Back to the
Ian McDonald information page.
Interview of Ian McDonald by Pete Crowther. Originally published in Fear #25, January 1991, page 11. Reprinted with permission.
Pete Crowther takes a walk down the byways of the mind with Belfast's Ian McDonald.
Born in 1960, Ian McDonald first started writing when he was on the dole after getting chucked out of university where he was studying psychology. After an uncertain start, he began selling short stories to magazines and then moved on to books.
'I decided I should do a book because people starve to death writing short stories! A letter arrived from Bantam in New York saying: We've seen some of your short fiction, we think you're wonderful, have you any books in your bottom drawer you might be working on? So I took that as confirmation and launched into it. Though that's actually the second incarnation of Desolation Road. I did the first version which was about half as long again and quite different and then I had to re-write the whole thing.'
The very first incarnation of Desolation Road was his first sale to Asimov's, a tale called The Catherine Wheel, which eventually grew into Desolation Road - a book which is set on Mars, but doesn't actually state the fact until seven words from the end!
'I like to take fairly common science fiction clichés and then do bizarre things with them,' he says. 'I mean, Desolation Road in many ways is a series of science fiction clichés. Like the mad scientist invents the time travel machine and the prime law of time travel stories is you can't change history or terrible things will happen. So I said: Well, why not change history? And that becomes the reason for people wanting to get their hands on the time machine - because they can use it as the ultimate weapon to do as they like,
'Likewise, my version of the little green man from Mars is in a different form, and during the final battle when the parliamentarian forces close in ... those are just H. G. Wells' Martian fighting machines, changed sides. So the whole thing is basically a string of SF clichés which I've done perverse things with.'
The book attracted a crop of differing reviews and different interpretations/explanations of the story. Locus came out top of thte class according to McDonald: 'They said it was a cross between Marquez's Hundred Years Of Solitude and Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. That was the effect I was looking for. A combination of Bradbury and South American magical realism. Spot on!'
The first time that McDonald came across Bradbury was in the form of a Christmas present he received as the age of ten or 12: Farenheit 451. However, the first time he read The Martian Chronicles he didn't like it. 'It left an odd taste in the mouth and then I had to read it again and found that I actually liked it. I thought it was tremendous.
'The books which have the most influence on me are the ones which sort of leave that oss sende of dissatisfaction after reading them the first time. I think: There's something more in there I didn't get. And so I'll go back and read it again and the whole thing comes together. And I think: Yes, that's extremely good, damn him!
'I actually read very little science fiction these days. Either because (1) it's extremely bad or (2) it's extremely good and I get extremly jealous. At the moment I'm reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet which is pretty damn good. I used to be very keen on Ursula LeGuin but she went a bit soft in the past few years. Gene Wolfe can still do it - the standard of writing is just astounding. In the non-science fiction field, the South American writers are a lot of fun as well. And people who basically play around with what you can and can't do, like Günther Grass, the master of bad taste.
'I'm not terribly into gore and monsters and things like that. I like intellectual horror. Actually for me, the most horrifying thing recently in the past few months was to imagine yourself on Pan-Am flight 103 and what you do in those two and a half minutes it takes you to fall from 37,000 feet. That gives you a good intellectual shudder. There's actually a bit in James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man where some priest is describing Hell. It's fabulous, it really is. The lyrics to: "Oh God, what if it's true," you know.'
Truth, spirituality, and religious values are recurrent themes in McDonald's work, but his treatment of them is not heavy handed. The decision not to go too deeply into the characters in Desolation Road was taken for good reasons. 'It would have been at least three times the length and I thing I gave enough to carry the plot forward. The whole thing about the book is that the people were the motors of the plot and therefore, only that which was necessary to carry the plot forward was essential to the book.'
Following up on the success of Desolation Road could have been a problem, the spectre of 'the sequel' looking.
But Out On Blue Six was a very different book. 'The way I visualize Desolation Road is that it's wide open, full of light. Blue Six is claustrophobis, compact, dark and it rains most of the time. I don't want to fall in the trap of sequelitis. I like everything to be different.'
However, underneath such matters as style and treatment, there might be a thematic unity which could be explored. 'Somewhere in the extremely distant and vague future, I have sort of on the edge of my imagination an extremely large book which would fill in the entire history from the end of The Catherine Wheel to about five minutes before Desolation Road begins,' he says. 'It would cover about 1,200 years and probably about 1,000 pages or so.'
But for the present he's working on a fantasy book. 'It's a development of King of Morning, Queen of Day from Empire Dreams. That story - expanded - forms the first part. It takes place in Ireland. Actually, an awful lot of American writers write fantasy books about Ireland and as a resident of the country reading them, it just sort of fills me with fury you know, so I want to do a proper fantasy book about Ireland.
'Fairies play a prominent role in the first part, but they're actually sort of psychological manifestations in a way. In some ways it's something like Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood.
'It takes place in 1913, 1934 and the present day. It's in three sections. I mean, Dublin has the worst heroin problem in Europe but you don't get the Anne McDaffreys and the R. A. MacAvoys telling you that.'
This fascinating book is yet to be titled, but interested readers should stay tuned to this magazine for publication details...
Back to the
Ian McDonald information page.
This
page is maintained by Hans Persson. Mail me
(unicorn@lysator.liu.se)
if you have comments or additions.
This
page last updated