Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He has won the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novels include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House, the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. In 2019, Ian was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the European Science Fiction Society. He now lives in Belfast.
What is the first speculative fiction book you remember reading or the one that sparked your love for the genre?
I’m not sure how useful it is to me to talk of a ‘first spark’ book—I find a lot of talk around the creative process infested with Victorian Romanticism—like ‘inspiration’ and ‘muses.’ I read a lot as a kid, I was an imaginative kid. These things kind of moved together.
How would you categorize your work? Do you think the label of speculative fiction fits what you write? If so, what purpose does it serve for you?
That’s a terrible thing to ask any writer—to categorize themself! I know what I’m not currently interested in—space opera, Big Fantasy—but that doesn’t mean I won’t always not be interested in those areas. It depends on the idea, the story and the characters. I like language, so it’s important to me that the voice and the language in something I write aren’t just incidental, they are as integral to the work as the story. I’d hate to be bounded in by the hashtags.
Who are the authors you have looked up to who are doing the “good work?”
Le Guin, Samuel R Delany. Currently loving Francis Spufford. I read very little fiction these days.
How do you see imagination, speculation, etc., as tools for building better worlds? How do you feel that you personally do this?
If only our books could change the world! Some do, but I know that how I write, all I can do is move one person at a time. I work small scale, even in something as enormous as the 650-page Hopeland. Writing is a deeply intimate and individual art: no two readers will have the same
experience. This is a strength and also a weakness. But I know that I can’t work with big groups of people. A small number of people, or individuals, is how I work.
Luna, through its Five Dragons, decentralizes European and North American political influence. What about the cultures of Australia, Ghana, Brazil, Russia, and China made you want to write about them?
Because they weren’t the U.S. I’ve always been interested in what used to be known as the ‘developing world’ does with the tropes and mechanisms and concepts of western SFF. Also, in Lunas, I like the idea of Australians being the baddies (though I came to rather love the Mackenzies as the series went on). America is a big place, but it’s not the world.
Music plays such an important role throughout the trilogy. Are there any personal experiences with musicianship that influenced you to include Lucas’s listening room, Jorge Nardes, Dr Volikova and the exploration of jazz?
I’ve a secret other life as a sound designer and occasional composer for theatre—I used to play bass and guitar but gave it up as my dyspraxia got worse. But it’s still a joy to draw patterns out of time and make a music from them. (Electronics, if you ask). Every book I do has a sound track—some of which I’ll share on Spotify. For me it’s an important part of the world-building—and to characters, like Lucas, who have very different tastes from me. Brazilian music is a whole universe of wonders to discover. Likewise jazz—it’s exciting to discover new things, learn about whole new musical worlds.
Adriana Corta as a character defies cultural perceptions of femininity: she is unpalatable and rude and can even be venomous. She isn’t straight, even as a terrestrial-born. She talks openly about her sex life, even as an old woman. Was this your intention in writing her? What was Adriana Corta, as a character, meant to accomplish?
She’s the founder of Corta Helio, the Fifth Dragon of the five families that control the lunar economy. I’m always interested in woman protagonists—in our culture, they often have the longer journey to go on and that longer journey is always the better the story. A woman setting up a great and powerful family and company—that’s a long journey. On the moon, she can redefine herself. She can be whoever she wants, she can love whoever she wants. Sex on the moon is underpinned by the basic rule—it’s who you love, not what. Everything is a transaction, everything is a contract drawn up between people, and that applies to love and sex as well. I’m returning to the moon in the current WIP (final edit stage as of mid-April 2026) with Once Upon a Time on the Moon, set 40 years before the Luna series. If Luna was The Godfather on the moon, this, well, Deadwood on the moon.
Tif Tamin is equally intriguing. For a character who has such a clearly defined path he is so quiet. The story really feels at times like it exists somewhere between his head and the world outside it. How did you arrive at Tif for the main POV?
You say quiet, I say, burning with deep want, loss and passion. It’s all in there, and he keeps it restrained, to a certain extent. It really only comes out when he says his name—his Arabic name—aloud to himself to remind himself of who he is and what he comes from. He’s an orphan. He’s been in care, he’s gone through horrendous stuff, he keeps it in. He’s not flashy
like Prince, the lead rider of the rodeo—with whom he falls desperately in lust. But he is honorable, and true, and kind, and brave, and impulsive, and knows what he wants. I loved writing him—he’s vulnerable, lost and (I hope) rather adorable. He’s an outsider in a found-family of outsiders.
In both your Luna series and in Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur, you center characters who are in the middle of finding out how the world works. Coming of age meets big and small stakes. Why do you find these perspectives particularly compelling to write from?
They’re useful in that they stand in for the reader—there’s a lot of world building that needs to be set in place and having someone finding out about the place in which they find themselves does a lot of lifting. You don’t have to explain, you don’t have to info-dump—your character finds out. The rookie is a very useful story-telling device! Stories are often about moving from one world to another (literally and metaphorically).
Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur defies. Defies genre, defies expectations, defies its small page count. How do you pin down something so slippery as a writer?
Well, as you know by now, I like defying boundaries! The idea for the novella came from a t-shirt from the U Wyoming Geology museum—a cowboy riding a bucking bronco triceratops. I got one when I was on the very very worthwhile and illuminating Launchpad residential course—and eventually, when you see something every day, you have to write about it. It’s its own world and I think you have to come to it with no preconceptions. Take it as it is. I don’t offer many explanations for how this world came to be, but there are a couple of excuses.
You trust the reader quite a bit. How do you know when to trust that they will be able to follow you and when you might need to guide a bit more?
I do think that writing should spark the imagination in the reader. A novel is a couple of hundred K of data at most—so someone has to flesh it out into a whole world, and that’s the reader so every word has to do at least two things. I don’t like to over-describe—I almost never give physical descriptions of characters because I know readers will fill in the blanks. I
particularly hate writing emotions as emotions—you know, ‘he felt sad.’ What does sad feel like? What will that feel like feel like to a reader?
What is your favorite dinosaur?
Hah! A great question! Triceratops.
The world is feeling a little topsy-turvy at the moment. Where are you finding your joy these days?
Books, people, jazz. My cats. Theatre. Lovely cooking.
What media are you enjoying these days?
Really liked Pluribus. I think that was the most recent show I raved about to others. I don’t watch too many cop shows because I don’t like cops as characters. I actively loathe medical shows. Movies: I don’t really rate movies. It has to be something special to get me out of the house to go and see a film. As Samuel Johnson said of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland: ‘worth seeing, not worth going to see.’ I have a massive pile of books which I’m reducing slowly—my reading has slowed down. Alas.
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