- Paperback: 560 pages
- Publisher: Earthlight; New edition edition (4 Mar 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0671037544
- ISBN-13: 978-0671037543
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 10.8 x 3.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,213,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
In his SF novel Ares Express, Ian McDonald brings magic realism to Mars as he did in Desolation Road (1988)--but now the wonders and marvels are harnessed to a driving story line. Indeed the feisty but cute heroine, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honeybun Asiim Engineer 12th, knows she's in a story that's hurtling like an express train to some apocalyptic climax ...
This Mars has been terraformed by orbiting clouds of reality-bending machines called Angels. Its red deserts are criss-crossed with railway tracks carrying gigantic fusion-powered trains whose engines are the size of ocean liners. One such is Catherine of Tharsis, run and inhabited by generations of Sweetness's family. When they arrange an unwelcome marriage she escapes into adventure, pursued by her witchy Grandma.
Sweetness is someone rather special, as a green-skinned prophet tells her, and so is the ghost twin who talks to her from mirrors. A fake evangelist with a flying cathedral sees her as the key to real apocalypse. Then there's the quantum time traveller, the town blighted by a dream plague, the card-sharp whose stakes are years of life, the artists building giant domestic furniture in Martian deserts, the anarchist saboteurs humiliating wrongdoers with "massive practical jokes", and many more colourful inventions. McDonald's imagination is rich, lurid, often wildly comic.
As Armageddon impends, armies drop from orbit, and space weaponry slashes lilac paths across the sky, there's hand-to-hand aerial fighting with Sweetness in the thick of things, while down below Grandma and the big locomotive break all rules and records with a 300mph rescue dash. Breathless excitement, artfully concluded. Great fun. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
VECTOR, the critical journal of the BSFA
‘An engaging, page-turning, and frequently hilarious, delight’
Inside This Book
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most fun I've had in ages (can I give it six stars?),
By A Customer
This review is from: Ares Express (Earthlight) (Paperback)
Simply the best SF I've read in a long, long, time, this is a top piece of magical-realist world-building from one of the top ideas men in British Science Fiction.Set on a terraformed Mars and drawing on everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs to the flavour of the month in physics, string theory, the overwhelming feeling is of the planetary romances of later Jack Vance. There are wacky religions, giant steam trains, a bunch of government-licensed pranksters who humiliate threats to the status quo, and one of the strongest female heroes ever written by a man. Buy this one, it doesn't dissapoint on any level. Excellent.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sparkling stuff. I want more!,
By
This review is from: Ares Express (Earthlight) (Paperback)
If Ian McDonald continues to write so imaginatively and wittily, he's in danger of being labelled "the Terry Pratchett of Mars". I really didn't want this novel to end, so chock-full is it of colourful events, characters and, perhaps most importantly, the kind of ideas that other sci-fi writers would kill their great-great-grandfathers for. I really hope McDonald sticks with this train of thought! Oh, one word of advice: it's best to read Desolation Road first, as you may otherwise be unduly confused by some of this.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the injustice!,
By
This review is from: Ares Express (Earthlight) (Paperback)
Ian Mcdonald's novels seem to stay in print a shockingly short length of time; I can only guess he's too literate for the mainstream sci-fi reader and too sci-fi for anyone else. So what they're all missing is a wonderfully weird kaleidoscopic road movie stuffed full of magic realism, wild, vivid characters and ideas, an irresistable protagonist, some lightly worn yet profound insight into political, social and religious manipulation. Now that Jeff Noon and William Gibson have left the building he's the best there is. Wake up! Catch up!
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