Ares Express

Book excerpt: 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. REVIEWS “Ares Express is a long, adventure-filled, extravagantly colorful, often funny, quite moving, highly imaginative, excellently written story, set on a glorious Mars built partly of sharp-edged Kim Stanley Robinson-style extrapolation, but mostly of lush, loving, Ray Bradbury-style semi-SF, semi-Fantasy, Martian dreams.... I loved it wholeheartedly.” – SF Site “Hugo-winner McDonald’s virtues have long been underappreciated by major North American publishers... 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 [Desolation Road].” – Publishers Weekly “One of the strangest, weirdest, fantastic reads of your life.” – SF Crowsnest “McDonald is clever, lyrical... snarky, and utterly wondrous. The characters would be completely unbelievable in our world, but in theirs they are inevitable...” – Night Owl Reviews