Customer Reviews

Desolation Road

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've had this book sitting around forever. Literally, I think. I have had it since I was a teenager and never read it. With every move it somehow gets boxed up anyhow and shipped with me. I would see it and think that I needed to read it, and then somehow I would forget about it. Anyhow, I finally read it. I am not going to say that it is worth a 20 year wait, because what would be? But it is a pretty good book, and I enjoyed it enough that I think I will look up some of Ian McDonald's more recent works.

Desolation Road was McDonald's first book, and was apparently released to all kinds of glowing praise. For a first science fiction novel, it definitely gets credit for imagination and unusual ideas. The book begins with Dr. Alimantando following a greenperson across a desert. This following, plus an unexpected accident lead to the founding of Desolation Road-- a town where no town is supposed to be. Rather than follow any one character, the book tells the story of the town itself. The structure of the book consists of a series of interconnected stories about the people who live in the town. It spans several generations.

I am always a sucker for this structure of interlocking stories. (Another good example is The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente.) There is something about the pace and flow that I really enjoy. McDonald is also a good writer with solid craftsmanship. I engaged with the characters, and was interested in the fate of the town. I cannot exactly put my finger on how, but sometimes the plot felt a bit like much of a muchness. This was the only real flaw I can identify, but it kept me from loving the book instead of just liking it.

Anyone out there recommend other McDonald books that would be worth the time to read?

Ian McDonald's Desolation Road is undeniably his best book, a rich and vibrant tale of village life on a terraformed Mars. Reminiscent (intentionally) of the magic realist novels of Marquez and Llosa it transcends the science fiction genre without denigrating it, revelling in both worlds to the credit of each. This is one of those books that critics should hold up as an example of great writing in sf, especially because it won't disappoint even the most hardened veteran reader--literally, a book for everyone.

Desolation Road is a scifi romp through what might be when we start migrating to distant planets. The combination of entertaining and well thought through characters, peculiar perspective manipulation, and engrossing dialogue makes this one of my personal favorites. Air, Land, and Sea all take secondary roles to time and space. A distinctly new style and approach while addressing the mundane and oft peculiar activities of current life in the post industrial age make this book breath with the life of all times. Heinlein without the mysogynistic attitudes

I was drawn into Desolation Road immediately and enjoyed the book. It begins as an intimate, slightly fey, story of misfits on a terraforming Mars finding a place for themselves in as yet undeveloped stop on a desert railway.

But as it progresses towards the end it drags and what was an engaging story of a small society of misfits loses focus when the stories scope expands.

I became increasingly disinterested as the story seemed to become less about the characters and more about the wider world around them.

I don't think, as some reviewers say earlier, that this is McDonalds best work. I think his stories set in future India ('River of Gods' and attendant short stories) are much better.

Ian Mac Donald has a refreshing style that should appeal to all hardcore sci-fi readers tired of big spaceships and huge disasters. Here, the core of the plot is the human destiny, with its share of luck and coincidence ; if everything seems at first a bit disentangled, it all ties up in the end in a glorious finish wich is one of the best ever written. This book is like foreign food : try, and you'll find it excellent.

The story told in this book is an original and engaging one. I particularly liked the writer's no-nonsense story telling. As a would-be author myself, I was constantly astounded by his ability to tell a lot in just a few words. It's a tale that somehow weaves together the terraforming of Mars with a rich mysticism and a gigantic array of characters. It doesn't sound like something that works, but I found myself hooked from the outset.

I recommend the story.

But I can't recommend this edition. Put simply, I could believe that this book was so poorly made. The binding is fine, the thing seems well enough made.

The problem is that this printing is clearly the result of an OCR-scan of an original printed version. Every other page seems to include a wrong word, an oddly inserted newline, or a mistaken letter (e.g. a '1' appearing where an 'l' belongs'. It is appalling obvious that no one ever reviewed what was being printed, let alone proof-read the thing. There is no evidence that this edition was even prepared by anyone involved with the original: it reads like something a guy with a scanner and MS Word could have cooked up. (Even the typeface was a weird one not suited for a book).

When I buy a book, one of the things I'm buying is a professionally-made work that I'll keep for years and will re-read. This book fails in this regard. I'm not even sure I'd pass it on to friends.

If this could be rated on creation of a new universe alone, it would have very high ratings. This book has a "New York Stories" kind of element to it since there are several plot lines, almost vignettes, comprising the whole book. What's done well is the switching from thread to thread and somehow having it make sense. Other books which try that can be VERY confusing. The characters live in a fantastically strange terraformed world filled with both incredible technology contrasted with the wild rural west, full of goats, shanty towns, a world-railroad, and scraping in the dirt. There are several "universes" actually contained within the same world, and the people in the small town of Desolation Road are used to tie it all together. The ending didn't really work for me, so I had to downgrade it. When I close a book like this at the end, I expect to have some satisfaction. It was an interesting ride, but some of the plot lines were not interesting, so I had to wade through those to get to the interesting ones. I think a lot more could have been done with the fabric of this world. In the end, there was too much "window dressing" and not enough real content. Another analogy would be making a soup with too many ingredients. The totality of the book was kind of overwhelming, which prevented what I would consider full development of the vignettes, which just needed to be finished. I ended up wanting to get to the end of each plotline, but it didn't really happen. I would have preferred a tighter focus and more bang for my buck in a more understandable conclusion. I do, however, think the author is highly talented.

The story itself is good, but the 2009 Pyr printing is full of typos. Nothing pulls me out of a fantasy world quicker than a typo.

I wonder if the other editions suffer the same problem?

Spellbinding!

Set in the far future after man and AI-kind have settled Mars, this is the story of a nowhere place called Desolation Road, a town started by one man, where nothing existed before, and nothing was EVER supposed to exist. Yet, as the city grows in size, the story grows in scope, to cover generations of the original inhabitants and their ancestors. Life, death, birth, war, deception, betrayal, religion, sex and love...

For lovers of cyberpunk, biopunk, and space opera.

Much quirkier than I had expected. It's an inevented future that's highly bizarre on many levels, with a weird array of characters in their phsical and psychological characterisics. It's a thoroughly strange environment, from the traveling carnivale selling 'make a baby' kits, to the near-random timetravel and the widely shifting rate of politics. It works because there are clear emotional journeys for the characters even among all the bizarre and at times grotesque detail. It feels at times like McDonald is being too playful for his own good, but on the whole the push of the main characters onto their various successes, tragedies and wacky hijinks works well.

In the representation of larger events it's hit or miss. At the best moments the book functions like an intensely genre version of the series Deadwood, showing the growth in complexity, numbers and mechanisms of community into an elaborate hypermodenr civilization. In this vein, the arc with escalating conflict between labor and the corporate management is particularly effective, particularly in the hectic narrative pace set once a full revolution breaks out. It's interesting, intense, tragic and defined with lots of unique little details that tie the events to this specific invented future. On the other hand, at points the big picture stuff simply gets too far out there, straining suspension of disbelief overly and making for an excessively arbitrary story universe.

It was McDonald's first novel, and is very different from the larger direction he ended up going. Well, it's good to see that he wasn't locked into a single recurrent formula like a lot of authors. Moreo, though, I have to say that I'm quite glad he moved beyond the writing pattern of Desolation Road. Overall it was good and it had a lot of strong elements, but I was also a lot more disatisfied than I've been with any other McDonald and there's something about the way the whole narrative is formed that was a bit alienating. It's not incoherent in the sense of a Hylozoic, but at points there are indications that might go in that direction, and as a text it's one that could have used a bit more restraint. We always read a book under the shadow of the book we were expecting to find, and I'd say that factor was particularly strong here. Beyond that there are problems in the basic story, and I wouldn't consider this boo a classic in the way Evolution's Shore was. It's a fair distance from aesthetic ruin, in no small part because of a lot of engaging pieces of characterization.

Better than: Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh
Worse than: Ubik by Philip K. Dick