Review of Hopeland by Ian McDonald

I have read almost every novel Ian McDonald has produced. The man is a wonder of technique and imagination. Technique is technique, but in McDonald's case it's the ability to write vibrantly in almost any style, from gonzo to core genre. Imagination is more subjective, but he has written everything from market-conforming fiction to fiction which has inspired others to imitate it. Whenever I hear of a new McDonald coming down the pipe, I get excited. In 2023 I was ready for a pair of collections that have been announced for years. But it was a novel which popped out instead: Hopeland. (Still waiting for the collections...)

An amalgamation of his oeuvre to date, Hopeland is squarely an Ian McDonald novel. There is a bit of the eccentric, magic realism of his early novels (Out on Blue Six, Desolation Road, etc.). There is a near-future tangibility not unlike his so-called globalization novels (Brasyl, River of Gods, etc.). And there is a continental social concern which stems from his Chaga series. McDonald's DNA is woven throughout Hopeland. So what is the novel about?

Hopeland is the story of the fictional island Ava'u and its social and environmental struggles. Gods that was a boring sentence... Spicing up and stirring this concept is everything else. The story begins with a leaf-in-the-wind woman named Raissa in 1990's England who has drifted into the field of electromancy, i.e. controlling the electricity in weather, and specifically in her case, the electricity in music, also. Raissa is in love with a master electromancer named Finn, but things start to fall apart when she meets a phlegmatic DJ named Amon. Getting pregnant in the aftermath of an electro DJ duel (yes, you read that correctly), Raissa runs away to Iceland, there giving birth to what will become the hope of one Pacific island—little to their knowledge.

To get straight to the point, Hopeland is McDonald's best novel in more than a decade. I have enjoyed McDonald's forays into mainstream science fiction (the Everness and Luna trilogies), but in those efforts I could feel McDonald reining himself in, his diction tugging at the leash. Hopeland plays out the leash. Nowhere near as gonzo as Out on Blue Six, however, things do remain under control—comparatively, i.e. not a bad-mouthed, marijuana-smoking raccoon in sight. There is a finite sparkle to the prose, a facet which aligns nicely with the motif of electromancy.

Regarding theme, Hopeland is, as the name suggests, a mythic vision for a future where social change paves the way for positive adaptation to climate change. There is another way of putting this: where Asians crossed to the Americas during the ice age to start a new life, Hopeland presents a yang to that ying in which the anthropocene pushes a group of Pacific islanders into the colder, European north, and that colder, European north throws open its arms to accept them and live in peace. Yes, an interesting idea that, something which McDonald's idiosyncratic diction gives a jolt of energy in the telling. But the idea likewise has a gaping hole...

Hopeland is fantasy—in both the literary and literal senses, unfortunately. On top of presenting a near-future world in which certain electrical and environmental forces can be controlled by humans (the literary fantastic), the novel likewise presents a world in which people with gender dysphoria live well-adjusted lives and the mass emigration of an entire nation to live within another nation is accepted without complaint (the literal fantastic). But when fantasy wants to dip its toes into such political zeitgeist, it needs to have some degree of realism or relevancy to support the vision, to give it legs. Otherwise, it's just a literary fantasy, an alternate reality—as escapist as aliens, elves, etc.

Hopeland lacks even a minor degree of realism in presenting gender dysphoria and mass immigration. McDonald ignores personal and social realities in building the novel's mythic vision. For example, there could have been a hint of the psychological challenges the overwhelming majority of people with gender uncertainty face. One of the characters, Raissa's child, is one day him, the next her, and so on. (McDonald's style made me feel like I was reading a schizophrenic.) But where other characters' dark sides do receive minor treatment, the gremlins which undoubtedly thump around inside the child's psychological closet at night, don't. The child is instead presented as self-actualized from birth—an inhumanly possible situation. And there are just as many overt issues with the manner in which mass immigration is handled. Unload thousands of people at one time onto another country and there are no conflicts, senate floor or urban street? Regardless how liberal a society may be, it can never be 100%. The Iceland of Hopeland is, in fact, an alien world.

I get that the idea is “hope”. I understand that in order to achieve something a goal must be set. But the evolution needed to achieve the goal must move in steps, and considering Hopeland starts during the 90s tech boom and ends ten years in our future, its too convenient those steps are ignored. Such evolution can be magicked into existence only in fiction. This leaves Hopeland the escapist variety of fantasy rather than the socially constructive it perhaps wanted to be. The theme sometimes feels, unfortunately, like ultra-left, flower-power sf for the current generation.

Regardless the ambiguity of mode, Hopeland is the best book Ian McDonald has written since The Dervish House. It has one foot in a near-future reality, another in a magical-realist mode of delivery, and a third (this is fantasy, remember) in myth making of the shooting star variety. Tesla-coil DJ duels, volcanic server farms, thousand-year symphonies, and the mother of all hurricanes (then the grandmother), the novel offers a rainbow of imagination and idiosyncratic characters. Regarding politics, it will be a utopia to some, and a pipe dream to others.