It's just the way things are, alongside all the other marvels of Hopeland - the water driven musical engine playing its thousand year melody, for example.

The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup

Coming off the back of Ian’s Luna Trilogy – a sort of Game of Thrones on the Moon – I was really looking forward to another complex and intelligent science fiction novel. she's one of the Hopelands, a family/religion/way of life, something like if Tesla and the Utopian thinkers of the era around him collaborated to create a cult with a steampunk aesthetic and no coercive elements.Ian Neil McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. Beautifuly written, masterly delivered, and I just couldn't care less about the people and the (quite epic and eventful) plot. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

Ian Mond Reviews Hopeland by Ian McDonald – Locus Online Ian Mond Reviews Hopeland by Ian McDonald – Locus Online

When he meets Raina Hopeland, he thinks it's just more of that luck, but she's not like other people he's met. From Waltham Forest to Croydon, Woolwich to Shepherd’s Bush, riot runs like molten lead from BackBerry to iPhone, Nokia to Samsung. Are those arcane markings etched into the roof lead beneath his feet, or the hieroglyphs of pigeon shit? Amon Brightbourne has led a charmed life, an ancestral gift of luck bestowed by a ghost, as the story goes.It's the adaptability, the optimism, the insistence that they will be strong and around, helping each other out 10,000 years in the future. I've liked McDonald since his Luna series, and when I saw that he had a new book out, I had to give it a try. Amon is captivated, even before Raisa introduces him to Hopeland: but when Raisa visits Brightbourne itself and discovers the secret of Amon's improbable luck -- his Grace -- she flees.