Building Bridges between Cultures in Ian McDonald's Science Fiction

The book argues that Ian McDonald’s globalized science fiction functions as a complex, hybrid fusion of magic realism and SF literature and culture. 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.