Building Bridges between Cultures in Ian McDonald's Science Fiction
By (Author) Jerome Winter
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
4th September 2025
United States
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Literary studies: postcolonial literature
823.914
Hardback
240
Width 152mm, Height 229mm
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 McDonalds 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 McDonalds science fiction as a salient contribution to the flourishing cosmopolitan literature of postcolonial developing nations at the crossroads of the global imaginary.
Jerome Winter is Full-Time Lecturer at the University of California, Riverside.