Ian McDonald Books in Order

On Mars, the settlement of Desolation Road grows around its eccentric founder and an extraordinary collection of inhabitants. Across thirty years, impossible inventions, strange births, traveling spectacles and conflicting ambitions shape the town's turbulent history.

McDonald collects early science fiction about an astrophysicist approaching a black hole, a strange encounter in Morocco, alien contact and a child fighting cancer through virtual reality. These stories place intimate human experiences beside cosmic and technological possibilities.

In a future society where unhappiness is a crime, cartoonist Courtney Hall attracts the Ministry of Pain's attention. Fleeing the Love Police, she discovers an underground world of rebels, artists and enhanced raccoons beneath the official utopia.

Three generations of Irish women inherit the power to bring the mystical Otherworld into ordinary reality. Emily, Jessica and Enye each confront dangerous forces and personal histories as their abilities blur the boundary between human life and faerie.

When religious conflict brings war to her peaceful village, a young girl who cannot speak becomes separated from her family. Mathembe Fileli sets out to find them through a transformed world where organic technology shapes daily life.

This graphic novel presents a glittering, nonhuman society whose desires and prejudices echo humanity's own. Dark humor and detailed artwork expose corruption and racism beneath the surface of an apparently fantastic world.

Eleven stories explore strange futures where technology reshapes the boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. Conflicts over class, survival, and identity connect these speculative worlds, from altered creatures carrying on humanity’s wars to encounters with unfamiliar forms of intelligence.

Nanotechnology allows the dead to return, but their resurrection debts confine them to segregated labor and neighborhoods. During Los Angeles's Night of the Dead celebration, events in Necroville draw living visitors toward questions that could reshape humanity's future.

Ethan Ring discovers images capable of controlling and killing those who see them. Exploited by political forces, he seeks redemption on a long pilgrimage while struggling to escape his past. This edition also contains The Tear.

Journalist Gaby McAslan investigates alien growth spreading from a meteor strike near Kilimanjaro. The Chaga destroys human materials and transforms living bodies, and a survivor of its changes reveals that the invading ecosystem has plans for humanity.

Alien Shian settlers join an already divided Northern Ireland in exchange for sharing their technology. When a Shian family is murdered, former prisoner and translator Andy Gillespie must find the killer before fear drives humans and aliens into conflict.

As alien Chaga vegetation remakes the tropics, former reporter Gaby McAslan struggles with motherhood and a diminished sense of purpose. Political and military upheavals pull her back into events that may have already changed the universe itself.

On a transformed Mars, fusion-powered trains connect settlements while artificial intelligence continually reshapes reality. The planet's future becomes bound to Sweetness Octave, a woman caught amid the strange forces that sustain and unsettle this world.

Tendeleo is nine when an alien presence begins spreading from Mount Kilimanjaro and transforming the surrounding land. Before she reaches adulthood, the Chaga reshapes her world and life, bringing a personal perspective to an immense planetary change.

In India in 2047, failed monsoons, artificial intelligence and profound social changes draw nine very different people together. Their intersecting lives in Bharat connect political conflict, personal betrayal and an otherworldly mystery to the country's future.

Three stories connect Brazil's past, present and future through shifting realities and dangerous conspiracies. A Sao Paulo entrepreneur encounters illegal quantum computing, while a Rio television producer investigating a disgraced footballer becomes entangled in a threat beyond her understanding.

Seven stories return to the future India of River of Gods, exploring artificial intelligence, water wars and genetically altered lives. Soldiers, would-be spouses, a former child-goddess and others navigate a society reshaped by technology and political division.

A bombing in Istanbul sets six lives on converging paths during a politically tense week in 2027. Around an old dervish house, personal ambitions, carbon markets, and rival power structures become entangled in an increasingly urgent struggle.

Adriana Corta has built a powerful helium-mining dynasty on the Moon, where rival family corporations control survival itself. Near the end of her life, her children must defend the business against outside enemies and their own competing ambitions.

After Corta Helio falls, its surviving children are scattered among rival lunar families. Lucas Corta disappears, but plans to restore the dynasty draw him toward Earth as shifting alliances and corporate rivalries push the Moon into war.

An artificial intelligence monitoring casino gambling in Reno exposes a magician's tricks and taunts him with its knowledge. The humiliated performer sets out to retaliate, turning professional pride into a contest with a machine that seems to know everything.

During World War II, lovers Tom and Ben vanish after a secret radar-concealment experiment goes wrong. Lost across different decades, they leave clues in poetry books and search for a way to bring their separated timelines together.

Lucas Corta rises from his family's defeat to seize control of the Moon through political calculation and force. As the industrial dynasties struggle for supremacy, his sister Ariel becomes the person capable of stopping his pursuit of absolute power.

Cariad Corcoran gains a new sister whose confidence and appearance seem to make them opposites. Together they set out to find humanity's first lunar footprint, facing a hostile frontier that tests their unlikely alliance and growing family bond.

A chance meeting during a London riot links aspiring electromancer Raisa Hopeland with the mysterious Amon Brightbourne. Their encounter begins a journey across decades and continents, drawing family, unusual powers, and a changing climate into the same story.

Orphan Tif Tamim dreams of riding dinosaurs in a traveling rodeo but struggles to find a teacher. After rescuing a dinosaur from abuse, he crosses a dangerous former American West and attracts the attention of another rider.