The novel “Desolation Road” by Ian McDonald was published for the first time in 1988. It won the Locus Award for best novel of the year by a new author.

It’s been a long time since Mars has been terraformed but life on the red planet is not necessarily easy and the Earth is still overpopulated. Following a greenperson in the desert, Dr. Alimantando ends up founding a new city that, while drunk, called Desolation Road. City is a big word but over the years more and more people stop there, usually by accident, and someone ends up settling in that place not even registered.

Initially irrelevant in the history of the planet, Desolation Road becomes a place full of special people with the strangest stories. Over time, someone goes away but the ties with this strange city are difficult to cut, even when there are space-time anomalies. The history of the city ends up becoming important in a tumultuous period for Mars from the political and social point of view.

“Desolation Road” is the first novel written by Ian McDonald. Because of the Martian setting with events that cross several decades it was compared to the famous “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury, but the resemblance is only superficial. You can tell that this novel contais the chronicles of Desolation Road, which remains the center of events, even of what is happening in other places, with the stories of its curious inhabitants.

Ian McDonald’s style of is peculiar, in many ways closer to Cordwainer Smith than Ray Bradbury. The author wrote the novel as if those were legends told much later, so there is no search for realism. The characters tend to be over the top and the first part of the novel has a plot that apparently is not linear.

With a refined language, Ian McDonald includes elements of what is called magical realism in a novel that is still science fiction. The novel contains elements that are very diverse because it also includes several advanced technologies but doesn’t describe how they work because this isn’t the author’s purpose.

Desolation Road is always the center of the narrative and the novel begins with a long introduction of the many characters that come there and of their personal stories. The city is the true protagonist of the novel so what in much of the novel seems a very fragmented story has a meaning because it’s the story of Desolation Road’s growth.

In the second part of the novel, the plot becomes more linear, more focused on political, religious and social struggles that go well beyond Desolation Road. In these stories, there’s also an element of satire but I think its use is successful only up to a certain point because it’s always in danger of being watered down within all the other elements of the novel.

The many elements of different narrative genres and subgenres included in “Desolation Road” deserve an analysis but it would end up trivializing them. A story that at times seems almost a poem would be reduced to a set of labels. This is one of the cases where the final blend of the components can’t be simply described but you have to read the novel to understand it and really appreciate it.

The town of Desolation Road is the protagonist of the novel but its inhabitants are the ones who give it life. Their stories are the history of humanity with great achievements and great tragedies, love and hate. For this reason, those stories are both trivial and profound, already read countless times and yet always important because they relate to significant moments for one person or for a community.

“Desolation Road” is not easy to read because of its rather special characteristics but overall I think it’s really good. It’s not a novel for everyone because many will find the Ian McDonald’s style too weird and the first part hard to follow because of its structure. I recommend it to people who appreciate genre-blending and in general to anyone looking for something original and different.