Ian McDonald - Developing worlds

If you’re not aware of Ian McDonald’s post cyber punk forays in the troubled global economies of the near future you need to be. His novels, River Of Gods and Brasyl are dazzling adventures located outside of the Euro-US cultural axis. A book of short stories, Cyberabad Days has just hit the racks and takes us way beyond Slumdog Millionaire while another novel, the Turkish based Dervish House, is ready to roll.

“What interests me are the edges of things, things that might develop.” muses Ian McDonald over the phone from Northern Ireland. He’s fresh from reflecting on a strange medieval Islamic tale of the Mellified Man which deals with a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a cadaver in honey.

“My latest venture, Dervish House is about the nanotechnology we’re likely to get, not the kind that eats the world.” he continues. “In five years time Turkey joins the European Union, it’s a country on the edge of Asia and Europe and the cradle of Sufism. It has a diverse Muslim culture, an aggressive secular government and it’s the place that makes 85% of our TVs. Good stuff to write about.”

As a writer he cruises the scientific limits while tapping into an age of uncertainty. It’s an approach that has earned him the prestigious Philip K Dick Award and a brace of nominations for others. He maintains his job is to push the here and now into different directions, to reach out beyond the old certainties to “a world that is a bit bigger, a bit browner and a bit more messy”.

It’s that world we discover in Cyberabad Days. Set during the 2040s in India, following the War Of Schism, this vibrant, collection of seven short stories takes up “dangling threads” from other works, like Vishnu At The Cat Circus.

He is still amazed that nobody else had the vision to write a book based in the “near-future future” in a rapidly developing country like India before his own River Of Gods. It’s a novel that explores ethical business, eco-crisis, the allure of surgical androgyny and has a Krishna cop - think Bollywood’s Amitabh Bachan - blowing away rogue artificial intelligencies. According to Ian it would look “brilliant on the big screen”.

His next venture, Brasyl, extended the vision. It’s a hip, dazzling, hi-speed collision of realities with a Rio Baile Funk soundtrack.

“I’m a method writer, I immerse myself in what I’m writing, and when I came out of writing Brasyl I kind of came out thinking Brazilian and with a large music collection.” says McDonald. “How could you not love a country which has plastic surgery for dogs and its own martial art (capoeira) where they don’t hit each other. It’s hard to explain but even if I wasn’t exploring the future, Brazil would still have the feel of many worlds.”

In Brasyl parallel universes blend and collide. Dr Robert Falcon, a 16th century rationalist, rubs shoulders with hustling “favelados” and “quantumeiros” who roam the highways in armoured vehicles avoiding the watchful eyes of the Angels Of Surveillance.

Fiction and reality blur amid an air of meticulous research which McDonald maintains is “the yeast in the bread.” He writes with a Google window open, rates Spam as a major source of character names and declares Wikipedia, as “fabulously unreliable.”

In River of Gods, Brasyl and Cyberabad Days everything seems possible, they deliver the technology you want and a reality that’s always different from what is planned.

Paul Bradshaw / Straight No Chaser

Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald is published in March 09 via Orion.
www.orionbooks.co.uk

Comments