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384 pp
ISBN: 978-1-59102-744-7
Trade Paperback (6" x 9")
$15.98
July 2009
Cover Illustration: © Stephan Martiniere
NOMINATED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD
It all began thirty years ago on Mars, with a greenperson. But by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every conceivable abnormality from Adam Black's Wonderful Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ‘Stravaganza (complete with its very own captive angel) to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar. Its inhabitants ranged from Dr. Alimantando, the town’s founder and resident genius, to the Babooshka, a barren grandmother who just wants her own child—grown in a fruit jar; from Rajendra Das, mechanical hobo who has a mystical way with machines to the Gallacelli brothers, identical triplets who fell in love with—and married—the same woman.
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Reviews:
Praise for IAN McDONALD
"...one of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era. Indeed, maybe the most interesting and accomplished." —Asimov's
"McDonald deserves to be going up against most of the world's top fiction writers, period." —Amazon's Bookstore Blog
Praise for Desolation Road
"Very, very clever... Desolation Road reads like no other SF novel you've ever seen—more like a densely poetic folktale than the usual robots-n-lasers stuff, albeit with lots of actual robots and lasers and stuff, a bewitching combination of scientific conceits and third-world superstition... As with all of the books by McDonald I've now read, it comes highly recommended."
—Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
"McDonald's style is a little flowery at first, but after a while it gives the story the feel of an oral legend being repeated to newcomers... This feeling of oral tradition really suits such a sweeping story and it gives the story a deeper feel of credibility that I really enjoyed."
—Synergy Magazine (Australia)
"Ian McDonald's Desolation Road is one of my most personally influential novels. It's an epic tale of the terraforming of Mars, whose sweep captures the birth and death of mythologies, economics, art, revolution, politics... Desolation Road pays homage to David Byrne's Catherine Wheel, to Ray Bradbury's entire canon and to Jack Vance, blending all these disparate creators in a way that surprises, delights, then surprises and delights again.... Pyr Books has done us all the service of bringing this remarkable volume back into print after too long a hiatus (the equally delightful sequel, Ares Express, is out of print and pricey). They sent me a copy that I picked up from the post-box an hour ago, and I've been flipping through it ever since, getting reacquainted with this old and dear friend."
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net
“Ian McDonald's Desolation Road is one of the books that has influenced me the most as a writer. Funny and sad and wildly imaginative... What a book!” —Cory Doctorow
"This is the kind of novel I long to find yet seldom do. Desolation Road is a rara avis... Extraordinary and more than that!" —Philip José Farmer
“Flavoured with a voice that blends the delightful prose of Jack Vance with the idiosyncratic stylings of Cordwainer Smith, this novel is, most of all, about the dusty town of Desolation Road in the middle of the red Martian desert. Episodic in scope, it would also work as short stories. An elderly couple get lost in the infinite space of their garden, a baby growing in a jar is stolen and replaced with a mango, a man called The Hand plays electric guitar for the clouds and starts the first rain for one hundred and fifty thousand years.” —SFSite.com
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