[Brian Stableford is known as a productive British science fiction writer and critic. While he was here in Sweden as Guest of Honour at ConFuse 91, we asked him if he would write an introduction to next year's Guest of Honour, and he was happy to do this. We figured this might be fitting, both since it would lend some continuity to the con, and also since Brian was the one who originally suggested Ian McDonald as Guest of Honour.] "Whenever I'm asked the name of the best science fiction writer in Britain," a well-known British science fiction writer said to me at the recent launch-party for the newest incarnation of New Worlds, "I have to say that it's Ian McDonald." "Well," I said, gallantly, "your natural modesty obviously wouldn't allow you to name yourself." "Modesty has nothing to do with it," he replied, mournfully. "It's my honesty that makes me do it." I know exactly how he felt. Having been a prolific book reviewer for many years I can approach almost any text with every confidence that it will have something in it that will fail to impress me, and that no matter how good it may be there is bound to be something which I can damn with faint praise. There are, however, some books whose virtues are so overwhelming that they utterly obliterate my natural critical parsimony, and leave me with nothing else to do but grope for superlatives. Desolation Road had that effect on me, and so did King of Morning, Queen of Day. As soon as I became fully involved in each text I knew that I was quite helpless, and that all I could do was to relax and allow myself to be carried along, numb with admiration, until the story reached its conclusion and politely put me down again. When I recently undertook to edit two anthologies for a small press called Dedalus, which would juxtapose nineteenth century fantasies with modern stories on the same themes, Ian McDonald was at the top of my list of writers from whom I wanted stories. Despite the miserably inadequate word-rates that I was able to pay he responded heroically to my requests. "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria", which he wrote for Tales of the Wandering Jew, is a masterpiece, in which the eponymous legendary figure (here represented by a St John modelled on the Pied Piper) becomes the fateful thread entwining Freudian theories of the mind with the psychology of Hitler's Holocaust. "Brodie Loved the Masai Woman", which he wrote for The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales, is as different as it could possibly be, presenting an anecdotal account of life and death in colonial Africa whose allegorical overtones are delicately understated. I am proud to have played a part in the generation of two such fine stories. *** Desolation Road deservedly topped the Locus poll as best first novel of 1988, and I doubt that anyone in the field has ever produced a more spectacular first novel. It is an imaginative tour de force which deftly brings together the two sf traditions which deal with the colonization of Mars: the Romantic tradition which extends through the lyrical and elegiac fantasies of Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury; and the Realist tradition of Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein. The novel achieves this combination not by bringing the two ideals into a stark confrontation in which the former must give way to the latter, as do Ludek Pesek's The Earth is Near and Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars", but rather by bringing about a glorious synthesis, in which the awesome wonder of a quasi-transcendent process of terraformation provides a lush and lavish background to a more cynical tale of psychological survival and destructive warfare. Desolation Road is a book full to the brim with tall tales and vivid vignettes, which accumulate into a fabulous compendium of images, big enough to contain all the boundless but fragile dreams which entwine to form both the mythology and the actuality of a world in emergence. It is in many ways a young man's book -- there is no horizon to its ambition, no rein upon its exuberance -- but it is executed with an efflorescent maturity of style which many writers never achieve. *** Desolation Road was issued onlv a month before Ian McDonald's first collection of stories, Empire Dreams, which assembled almost all of the short fiction which he had as yet produced in the space of his brief career, from the early "The Island of the Dead" -- which appeared in the short-lived magazine Extro in 1982 -- to the previously-unpublished "Unfinished Portrait of the King of Pain by Van Gogh". The stories which had already seen print -- mostly in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine -- had already won him a nomination for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. They exhibit the same combination of effects as Desolation Road: vivid imagery conveyed in assertive and sparkling prose, deployed so as to pack a powerful emotional punch. Although they occasionally attain heart-warmingly happy endings (as in Empire Dreams itself) the stories in the collection cast a cold and courageous eye upon the inequities and iniquities of everyday existence. They are highly sensitive to the pain of human suffering, and can, like "Unfinished Portrait...", become positively harrowing. For this reason they are sometimes found disturbing by readers who like their fiction smoothly cushioned, but they are certainly to be treasured by all those readers who think that the highest purpose of art is to give us clearer sight rather than to lull us into a false sense of tranquillity. *** One of the stories in Empire Dreams is the beautifully ironic King of Morning, Queen of Day, which compares and contrasts the experiences of a romantically-inclined teenage girl and her scientist father in the spring of 1909. While the former discovers the Land of Faerie in close proximity to their home, and boldly sets out to photograph the faeries, the latter deduces that an apparent comet is actually an alien spaceship, and boldly sets out to communicate with the visitors bv means of powerful flashing lights. A neat climactic twist overturns the expectations of rationally-minded science fiction readers, whose reflexive sympathies automatically enlist them to the cause of the astronomer. But McDonald's own scrupulous sciencefictional conscience could not let the matter rest there, and the logical consequences of the surprise move are taken up very carefully as a premise for investigation in a longer version of the story and two "sequels" which form the novel ofthe same title, which provides an excellent example of the way in which the sciencefictional method of extrapolation, when applied to the substance of fantasy, can make considerable adventurous headway into literaryv terra incognita. The central theme of King of Morning, Queen of Dav is the way in which our nascent myths and our perception of the mythologies of the past are altered and renewed. This permits some spectacularly melodramatic plot-twisting -- especially in the final section when the up-to-the-minute mythologies of teenage mutant ninja heroes, Space Invaders and slasher movies mingle and cross swords (literally) with Nimrod the Hunter and other elements ol traditional British mythology -- and also allows an extraordinarily intimate interweaving of the fantastic materials of the plot with the texture of everyday life. McDonald seizes these opportunities with avidity and panache, and makes such pyrotechnic use of them that this book will surely establish him in the very highest rank of modern fantasy writers. *** In between Desolation Road and King of Morning, Queen of Day McDonald produced the less successful Out on Blue Six, whose plot tells the phantasmagoric story of an attempted escape from the ambiguously benevolent and rather stifling rule of the futuristic "Compassionate Society". Like Desolation Road it includes some beautifully bizarre images, but the image-packed language sometimes seems to be working too hard and the future society framework which is supposed to contain and constrain the elements of its plot is not quite up to the job. One of the problems which results from having written an extraordinarily brilliant first novel is that it may set an impossible standard to meet, and Out on Blue Six would probably have seemed much more impressive had it not followed in the wake of its predecessor. The struggle which the author seems to have had in trying to make it work was, however, by no means wasted, and he was able to carry forward the lessons which he learned. The true beauty of King of Morning, Queen of Day is that the framework of the plot not only licences but requires an elaborate array of stylized scenes and descriptions, in which the minutely naturalistic rubs shoulders with the flagrantly exotic. McDonald has such a love of words and their rhythms, coupled with such careful control of the logic of extrapolation, that he is able to work wonders in meeting this requirement: in his future work he will undoubtedly be able to carry forward this quest to write books whose like no one has ever written before. *** Ian McDonald has so far been more successful in the USA than in Britain, although Desolation Road was a runner-up for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. All the novels mentioned above were first published by Bantam, and all were issued as original paperbacks -- although Desolation Road was eventually issued in the UK in a handsome hardcover edition by the Drunken Dragon Press. His next few works, however, will be issued by Gollancz in the UK. His new novel, Hearts, Hands and Voices, is unpublished as I write but will be available by the time ConFuse takes place. The story is set in a future which, like the Mars of Desolation Road, has been transformed in an almost magical fashion by sophisticated biotechnologies. This will be followed in September by the short story collection Speaking in Tongues -- which will, I hope, include among others the two stories which he wrote for my anthologies. Also scheduled for Autumn 1992 publication is a graphic novel written in collaboration with the illustrator David Lyttleton, Kling Klang Klatch, which the author describes as "a whodunnit set in Toyland". It will be most interesting to see what this excursion into a new medium achieves. *** In person, Ian McDonald is softly-spoken and perhaps a little shy. I was once seated next to him in a seminar organized by British Telecom, in which various sf writers were invited to throw ideas at BT's research staff, and I recall the difficulty which he had in trying to intervene in the more heated parts of the debate, he simply could not shout as loudly as some of us, and was far too polite to try. I thought at the time that this was a great pity, because I'm sure that he would probably have had more interesting things to say than some of those who had less difficulty in demanding a hearing. In Sweden, where everyone is far more polite than people usually are in Britain, he will have ample space to set out his stall and say what he has to say, and I know from my own experience that he will have an audience capable of appreciating him. I am sure that his visit will be a memorable occasion for all concerned.