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Ares Express (Earthlight)
 
 

Ares Express (Earthlight) (Paperback)

by Ian McDonald (Author)
3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 352 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: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 659,586 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #22 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > M > McDonald, Ian

Product Description

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’

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Ares Express (Earthlight) 3.4 out of 5 stars (5)

 

Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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 (2)
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 (1)
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Average Customer Review
3.4 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 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?), 1 May 2002
By A Customer
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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Humph, 4 Mar 2004
By M. Bright (Oxford, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
It irritates me, this. I convince a someone with the usual antipathy to SF to give it a go with a stunning defence of its linguistic and social radicalism, they ask me 'who should I read'? and I want to say 'Ian McDonald', I really do, but I can't, because there's a chance that they might pick up 'Out on Blue Six' (which the author himself has disavowed), or the tedious 'Necroville'. Or this. Ares Express is all the more disappointing for being a quasi-sequel to the excellent 'Desolation Road'. It's just...lazy. And in McDonald's case lazy frequently means overwritten, as though he can get away with massive defects in plotting and characterization as long as he keeps up the breathlessly poetic style (for which, along with a couple of amusing setpieces, he's getting a single grudging star). Well, he can't. Neither, Mr McDonald, can you get away with covering up all sorts of irksome coincidences by claiming that your protagonist is in the grip of 'narrative magic'. How am I meant to care about the plight of Sweetness Honeybun Asiim etc. etc. (Dear God, the sheer, nightmarish WHIMSY of it all!) when you keep telling me that she'll be fine because the plot itself demands it?

So. Read Ian McDonald, do. At the top of his game he uses our benighted genre to both blow and change your mind. But don't read this.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Sparkling stuff. I want more!, 17 Nov 2002
By Tony Barrell "pop scholar" (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars the injustice!
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... Read more
Published on 5 Nov 2006 by Mr. T. J. Thwaites

2.0 out of 5 stars Déjà Vu
Good try, but.. Ares Express has a déjà vu feeling about it, I've read this before - but much better. Read more
Published on 12 Dec 2002 by svante100

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