Ares Express »

Ian McDonald is the author of many science fiction novels, including Brasyl, River of Gods, Cyberabad Days, Desolation Road, King of Morning, Queen of Day, Out on Blue Six, Chaga, and Kirinya. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the BSFA Award, and a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for the Nebula Award and a Quill Book Award, and has several nominations for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Visit Ian McDonald online at ianmcdonald.livejournal.com.

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colorful, witty SF novel; Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet's circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future - or futures - of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas and trains as big as city blocks.

Publishers Weekly

Hugo-winner McDonald’s virtues have long been underappreciated by major North American publishers, which may be why it took nine years for this sequel to 1988’s Desolation Road to make it from the U.K. to the U.S. Dissatisfaction over an arranged marriage and an ill-considered act of charity sends Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th away from the train that was her home and into an epic journey across a terraformed far-future Mars. Sweetness’s efforts to recover her twin sister’s ghost from glib religious con man Devastation Harx entangle her in a conflict that spans time and multiple realities. McDonald’s fantastic Mars is vividly detailed and owes much to Bradbury’s Martian stories. Despite a bit of hand waving around technology that is glibly indistinguishable from magic, this sequel is entirely worthy of its rightly lauded predecessor. (Apr.)