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Building Bridges between Cultures in Ian McDonald's Science Fiction

Building Bridges between Cultures in Ian McDonald's Science Fiction cover

Building Bridges between Cultures in Ian McDonald's Science Fiction

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Pre-order. Available 27 Nov 2025
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Description

This book is a career-long retrospective of the Irish writer Ian McDonald and his complex, compelling representation of our contemporary global condition.

Ian McDonald is a celebrated writer within the science-fiction community whose rich and urgent body of works, span over a quarter of a century. The author claims McDonald's work functions as vital, troubling allegories, which both refuse the Orientalist euphemizing of colonial atrocities, while still at the same time envisioning a transformative global alterity, seeking an ethical and political embrace of systematically silenced subaltern voices in the neoliberal world-system. The book follows McDonald as the globe-trotting writer travels from Ireland to Kenya, to India, to Brazil, to Turkey, to a proliferating multiverse and beyond. Along the way, the author analyzes McDonald's science fiction as a salient contribution to the flourishing cosmopolitan literature of postcolonial developing nations at the crossroads of the global imaginary.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. A Magic-SF Mission to Mars: The Inception of the Global Imaginary in “The Catherine Wheel (Our Lady of Tharsis)”, Desolation Road, and Ares Express

2. The Mygmus, Alien-Loving Frooks, and the Warriors of Destiny: Competing Globalisms and Sectarian Cosmopolitics in McDonald's Irish Trilogy

3. “Post-humanity's Playground”: The Chaga Saga, Afrofuturist Magic Realism, and Global Science Fiction

4. Rogue Aeais, Krishna Cops, and the Global Subaltern in River of Gods and Cyberabad Days

5. The Quantum Multiverse Meets the Global Marketplace: Brasyl and the Everness Series

6. “Istanbul, Queen of Cities”: Neoliberal Capitalism and Postcolonial Nationalism in Ian McDonald's The Dervish House

7. The Dark Grinning Skull of Margaret Thatcher”: The Reimagining of Radical Anarcho-Capitalist Ideology in McDonald's Luna Trilogy

8. Hopeland: Constellations of Critically Utopian Romance in the Global Anthropocene

Selected Ian McDonald Bibliography

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 27 Nov 2025
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 248
ISBN 9781666956801
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 229 x 152 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Jerome Winter

Jerome Winter is a full-time lecturer at the Unive…

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