Desolation Road

‘Camino Desolación’ (Desolation Road, 1988) es una de las mejores novelas de ciencia ficción que he leído nunca, pero también hay que añadir que posiblemente no sea una novela para cualquier público. Alejada del marco científico, la opera prima del inglés Ian McDonald fue un soplo de aire fresco para el género. La novela nos cuenta una historia del futuro en Marte, aunque no se trata de un Marte al estilo Kim Stanley Robinson o Greg Bear; estaría más cercano a las ‘Crónicas marcianas’ de Ray Bradbury. Lo que hace McDonald es mezclar la ciencia ficción con el realismo mágico. Sin abandonar el sentido de la maravilla, la historia nos presenta una serie de historias y personajes que se van entremezclando, show more mostrándonos un universo calidoiscópico. De esta manera, la narración se vuelve evocadora y cercana al cuento tradicional.

La historia, que como toda novela-río abarca una serie de años, es imposible de resumir. Todo comienza con el doctor Alimantando atravesando el desierto en su tabla eólica, que va siguiendo las indicaciones de un hombrecillo verde. En un momento dado, se encuentra con una órfica, una máquina terraformadora de la compañía ROTECH, lugar en el que se fundará el pueblo que Alimantando da en llamar Camino Desolación. Y a partir de aquí los personajes, todos ellos memorables, irán añadiéndose, cada uno con su historia personal: el señor Jericó, Rajandra Das, Persis Jirones, los Mandela, Mikal Margolis, Marya Quinsana, la Feria Ambulante y Fantasía Educativa de Adam Black, etc.

La imaginación de McDonald es soberbia y su estilo portentoso. Las breves piezas de que se compone la novela están perfectamente trazadas, y los personajes destilan humanidad y humor, siendo absolutamente creíbles. De esta manera, entre la ciencia ficción, el surrealismo, la sátira y la novela fronteriza, el conjunto convierte ‘Camino Desolación’ en todo un clásico. (Desgraciadamente, la edición en castellano lleva descatalogada desde hace más de veinte años, y solo se encuentra en librerías de viejo, mercado de segunda mano y ediciones digitales pirata.) show less

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It all began thirty years ago on Mars, with a greenperson. But by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every conceivable abnormality from Adam Black's Wonderful Travelling Chautauqua and Educational 'Stravaganza (complete with its very own captive angel) to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar. Its inhabitants ranged from Dr. Alimantando, the town's founder and resident genius, to the Babooshka, a barren grandmother who just wants her own child-grown in a fruit jar; from Rajendra Das, mechanical hobo who has a mystical way with machines to the Gallacelli brothers, identical triplets who fell in love with-and married-the same woman.

My Review: Earth can't show more sustain its current population in the style to which all 7 billion of us wish to become accustomed, and no one is predicting a sudden outbreak of common sense and birth prevention to bring the numbers down. What are we to do?

Move, of course. Where? More than one place. There's the Metropolis, the geosynchronous city in space reached by fixed space elevators; but that's filling up too; wherever shall we go?

Well, Mars, for one. The Remote Orbital Terraforming and Environmental Control Headquarters (ROTECH for short) consortium is created on the Motherworld, sent into a moonbelt orbit around Mars, and given a thousand years of development, has finally produced a planetary ecosystem that can sustain unsuited humans in the open.

ROTECH governs Mars as lightly as any frontier is governed. People, let loose from cities and rules, pretty much do what comes naturally. They have babies, they make farms, they organize themselves into Us and Them, and they do it all at breakneck speed without worrying too hard about consequences. When Consequences rain down from the Heavens, well, adapt or die.

Ian McDonald does in 363 pages what others do in 1000. He makes Mars come alive, he peoples it with fabulous characters (human and cyborg and robotic), he creates a logical thought experiment...how can humanity survive its inevitable wearing out of the Motherworld?...and uses it to tell us about ourselves, about what we are *actually* made of, and about what triumphs and tragedies flow naturally and inevitably from that.

I adore this book.

There.

No, really, that's it. I adore this book. You should read it, especially if you point your booger-holder at the sky when science fiction is mentioned. I don't read THAT people should read this. If you don't, then you should be ashamed of your inflexibility.

I even re-read Jane Austen recently. And liked it. So. What's that “I don't like THAT” stuff again? show less

The jacket copy promising "every conceivable abnormality" had me expecting a more comical romp than the wry and profound storytelling McDonald provides in his first novel. Although in many ways the most science-fictiony of science fiction--a story set on Mars during a period of human settlement--there are many other literary veins enriching Desolation Road. The little serendipitous town by the train tracks certainly has a 19th-century-US Western feel to it that gave the book a steampunk vibe (this well before the coinage of the genre label). Some readers have accused McDonald of "magical realism" in this Martian novel, which nevertheless intensely engages religious and political themes. The net effect for me was something like a hybrid show more between Little, Big and Dune.

There must be many influences and allusions that flew past me. Critics commonly point to homages to Jack Vance and Ray Bradbury. The 1985 Terry Gilliam movie Brazil is "sampled," if you will, in chapters 25 and 35. Cory Doctorow notes that the Catherine Wheel in the religion/planetary administration of McDonald's Mars alludes to the music of David Byrne. It's clear that McDonald has taken the old Clarke "indistinguishable from magic" saw to heart, and thus lays himself open to the charge of fantasy in SF drag, but if time travel is acceptable as science fiction, the rest of this kit should pass muster.

Sometime around page 150 I started to wonder, "What's with all the characters being sexually active at the age of nine?" It wasn't until I read about the grandfather of mature grandchildren thinking "the thoughts a man of forty-five thinks" that I realized these are Martian years! There are no C.E. dates in the book, but the story must start in the 28th century at the earliest, given some information about the timescale of "manforming" Mars. It takes place over roughly three human generations, each of which conveniently corresponds to a "decade" in Martian reckoning (i.e. 18.8 of our years).

McDonald very comprehensively adheres to the framing of Mars as "the world," with the word "earth" used only to reference soil and planetary surface, while planet Earth is called "the Motherworld." And still the Martian milieu is full of clever evocations of 20th-century mass culture.

The chapters are short and delicious, the vivid characters abundant, and the plot is so manifold that each of chapters 57 through 63 constitutes an independent climax, leaving room for a further half-dozen chapters of denouement and closure. It is a well-formed independent novel, and it does not in any way beg a sequel. The one McDonald eventually wrote (Ares Express) doubtless leverages the terrific world-building in Desolation Road, but I won't be surprised if it is at a significant remove from the characters and events in its predecessor.

This is one of those books that I devoured rapidly, and then toward the end I started to feel sad that it would soon be over. I recommend it without reservation. show less

'Desolation Road' is not easy to characterise. It is epic, with strong elements of both science fiction and fantasy, magical realist in tone and a satire on our species. It also has an element of human soap opera embedded in the planetary opera of a far future Mars.

This is one of those books which requires either a very detailed review of incident or something much shorter to give the prospective reader some idea of what they are in for. On balance, I am going for the latter here.

First of all, you might have to have an inclination towards wry humour in your science fiction. I do not. I usually loathe Pratchettery as a waste of my valuable time but here McDonald rises above the potential for silliness and absurdity because of the show more sharpness of his dark political satire.

The book starts with an obvious homage to Bradbury's Mars. The signal is sent that this Mars, like Bradbury's, is not supposed to be an actual Mars even in the far future but an imaginative counterfoil to our Earth-bound image of ourselves.

If Bradbury was reflecting on post-war America and its origins in the elimination and forgetting of the cultures it had to walk over to create its own modernity, McDonald (in 1988) seems to be reflecting on the patterns of rise and fall inherent in the human project but here translated to Mars.

The introductory fantasy of a settlement founded on the guidance of a mysterious 'green man' (a nice convergence of both earthly folklore and Martian fantasy) only has closure in the final pages which, of course, I will not describe for fear of a spoiler.

The book is like an onion. The tale of Dr Alimentando and the Green Man enfolds a tale about the weaponisation and complexity of time that goes beyond the Moorcockian. This then enfolds the story of the town and its early settlers which then enfolds the often violent human and political satire.

In between the opening and final punctuation points, McDonald's fantasy unfolds with the magical and fantasy elements given (barely at times) some possible far future scientific basis in the sociology and techno-innovation involved in terraforming a planet we certainly know to be a dead one.

There is a futuristic steam punk and 'blade runner' element even if the network of railways criss-crossing the world and its continents are driven by tokamaks and the 'engines' can evolve into a form of ecstatic sentience. Ecstatic violence is central to the novel as if this is also central to us as humans.

The whole thing is a mass of references to past and then-current science fiction in an explosion of creativity that, for once in science fiction that takes this route, holds together because the themes weave like a tapestry (a tapestry plays a role in the tale) that we can view as a whole.

The settlement of Desolation Road starts as a refuge for human flotsam and jetsam (McDonald, although British, is channelling American cultural themes at all times) and grows into something significant only to collapse under its own weight within the settlers' (long) living memory.

There is a brute, wasteful and inept capitalism. There are workers and a community which combines against it only to be crushed. There is a brutal war of resistance against order by a liberation army that is as nasty as its 'democratic enemies'. There are insane religions and irrationalities.

Indeed, if there is an overarching theme to the novel buried in all the incident (a lot happens in short chapters that often read like very short stories) it seems to lie in the conflict (possibly doubly resolved at the end) between scientific reason and the mystical and ecstatic.

McDonald has one skill that is too easily forgotten in this sort of novel. His characters are not just symbols or stereotypes and, if not entirely real either, they are very well drawn and complex so that his symbolisation of the tussle between reason and mysticism becomes plausible.

The weaving of the story is, in fact, exemplary. The dark humour and detachment are appropriate. The ideas may not themselves always be so plausible but the way they flow is. It is up to you to stop and think about whether it all hangs together but, if you do, you will lose the momentum of the tale.

If it has a flaw, it lies in its exuberance. While it does not overwhelm with invented technologies and ideas and it builds a world that we can suspend belief sufficiently in to enjoy, its tale is a fantasy wearing science fiction clothes and any reader should go in expecting that. show less

Desolation Road by Ian McDonald was very good, and well worth reading. I didn't love it as much as some people have (ahem), which I understand puts me in the category of "heretical apostate." Can't tell you how many times I was put into time out for that one when I was young.

Dr. Alimantando unexpectedly has a greenperson emerge from the Martian desert and help him construct, from recently deceased technology, what will become the town of Desolation Road. A little different from your average fare, right? The book then goes through 23 amazingly event-packed years set in Desolation Road or tying back to it (although if my math is right, that'd be something like 46 here). Lust, romance, avarice, power hunger, religious longing, and a whole show more host of other strongly felt human yearnings, bring both growth and calamity to Desolation Road, and also help it dodge dissolution and annihilation. There's some fancy footwork with a localized, time-altering chronometer threaded throughout the story which also helps keep Desolation Road whole.

This book has some beautiful moments. The descriptions of the music played by the extraordinarily gifted The Hand, of the kind I have found pathetically lame in other books, were instead transporting. The scene in which his music tries to draw rain to parched Desolation Road is extraordinary. The rebellious All Swing Music is similarly well-described. A scene in which an elderly town couple explores their strangely enlarging garden, using twine to help them find their way back to the gate, is, well, idyllic and sublime. I hope my wife and I get a chance like that someday.

There were some things that didn't work so well for me. The author has a penchant in the book for long lists of object types or places or people which had me wiping the glaze from my eyes. "There were young men, old men, middle-aged men, tall men, short men, fat men, thin men, sick men, healthy men, bald men, hairy men . . ." This sentence goes on for 16 more lines!

That's a minor quibble in this expansive, creative work. It's filled with memorable characters, including the Greatest Snooker Player in the World and a reluctant goddess of machinery. The author undoubtedly had a good time writing it, and there are a lot of good times for the reader in it as well. show less

An amazingly assured first novel. I've noticed that other online reviews see their favorite "odd" author in this novel, e.g., Jack Vance. For me, the strongest echoes were of R A Lafferty and Bradbury. But unlike Lafferty, who could never quite make the novel form work, or Bradbury, whose Martian Chronicles was clearly no coherent narrative, McDonald is able to weave this collection of tall tales into a cohesive whole. This is a Mars supposedly terraformed to its current livable state, but that's just to make it seem like SF. People travel by railroad or old planes, the traveling side show comes to town periodically, etc. All important points in time have a repeating form, e.g., 12 minutes of 12, 6 minutes of 6, and so on. The stories show more tell of the founding, growth, heyday, and eventual downfall of the town of Desolation Road. I was concerned in the first chapter that archness and distance would make the book a hard slog, but either I or the author learned better. The weakest section for me was the new SF space opera style war that occupies most of the final fifth of the book. Tachyonic beams, giant robots, people never just killed but blown into bloody smears, deaths by the 100's of thousands -- all overkill, literally and figuratively. Fortunately the book's denouement recovers nicely. Recommended. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Regular readers know that in the last year, I've ended up becoming a huge salivating fanboy of science-fiction author Ian McDonald, and that I have no problem with people knowing this; that's part of what being a book lover is all about, after all, is finding certain writers that we can go all nutso crazy for. So ask me how excited I was when our friends at SF publisher Pyr recently sent me a copy of McDonald's very first novel, 1988's Desolation Road, re-released last year on its twentieth anniversary with an all-new layout and a stunning show more new cover by in-house wunderkind Stephan Martiniere; because this is why I started the "Tales From the Completist" series here at CCLaP to begin with, because sometimes it's simply fun to attempt to go back and read every single thing an author has ever done, although admittedly in McDonald's case I still have a long way to go (his 19th book, the Turkey-set day-after-tomorrow tale The Dervish House, comes out next summer).

And in fact Desolation Road is quite the intriguing title to start with if you've never read any of McDonald's work before, and it's easy to see why it made such a big splash twenty years ago to begin with; because instead of the usual Blade Runneresque cyberpunk tale that was so popular at the time, this is a rather literal ripoff of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 postmodernist classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, only in this case set entirely on a semi-terraformed Mars thousands of years in the future. (And just to make it clear, I myself have not yet read Solitude, although it's scheduled to be reviewed next year as part of the "CCLaP 100" series of classics essays; I have, however, already read and reviewed yet another Solitude ripoff from these same exact years, Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" stories from the old seminal comic book Love & Rockets, which is why I feel qualified enough to at least make the comparison.)

See, like Solitude, Desolation Road is essentially the story of an isolated village out in the middle of the Martian desert, literally forgotten by the rest of society because of it technically not even supposed to exist (turns out that an artificially intelligent terraforming machine, bored with the ennui of life, secretly created the town's infrastructure one day without telling anyone, then committed suicide); the story itself, then, is a multi-generational look at the stragglers who all end up at this forgotten village in the middle of nowhere (through getting lost, being exiled from other towns, running from the law, etc), and how the dramas of these families pass from parents to children as time passes and the village takes on a life and history of its own. And hey, it turns out that McDonald even incorporates the Latin-flavored magic-realism that made Solitude such a stunner when it first came out (in fact, it can be argued that the original Solitude single-handedly started the now way overused trend of magic-realism within postmodernist novels); it's just that McDonald very cleverly filters his magic-realism through the prism of hard science, so that for example there are "angels" in his story made up of semi-forgotten biomecha drone workers from long before the planet was habitable to humans, and "ghosts" who in reality are an alien species who have mastered the art of quantum-mechanical time travel.

And all of this is indeed very very clever, and as a result Desolation Road reads like no other SF novel you've ever seen -- more like a densely poetic folktale than the usual robots-n-lasers stuff, albeit with lots of actual robots and lasers and stuff, a bewitching combination of scientific conceits and third-world superstition, which in its incidental passages just happens to also lay out the ultra-complex thousand-year history of Mars' transformation into a habitable planet in the first place, a virtual wet dream for fans of world-building stories like me. (And yes, just like both Solitude and Hernandez's Palomar stories, certain young characters within Desolation Road end up sick of the provincial life and moving to one of several huge cities, giving McDonald a chance to greatly expand the scope of this novel; in fact, this is how most of the population of Mars lives, within a small series of giant, packed megapolises, usually founded by one particular Earth nation or another, and thus each of them taking on the flavor of, say, an Indian city or a Mexican city or whatnot, separated by thousands of miles of barren desert and connected by an impossibly long railroad track that circles the planet.)

But of course there's a problem with Desolation Road as well, albeit in this case a welcome problem; that just like it is with any brilliant mature author, McDonald has ended up becoming a much better writer in the twenty years since this first came out. And so that's bound to make any current fan of his a little disappointed with this early classic, when compared to such contemporary masterpieces as Brasyl and River of Gods; because just to cite one example, the flip-side of all the poetic magical-realist writing seen here is that it often tips into overwritten purplish fussiness, the kind of Victorianesque finery that will make many modern audience members roll their eyes in exasperation. If there's any legitimate criticism to be made of this book, it's that McDonald at the beginning of his career leaned a little too heavily on writers like Marquez, and had not yet found that strikingly original voice that has made him now so loved; to get technical about it, in fact, there are huge sections of Desolation Road that contain no scientific or futuristic elements at all, entire chapters that could literally be reset in a small village in Mexico without anyone telling the difference, which is bound to make many SF fans frustrated indeed.

But still, just like any early novel by a mature author who has since acquired a strong following, Desolation Road is more than worth your time; and in fact, this may be one of those cases where those not yet familiar with McDonald may end up liking it even more than existing fans of his, a fantastic place to start before moving on to his mature works that will literally blow your head clean off your neck. Especially now that it's available in such a gorgeous new edition (and seriously, designer Jacqueline Cooke, you should be commended for a book design that is both stylish and non-distracting, a hard balance to find with full-length novels), it is more than deserving of your money and attention. As with all of the books by McDonald I've now read, it comes highly recommended. show less