Everywhere (The Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod)

Welcome to the first half of the collected worlds of one of fiction’s great myth-makers. Blending naturalistic settings with real—and unreal—histories, dark presents, strange pasts and star-flung futures, Ian R. MacLeod’s multi award-winning stories defy easy classification, but are always vividly elegant, compelling, and filled with wonder.

In Grownups, a young boy discovers the strange facts of life in a very different—yet also alarmingly recognizable—world, whilst New Light on the Drake Equation focusses on one man’s quest to prove there is still a chance of intelligent life existing beyond Earth, and in Ephemera a very strange librarian has final charge of all the world’s knowledge and culture, and The Master Miller’s Tale tells of obsessive love as a bucolic past dissolves into the magics of industry, iron and steam.

Nothing in MacLeod’s visions is ever quite what it seems, yet they remain deeply real and involving. If you haven’t read MacLeod before, you can expect to be moved and surprised. If you have, then you need no further introduction other than to say that Everywhere—and its companion volume Nowhere, which features many of his best shorter stories—represent a generous and wide-ranging summary of his work, along with many insights into the creative process which are provided by the fresh introductions and afterwords.