Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod

As seen on Sky Arts’ Playhouse Presents: Imagine there’s no Lennon . . . In the reality-altering novella “Snodgrass,” John Lennon sidesteps his musical destiny and instead becomes a civil servant

After spending his adolescence like so many others had, playing in a band with friends, John Lennon knows it’s time to grow up. Skipping out on the Beatles before they would go on to become one of the greatest rock groups of the twentieth century, John moves to Birmingham. As he watches the exploits of friends Paul, Ringo, and George, John grows older and lives an ordinary life . . . and he is left wondering “what if?”

With “Snodgrass” as its anchor, this collection of eleven stories also includes “The Chop Girl,” inspired by the infamous Dresden bombing raids; “Past Magic,” a futuristic account of parents cloning their children who have passed away; “New Light on the Drake Equation,” inspired by a man’s journey as he searches for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence; and seven more tales that showcase MacLeod’s breadth as a writer.

Review
“MacLeod’s originality enriches and enlivens the genre, and his fiction—though often grim—should be read by everyone looking for something that is truly out of the ordinary.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic, or tragic . . . But it’s on the character front that MacLeod truly expends his best efforts and achieves the most.” —SF Signal

“One of the finest prose stylists around, and—borrowing as he does much of the melodrama of Victorian literature, along with the revisionist modernism of later authors like D. H. Lawrence—his writing is unfailingly elegant.” —Locus

About the Author
Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel, Wake Up and Dream, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.