The Best of Ian McDonald

Cover art:  Jim Burns

Ian McDonald, the author of such landmark novels as Desolation Road, Chaga, River of Gods, and The Dervish House, has long been regarded as one of Britain’s finest SF writers. Just like those full-length works, his shorter fiction has commanded much admiration, and now, in this massive retrospective volume, the best McDonald tales are assembled in glittering array.

Represented here are all the phases of McDonald’s career: the poetic early retro-visions that in the late Eighties signalled the arrival of a marvellously fluent new stylistic voice; the virtuoso Nineties riffs on themes such as the Irish Troubles, nanotechnology, alternate history, and alien sexuality; the bold post-millennial ventures into the futuristic politics of Third World countries such as Kenya, India, and Brazil, as well as far afield to alien solar systems; and recent, dazzlingly conceived variations on the Arab Spring, the nature of superheroes, and Mars as pulp SF writers once fondly imagined it to be. The treasures are abundant, each presented in McDonald’s addictive, immersive prose—language at once elegantly timeless and edgily contemporary.

Unsigned hardcover

Limited to 100 signed and numbered hardcover copies with chapbook of additional stories, Floating Dogs, and housed in an illustrated slipcase

Lettered It is our understanding that PS Publishing sold 26 lifetime subscriptions, as a perk of that subscription the purchaser would receive a copy of the signed state of a particular book but instead of a number in the limitation line, it would contain a letter, each subscriber was assigned a letter, in all other aspects the book is identical to the "Limited" copy.