Interview with Ian McDonald

Q: You're seen as one of the major players in the new European onslaught on speculative fiction, despite being a published author for almost two decades. What do you see as the reason behind the recent domination of the fields of science fiction and fantasy by authors from the U.K.?

The UK realised some time ago that tomorrow doesn't belong to it. That's a great challenge to any SF writer --that his or her cultural POV may not be the prevailing one. I think it helped spawn the great Brit space-opera boom --if the future isn't going to look like us, then it's not going to look like anyone --but it might look like everyone. For me, it was looking outside the West --to Africa for my take on First Contact, to India for Khyberpunk, to Brazil for Dickian reality-bending. In a sense it's taking the tropes of SF and asking, what can a non-Western culture do with them? There are a lot of great writers over here --a lot of us (alas) are the same age and emerged in the Thatcher era, when, for a moment, SF and Fantasy felt slightly subversive. Charlie Stross is the wunderkind of the past five years, but he's been writing since God was a boy: the Eighties Interzones at least.

Q: I've read that you've changed your U.K. publisher. Care to shed any light on who the new publisher might be? Will we still get a cover as pretty as that for RIVER OF GODS for BRASYL?

I've returned to Gollancz. (So there's a chance the endlessly-delayed but plotted-out conclusion to the Chaga trilogy may eventually happen).

Q: Speaking of BRASYL, what's the progress report on your new novel?

Done, dusted, copyedited. have a look here and here.

Great cover by the mighty Stephan Martiniere. Due out in May. It's definitely not RoG2: that was one thing I wanted above all to avoid, but I think you'll find it as rich, deep, dazzling and strange. India is in yer face. The culture slaps you the moment you step out of the airport (in fact, as the plane was touching down). Brazil creeps up on you, shakes its ass, gets you to buy it a drink and the next morning you wake up with your passport gone, your wallet lifted and one kidney replaces with a row of sutures. Peter Robb's magisterial 'A Death in Brazil' carries the line 'Brazil is one of the world's greatest and strangest countries', and it's only a year after being there that the full understanding of that arrives. It is like nowhere else --certainly not in South America, in the same way that India is like nowhere else. And it's history is more or less completely unknown in the rest of the West.

Q: PYR is earning loads of acclaim and new readers in the US. How do you feel about the eclectic and expansive output, other than RIVER OF GODS, of this new publisher? Do you have any favorites from their catalog?

David Louis Edelman's Infoquake. So fresh and good I shamelessly stole an idea from it: the whole premise of a future corporate thriller. I remember Lou Anders pitching this one at the Pyr panel at Worldcon in Glasgow and thinking, of course! It's so bloody obvious! That's a genius idea. It sent me back to an old novel by James Clavell called 'Noble House' about corporate intrigue in an old Anglo-Chinese trading company (it got made into a pretty dire TV miniseries), so that's in the mix at the back of my head. Buy Infoquake, read it (I think The Steg already has). Give him the Philip K Dick award.