are multiple parallel universes, running along each other and branching every ti

The Dervish House

It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shock waves from this random act of twenty-first-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, a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million, Turkey is the largest, most populous, and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It's a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and central Asia. 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.

Reviewer: Roza
Review: Jul 26, 2010
Genre(s): Sci-Fi / Fantasy
The Dervish House is just weird.  Many stories, with some interconnections and some who just float around the edges and never seem to matter to anyone else.  Not my style of writing at all.  Given that, it’s still a good book.  The characters are real, believable, pitiable, and sometimes awe-inspiring.  The dreams they follow are not my dreams, but in another world and another p

Ares Express

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colorful, witty SF novel; Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's 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. 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.

Reviewer: Roza
Review: May 28, 2010
Genre(s): Sci-Fi / Fantasy
Usually, when someone writes in a style far outside of what I am used to, and my tastes and vocabulary are wide and eclectic, I’m not terribly enamored of the book.  Of course, this is usually because this means it’s just poor writing.  Ares Express uses language so far outside of my comfort range I often had to stop and reread a sentence to understand what it meant – and I loved i

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