Ares Express

Desolation Road Universe #2

by Ian McDonald

Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road , this novel 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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

560 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2000

About the author

Ian Neil McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis's childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story "The Island of the Dead" in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing full-time.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! There’s really something special about Ian McDonald’s Mars books. McDonald’s Mars is a place I love to visit in all of its crazy, off the wall, illogical glory. I’ve rarely seen the numinous, and irrational, nature of magic so well displayed in fantasy books, let alone in a sci-fi one (the exception would have to be Sean Stewart who is also expert at such depictions, though in a very different vein). Despite the strangeness of McDonald’s Mars (which as I noted in my review to Desolation Road smacks heavily of magic realism) I’ve rarely seen such a consistently envisioned and joyfully painted world. This book was a hell of a lot of fun and it even taught me a few things: 1) Hell hath no fury like a failed art student; 2) If something is going to run your life it might as well be the Rules of Narrative, they just might save your life; 3) Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroines can kick some serious ass; 4) If you’re going to do it at all, do it widescreen; and 5) never underestimate the power and resourcefulness of grandmothers. But I think I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here.

_Ares Express_ is a sequel of sorts to McDonald’s aforementioned foray into a wild and wonderful terraformed Mars. In this outing we are introduced to the life and times of one of the great tribal-trains that travel across the Martian frontier as we jump on board the Catherine of Tharsis and meet our feisty and resourceful (but cute with it) heroine Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. As a member of the leading clique in the multi-family domiety of this rolling city all she dreams about is driving the train that her family has run for 11 generations. There’s only one small problem, she’s a girl…and everyone knows that girls don’t drive. Luckily for Sweetness the universe, and more specifically the Powers of Narrative, have something more in store for her and after she crosses paths with a certain Green Man nothing will ever be the same.

There are a few things you may need to know. First off, this ain’t Mars like you’ve ever seen it before (well, expect for the previous volume of course) as the past and the future collide in strange and wonderful ways. This Mars is circled by a glittering moonring composed of godlike AIs who manformed the world in the first place and are now worshipped as the angelic hierarchies of God the Panarchic and his sometimes almost-human saints. The planet is criss-crossed by the great rail lines of the Bethlehem Ares railroad and its multitude of behemoth engines, while its skies are dotted with great floating airships. Each city, village, and town is more strange than the last, whether it’s the interconnected megalithic city-states of the originally settled Grand Valley that lie under the glittering diamond Worldroof, or the tiny lotus-eating hamlet of Solid Gone under its literal cloud of deadening apathy. And the kids! When they’re not dreaming of manning the orbital defense stations or becoming reality shaping cineastes they’re listening to that outlandish music put on by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra. I guess if you’re going to terraform your world with quantum computers that scrutinize the expanse of the multiverse in search of the best of all possible worlds as part of their planetary engineering you shouldn’t be surprised if things start shading into magical realism. In short if there’s one thing McDonald seems to know it’s a sensawunda and he builds it into the very fabric of this world and then turns it up to eleven. It struck me at one point that his Mars books are kind of like a Terry Gilliam movie (though better written): they’ve got that zany, manic surface of ‘anything-is-possible’ and off the wall characters with an underlying core of emotion.

Secondly Story (with a capital S) and its relation to human lives is integral to this, um, story. There’s a very self-conscious artifice to this "story as Story" aspect that McDonald revels in and in order to get the most out of it you’re going to have to buckle in for the ride and not worry too much about the rules of probability. For the duration of the narrative the main character *is* a story and McDonald examines not only the way this impacts her life, but also how we need and use stories to give our lives meaning (and shape)...even if it is someone else’s story. Ultimately we are all ‘trapped’ by our lives to some degree, that formless shifting thing that is shaped by both our decisions and apparent blind luck (or lack thereof), and which only seems to gain a shape when we look back on it (and force it to adhere to one). One begins to wonder if the lucky ones are those whose lives truly do form stories in the strictest sense of the word, or whether it’s a mixed blessing at best.

Finally, be aware that it’s a wild ride. Once the Powers of Narrative take control of your life and invest it with Purpose you’d better be prepared for an adventure. In this regard I was once again impressed with McDonald’s truly cinematic style, a style that, while full of gosh-wow moments and hair-raising exploits straight out of an action movie piled one on top of the other, he still manages to couple with meaningful substance and interesting characters. Throughout the tale of Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th McDonald likes to both meet and invert our expectations of the Hero. First of all she is female, not generally the norm for stories in this genre (at least back in the day), and secondly despite being ‘the hero’ she is not always invested with full agency, being driven hither and yon by the dictates of narrative. The latter might sound like a bad thing, but as I mentioned above if you buckle yourself in you should enjoy the ride and Sweetness is certainly resourceful and spunky (but cute with it) enough to win us over. An interesting side element to her story is the fact that while she certainly attracts her fair share of members of the opposite sex (and is in no doubt as to her own attractiveness) she is never an irresistible lure to any of them. One after the other each of her plethora of prospective mates turns out not to be ‘the one’, though they all serve necessary functions in her story. They are ultimately very much an adjunct to Sweetness’ heroism, though still required for its fruition. They are the helpers who aid in, or dudes-in-distress that define, her heroism. It was an interesting inversion of some of my expectations.

I haven’t even talked about the main story arc, despite its obvious centrality to a story about Story, but suffice it to say that it involves disappointed ambition, thwarted desire, the destabilization of governments and, ultimately, a threat to the very fabric of reality. The villain is top-notch (how can you not be with a name like Devastation Harx?), if a bit behind the scenes, and the many surprises, twists and turns that comprise the plot are fully satisfying. Things move from the personal and particular to the general and universal and then back again as Sweetness’ personal rebellion sends shockwaves into the wider world and those in turn circle back to affect her closest family and friends. All in all it’s a lot of fun and certainly has cemented Ian McDonald as one to watch for me. I have to admit though, in looking at his wider catalogue, that it seems he veered away from this kind of balls-to-the-wall fun and went in for much more issue-oriented sci-fi in many of his other works. Not a bad thing, but I’m curious if I’ll like these supposedly ‘serious’ books half so much as I did these two grand adventures in a Mars that can never be.

Also posted at Shelf Inflicted

[Bandit · Rating 1 out of 5]

Desolation Road was epic. Not perfect, but very good, an exhausting but fascinating read. This one, its sort of kind of sequel, was just exhausting. Naturally, having read Desolation Road and being so in awe of McDonald's world building, his manformed (terraformed) Mars seems like a place worth a revisit. Sometimes a sequel is just as good as the original, sometimes it's inferior, but still quite good. This one wasn't even in the same ballpark, the apple rolled so far from the tree, it became an entirely different infinitely less appetizing fruit. In fact the striking difference in quality is about the most interesting thing about this book. I mean, it's still recognizably McDonald's writing, with his fairy tale spinning style and vividly (occasionally excessively so) descriptive imagery, but the rest...the story (of a young woman fleeing an arranged marriage to become enmeshed in planetary politics and her grandmother in pursuit) wasn't even slightly compelling, the characters neither likeable nor engaging. The book was dramatically overwritten, dizzyingly confusing, with cheap saves of an and then they woke up variety, loopy and seldom exciting. The connections to the far superior original were so tangential, it might have been a stand alone. Usually it pays to read the sequel shortly after the original while the names and places are fresh in mind, but in this case it didn't matter almost at all. Why this wild departure, why this stupendously unnecessary sequel...no idea, but it was a tiring and tiresome read, undertaken on a premise of the original and finished only due to my completist nature. It isn't without some inspired moments, but never enough to offset the bulk of the narrative. Glad to have tried the author first on his greater work, this one would not have invited a second try. Frustrating, disappointing and ultimately a waste of time (and quite a lot of time too). Desolation Road universe should have been left alone to wow, undiluted and proud. Pass.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Previously: Desolation Road

May 2010

In this quasi-sequel to Desolation Road (also worth checking out) Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, almost nine years old (Mars time) wants nothing more than to command the mighty train Catherine of Tharsis, but girls can’t drive. It’ll pass to her useless brother instead, father to son, just like it’s always been, while Sweetness gets married off to a useless Stuard. But then a chance meeting with a trackside fortune-teller reveals that Sweetness is actually part of a story--a story bigger than her, bigger than trains, even--and so, fleeing an arranged marriage, she steps off the tracks and sets out across the plains of Mars to seek an adventure. And stumbles into a war for all reality.

Ian McDonald’s Mars is a weird and wonderful place, a far-far-future world where the people are the same as us, trains the size of whole towns speed across the planet, and as Arthur C. Clarke once predicted, sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Angels and saints float high above the manformed land, imagining worlds and holding back the storms; slick card-sharks gamble with years; little old professors jump across time and dimensions while never leaving their homes; and the ghost of one’s twin sister may be something greater still.

Despite Sweetness’s genre-savvy self-awareness as a character in a greater story (a gimmick that works well, here), McDonald still manages to keep the story exciting and unpredictable with our Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine quickly becoming someone to root for, although it’s a shame how quickly some of the minor characters disappear as soon as their roles are up. Which says something about McDonald’s brilliant writing. Still, people-furniture? Shiver. I think I’m going to have nightmares.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(This is being published today in honor of "Ian McDonald Week" at CCLaP. For an overview of all the content regarding McDonald being posted here this week, you can click here.)

One of the things I like most about British science-fiction author Ian McDonald is that, unlike a lot of writers in his genre, he's able to slip effortlessly between different styles and themes in his work; so even though, for example, he's mostly known here in the 2000s for his more mainstream developing-world day-after-tomorrow tales (think "third-world cyberpunk" if you will, stories that feel like William Gibson or Neal Stephenson but set in such places as India, Brazil and Turkey), he's also loved by a generation of '90s fans for his urban fantasy tales set in Ireland, which much like many of the projects by Neil Gaiman or Joss Whedon posit a sort of hidden world of magic and fairies and demons that exists in the shadowy corners of our own real world. And so too is he also loved by a third group for his Charles-Strossian far-future "hard SF" stories, many of which play out almost like complex linguistic experiments, combining the expansive visions of such Silver Age authors as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury with the literary style of such academic favorites as Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and indeed, his very first novel, 1988's Desolation Road which I've also reviewed here in the past, is a rather literal homage to the latter's 100 Years of Solitude, only in McDonald's case set on a terraformed Mars a thousand years in the future, where such Marquez-inspired magic-realism touches as ghosts and angels have actual scientific explanations for their existence, while still being just as poetic nonetheless.

It turns out, in fact, that McDonald actually revisited this terraformed Mars in 2001, penning a "companion volume" of sorts called Ares Express, which is only coming out now in the US for the first time this month, thanks to our friends at genre upstart Pyr, and which I finally got my own hands on a few weeks ago. And indeed, it's important to point out that this isn't a traditional sequel, not only in plot terms but even its overall scope; becuase that was one of my few complaints about the original, actually, for those who have read that older review, that it limits itself by adhering too closely to the structure of Solitude, making it for the most part a beautiful but sometimes frustrating look at merely one tiny village within this utterly fascinating speculative world, with many scenes that contain literally no speculative elements at all, and which could be reset in the Mexican desert in the 20th century with no one being the wiser. Ares is instead a much greater look at this entire environment, which while referencing the dusty small town of the original actually concerns itself with a lot more than just that, taking us finally all the way around the planet to explore not just different geographical environments but the wealth of different urban societies that exist there; and unlike the more limited writing style of the twenty-something newbie McDonald of Desolation, the forty-something veteran McDonald of Ares delivers a knockout of an actual text, the kind of sophisticated manuscript that can be enjoyed not just by fanboys but those who usually stay far away from science-fiction, whose very idea of "speculative" is to pick up a title by Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy. Everybody wins! Everybody wins!

And in fact this is probably the first important thing to know about Ares, that it's not just the typical terraforming story of grubby domed colonies out on a distant barren world, but instead enfolds far-future ideas into a lush vision of the mechanical meeting the biological, a world where nearly omniscient artificially intelligent weather-generating satellites have the capacity to go insane and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting population (and in fact have a bad history of doing exactly that), a world where nerds with body-image issues can simply digitize their consciousness and upload their "souls" into the literal ring of orbiting devices necessary to keep Mars habitable for humans, using quantum mechanics and a type of science that sometimes seems more like magic. And indeed, I found myself thinking a lot about that famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke while reading this book, how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; and in fact McDonald gets a lot of play out of this idea in Ares, that in another millennium science will have become so sophisticated to once again start resembling the Medieval idea of wizards and alchemy, of self-flagellating wise men in the desert conjuring up unstoppable forces of both good and evil.

Like Desolation, the Mars of Ares Express is conceptually held together through the massive railroad track making a complete circle around the planet, the only thing holding these far-flung communities together; this time, though, we actually get on one of the trains using this track, following the fates of the various, again Medieval-sounding, hereditary families making up the various technicians needed to make those oversized train-cities run, the multi-generational groups of "Royal Engineers" and "Royal Cabin Stewards" who devote their entire lives to the time-honored traditions of those who came before them. And in good cyberpunk style as well, the actual plot revolves mostly around the exploits of a teenage girl in one of these families, one Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, who starts the novel learning that she's been promised in an arranged marriage she is against, so "runs away from home" in a manner that will have her family paying penance in this deeply caste-run society for years to come.

This then gives McDonald the perfect excuse to explore all kinds of different environments within this profoundly strange world of a partly green and completely breathable Mars, as Sweetness hops her way from one random place to another in a constant flight from both her family and others who wish her harm, taking her from a floating religious compound to the planet's largest city (scattered with the non-eroding "giants' skeletons" of a grand rocket program that hasn't been needed for centuries), a visit to a sleepy suburb whose citizens have lost the ability to have dreams, a jaunt across the desert with a mad genius in a dune buggy powered by floating box kites, and all kinds of other flabbergasting concepts from this utterly original, utterly addictive world. Along the way, then, McDonald also takes the opportunity to add a good amount of historical backstory to this environment, and even something resembling a three-act actioner plot, both of which were missing from Desolation, including an intriguing thread about the natural symbiosis and thus disdain between the humans who live on the planet's surface and the haughty AI society out in orbit who are needed to keep it all running, and the complicated way this relationship would play itself out after a thousand years of both groups now being there and relying on the other. And that of course is probably the last important thing to know about this book before reading it, that there is a real sense of gravitas to it, a sense of vast amounts of time passing, which is what makes it feel so much weightier than many other so-called "hard SF" tales.

As I often seem to be saying with McDonald's work, Ares Express has turned out to be one of my favorite reads of the year so far, and the only reason it's not receiving a higher score is becuase of a standing policy here at CCLaP, that genre books aren't allowed to score in the 9s unless they're able to transcend their genre, and become a book that even non-fans of that genre will have a chance of obsessively loving. (For example, McDonald's other new novel, The Dervish House, whose write-up is being published here tomorrow, expressly did get a score in the 9s, which should give you a good idea what the main difference is in their subject matter.) Nonetheless, it definitely is the kind of genre novel that usual non-fans of the genre would be wise to take a chance on, the kind of infamous "hey, this sci-fi stuff ain't so bad" title perfect to give your pretentious friend who likes Boing Boing and Lost but scoffs at your "Dragonriders of Pern" collection. Although they may end up scoffing at this too, it's at least worth the effort, a book that will show many for the first time just how artistically savvy science-fiction can be at its best.

Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.9 for science-fiction fans

[Gordie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Già con Desolation Road McDonald mi aveva positivamente stupito e rapito con i suoi personaggi e il suo mondo a dir poco alternativo sul suolo marziano uomoformato da IA trasmutate in Dei e Angeli.
Con questo Ares Express ha confermato la bontà della sua scrittura e della sua sfrenata fantasia: un misto di SF e NewWeird divertentissimi, estremamente ironico e continuamente spiazzante.
Sweetness Octave XII macchinista, la protagonista della storia, storia comunque ricchissima di personaggi incredibili, è una sorta di Alice moderna (avrà pure a che fare con degli specchi riflettenti su universi alternativi) che trascinerà il lettore in luoghi splendidi e altri bizzarri e inimmaginabili, incontrando tutta una serie di personaggi affascinanti e strampalati con cui affronterà un cammino tortuoso, scandito dalle classiche regole narrative, per cercare di salvare il suo mondo e la propria realtà dalla distruzione per mano di un neo-santone fondatore di una pseudo religione creata per corrispondenza.
Le avventure in cui verranno catapultati tutti i personaggi della storia sono incredibili, divertentissime, dal ritmo incalzante da non far staccare il lettore dalle pagine del romanzo e talmente inverosimili da sfociare nella sospensione dell'incredulità sino al più classico dei realismi magici.
Se, come qualcuno mi ha fatto notare, Desolation Road non è altro che "Cent'anni di solitudine" trasferito nel futuro su un altro pianeta, questo Ares Express potrebbe essere paragonato alle avventure di Alice, molto, molto più spettacolari, in un Paese, anzi, un Mondo davvero delle Meraviglie. Straconsigliato!!

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviews from the time when Ares Express was first published in Britain, as well as recent reviews from the United States, expressed admiration for and awe at McDonald's imaginative clout. Critics who had read Desolation Road, his first novel, were also happy to return to that universe. What divided reviewers was McDonald's decision to bend the rules of SF world making to the point where the novel must almost be classified as "magical-realism-with-rivets." Of course, there is a long tradition of such fantastical rule flouting in science fiction, including Ray Bradbury's urtext, The Martian Chronicles. In the end, Ares Express may be less alien to fans of Gabriel García Márquez than to those of Arthur C. Clarke. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"People who live in deserts are either mad, bad, sad or holy."
—Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, p.91

All four types of desert folk and more show up somewhere in Ares Express, Ian McDonald's sequel to his first published novel, Desolation Road (which you really should read before tackling this book, by the way, even though their plots are mostly independent). Ares Express took more than a decade to come out in the U.K., and more than twenty years to arrive in the United States. That's a heck of a long timetable for any train, much less one that's billed as an "Express," but at least it was (mostly) worth the wait.


Whereas Desolation Road focused mostly on the stationary town of its title, Ares Express is always moving—a picaresque journey full of surreal and often pointed encounters, a little something like The Phantom Tollbooth for grownups (though this one is definitely not a work for children).

The book begins with the above-named Sweetness, our protagonist, riding on her family home, the Bethlehem Ares Railroad's fusion-powered express locomotive Catherine of Tharsis, a gigantic rolling habitat that's been circumnavigating Ares since shortly after the "manforming" (sic) of McDonald's magical Red Planet first began. Sweetness and her family have spent their entire lives tending to the great train, and to its (far less significant, to their minds) passengers and freight.

Sweetness would love nothing more than to drive the train someday. She is an Engineer by birth, after all, a member of the Catherine's aristocracy; the rails are in her blood. But her gender prevents her. The rigidly stratified society of trainfolk has no room for a female engineer—even though her brother Sle is far less suited for the job, he will be the one who inherits control of the great Express' drive bar. If Sweetness is lucky, she can look forward to an advantageous marriage to a well-mannered Stuard from another Express.

With a stainless-steel kitchen looming in her future, Sweetness is naturally on the lookout for alternatives...

*

I didn't really like Ares Express quite as much as I did its predecessor, which had the advantages of its fresh setting and McDonald's youthful enthusiasm. The sequel seemed a little too constrained to me, the story too much (you should pardon the expression) on rails, hurtling despite its numerous twists and turns to a foregone conclusion. Part of this impression was due to Sweetness' frequently-stated awareness that she is participating in a narrative. It's a little too meta—she's too aware of her story as a story, an artifice that serves both to distance us from her as a character and to reduce the tension one might otherwise feel at the life-threatening situations she gets into.

There are more lists... one of the more distinctive features of Desolation Road was the frequency of paragraph-long lists of things, the sheer accumulation of commas sometimes creating its own poetry. I called out a particularly impressive example of this in my review of that book. The instances here, though, seemed relatively lackluster.

Ares Express does finally explicitly mention Ares' lower gravity (something I'd waited for but never seen mentioned throughout Desolation Road, in contrast to the frequent reminders about the length of the Martian year)... but not until page 253.


The attitudes towards sex and gender in Ares Express were also rather offputting. From Sweetness' flight from an arranged marriage to the verging-on-homophobic repetition of "butty-boys" and the redundancy of "lesbian dyke" (used as an insult), this 21st-century novel's distressingly retrograde sensibility falls into in the "really should have known better" category... perhaps it's plausible enough, given the regressive social structure on Ares (often labeled in Desolation Road as "Industrial Feudalism"), but it's still sometimes very hard to read.

Ares Express is occasionally even inconsistent about its own history—the World's Greatest Snooker Player was Limaal Mandella, not Rael Jr. But I guess stories do get changed in the telling...

*

Ares Express does spend much of its time (wait for it) off the rails, but the romance of trains still pervades it... and that's enough, or very close to being enough. McDonald doesn't really have to explain this, although his description of the way Arean railroad tracks are made right from the rust-red sands on which they lie does go a long way towards making a planet-spanning rail network seem at least economically plausible. To some extent, and despite their magical trappings, these books do make a stab at being hard science fiction, if that's of importance to you.

The bottom line on Ares Express is that if you liked Desolation Road, as I did, then you'll like this book too—not as much, perhaps, nor as much as you'll probably like McDonald's other work, but despite its flaws I for one still found this novel to be mostly worthwhile.

[Tim Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

McDonald's having fun with this one.

How can you not like a book that starts by saying that nine-year-old Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th wants to drive the giant trains that traverse Mars?

There's some hard science here, some stuff we might as well call magic, and ongoing multi-way battles both physical and political.

As any good SF author should, McDonald rolls out his "let's suppose THIS is possible" -- even if it is a little more far-fetched than most -- and then follows the logic of how those pieces would interact.

I am not sure we need a sequel, but this was fun.

[Simon Mcleish]

This is an early DNF, because of an unexpectedly unpleasant moment early on in the story which I found stomach churning - not a usual reaction for me. Sad, because the first book in this series is one of my all time favourite science fiction novels.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read Desolation Road I had no idea that I was reading a companion novel to Ares Express. Happily, it doesn't matter what order you read them in - there's no spoilers, and only one character in common... who is fairly central to the plot of both, but in ways that work separately for each novel.

Every time I read a new McDonald novel I'm reminded of just how awesome a creator he is. Here, the focus is a young woman born to a train family - they drive trains around Mars, and everything about the family is focused on the train. It's a weird mix of a society, because it's clearly technologically advanced - or at least, there are aspects of that, since they're living on a terraformed planet and they have various tech things that don't exist for us. At the same time, though, there are archaic aspects to the human side, including, sometimes, arranged marriage. Such is the future looming for Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, and she is not having it. And so begins an adventure across Mars that will eventually have enormous repercussions.

The way McDonald gradually reveals his vision of this future world is masterful. There's enough, early on, to understand the basics of society... and then slowly, slowly, enough of the history of the place is revealed that the reader's vision is broadened. It's looking through a keyhole vs eventually looking through a door. But not stepping through that door - there are still lots of tantalising bits that aren't fully explained, which just makes it all the richer.

Sweetness is a great focal character: young, impetuous, smart, unafraid of challenges and usually willing to admit when she needs help. I would have been happy with an entire novel focused on her. But McDonald adds Grandmother Taal, and I love her to bits. Old ladies being feisty, taking up the slack when the younger generation is being a bit useless, fearless and clever and willing to meddle: she's everything I love.

One of the great things about writing a middle-future novel where there's been some loss of tech for whatever reason is that, despite being over 20 years old now, it still gets to feel vital and believable and not at all outdated. Ares Express is magnificent.

[Ralph Palm · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few brief thoughts:
-This book is very, very funny. The jokes are very well integrated into the characterization and plot, in such a way that it is difficult to quote them out of context. I tried to repeat the jokes to people, because they are so thoroughly excellent, only to find that they required too much set-up to be funny second hand. I have decided this 'not funny second hand' will be a virtue.
-There are metafictional elements to the novel which are quite weak, and are the only thing which stopped me from giving 5 stars. The problem (I have only just now realized) is that metafiction is necessarily expository, rather than descriptive. In a science fictional context, this kind of exposition produces the fatal 'Old Man Explaining to Young Person What's Going On' thing which is a boredom unto death.
-Also, the metafiction reads as if the author felt guilty about writing what might be seen as a conventional picaresque adventure story and so he felt the need to have the characters nod and wink at the reader, to let us know that he knew this was all a bit silly and fun. I'm of a different opinion: if you are going to be silly, be silly. Narratively speaking, once you chose your path, never apologize for it. Ever.
-I could go into more detail on these points, but I've got stuff to do. If you like well-wrought, imaginary worlds populated with clever ideas and fully realized characters and unrepeatable jokes about such things as two thirds of a posh frock or a half eaten romance novel, then *Ares Express* is for you.

[Suz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desolation Road was about a town. Ares Express is about a person. I hate to talk about another book too much in a review, but these books are very similar, and Ares is a quasi-sequel. It’s not necessary to read Desolation Road first, but you will catch a few cameos and other things in this book with that background.. They’re both very beautiful, both very lyrical. However Ares Express is just better. It doesn’t suffer from the sudden jarring of character, it doesn’t (excuse the term) go off the rails.

This book is all about Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. A 9 year old (in Mars years) girl who wants to run a train. But she can’t, because the controls of the train (which generations live on), will go to her brother, because the controls are passed father to son. Then her train/family tries to marry her off to a Stuard on another train and she leaves, making her own destiny rather than being subjected to what her mini-society expects.

Our plucky hero has a story with zombie-like towns, a cult-personality (and, well, the cult itself), mad politicians, angels, slavers, and free-children. It’s a great story with lots of vibrant imagery, great characters, and wonderful action.

This has everything I loved reading in Desolation Road, and none of the things I didn’t. Great story. Great ride.

[Psychophant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not a sequel to Desolation Road. However it takes place in the same Mars and has many references to it, including cameos by the usual suspects.

It has some of the sense of wonder and imagination of that book, but much subdued. Explanations kill the magic effect, and there are too many explanations in this book, so it moves from Magic to bad Space Opera. The focus on one character and breaking the fourth wall at times weaken the effect, and the excessive use of Deus ex machina solutions, even if tongue in cheek, dillute the emotions vested.

Only McDonald's descriptive ability and his excellent view for predicting credible future developments give this book a third star. If there had been no links to Desolation Road I would have liked the book much more, as comparisons hurt this book more.

[Dan's]

Quick reference notes:

This book is The Wild West on Mars. Trains, petticoats, parasols, traveling extravaganzas, etc. It's not necessary to have read DESOLATION ROAD, you can understand this as a stand-alone.

There are a lot of fun and interesting concepts here: Siamese twins, ghosts, alternate dimensions, gambling for years of life, and time travel.

Sweetness is a strong and likeable character, and her tough-as-nails grandmother, Taal, is a joy to read about. She uses her feisty old woman role to get her way and fearlessly travels far and wide to find her runaway bride of a granddaughter.

[irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

una storia che gioca con l'essere una storia. uomoformazione, universi paralleli, intelligenze artificiali, caste e tribù un po' cyberpunk un po' Douglas Adams. immaginifico, divertente, avvincente. ambientato nello stesso mondo di Desolation Road, parecchio tempo dopo.

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toda la magia de Desolation Road de nuevo. Gracias Sr. McDonald.

[Simina · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first I wondered if I was being unfair and comparing this book too much with Desolation Road which was in a league of its own. But no. Ares express has everything I love about Ian McDonald, and everything that annoys me about him also.
The good parts: the worldbuilding and atmosphere, which echoes Desolation Road but not quite. McDonald is one of those lucky few writers who are masters at creating living breathing locations, and his Mars feels alive and lived in. I loved the lookback to Desolation Road, through the description of the desert town, and I also loved the chapter with the town of people who could no longer dream because it reminded me of a short story Ray Bradbury would write. A lot of the story was fun and clearly not to be taken seriously.
And this is where the problems started. Yes, it's not t be taken seriously. It's supposed to be a parody of sci-fi adventures stories (or fantasy adventure stories, too), especially those with resourceful heroines who get into a lot of trouble and always manage to get out in the nick of time unscathed (the classic "Mary Sue", and I suppose it's intended for Sweetness to be one, but I still liked her and thought she was a fun character). So I get the parody angle, it's just that McDonald reminds us of this every chapter whenever Sweetness thinks of what happens in these kinds of stories. Metafiction is fine in small doses. After a while it gets annoying. Couple that with action scenes you can hardly follow, that are excessively lengthy and make you lose your focus and McDonald's weird brand of violence and eroticisms that don't really advance the plot but seem more there to shock the reader (it didn't, it just bored me.).
So I suppose this left me with mixed feelings. It's a good book, it just could have been better if McDonald decided to just write a fun story and didn't decide halfway through that he was not taking this seriously anymore.

[Marco Landi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un impianto narrativo fantascientifico davvero bello.. un continuo sense of wonder in cui la creatività geniale dell'autore trova tutte le sue infinite dimensioni.. con alcuni innesti di stampo più fantasioso che scientifico, ma molto piacevoli.. nella parte centrale ha una 70ina abbondante di pagine in più che rallenta in modo un po' ridondante la narrazione, ma poi si riprende per un finale davvero ben fatto.. una vena ironica percorre il tutto e alleggerisce la storia.. molto meglio di Desolation Road, prequel molto dispersivo.. questo è il McDonald che adoro

[AJ Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun ride, but I think seriously enjoying McDonald's writing and the Desolation Road universe are a definite prerequisites. I wouldn't have thought I'd be such a fan of the idea of massive trains on Mars, but dammit McDonald hasn't sucked me in. Sweetness was a pretty awesome character... capturing someone so "full of life" is rarely done so convincingly.

[Francis X DuFour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the future?

Looking for bizarre futuristic societies? You got it! Amazing terrestrial and space-born technology? It’s in there! Battles over the very existence of human life? You bet! Along with totally unexpected other dimensional twists and turns in the very original plot, this is a fun book to read. True Ian McDonald style and oddness!

[Jeffrey Doten · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love beautiful clever books and this may well be one, but it's making me work far too hard for the payout. I've read McDonald before and knew this might happen, but there are the times that it doesn't, so you just never know...

[CJ Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

Juggles some interesting ideas but never settles down long enough to really make an impact anywhere. Very fitting given the subject matter that the book feels like something very powerful speeding right past you without impacting anything.

[Chris Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

So like a semi-sequel to Desolation Road. Same setting, hints at past characters and events, but a very very different book. This follows one main storyline throughout, which does get complicated, but is definitely cool. I mean, trains on Mars! What’s not to like about that?

[Greg M · Rating 3 out of 5]

5-star ideas/story/ideas/world building; 1-star writing style . . . An absolute chore trying to adjust to McDonald's rambling. I remember loving Desolation Road. I have to go back and read that again to see if the writing was different or the way I'm reading has changed.

[C. Steinmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspirational.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very long journey which could have done with more express (pace and brevity). Ambitious. Fabulous. Entertaining. Irritating. Meta. Bit of a slog at times. Some really good bits.

[Romana · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy things, such as Trains, Dystopias, and unconventional-ness, this is for you.

[Niall519 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colourful is about right. I came to this without having read 'Desolation Road' first, which may have increased the feeling of just being dropped into a whacky and and frenetic far-future Mars. I'll have to see what I think again, if I do manage to give 'Desolation Road' a go.

The whole tone was very different from the only other book I've read of McDonald's to date: 'King of Morning, Queen of Day', and yet the oddball lyricism remains. This one, however, put me more in mind of Charles Stross or Iain M. Banks, or even China Mieville at a small stretch; rather than Alan Garner and Tennyson. No bad thing, but a very different experience, and somehow still just as dreamlike as his previous work.

I loved the colour and the absurdity, and (as stated) the sense of just being dropped into something riotous and new. The protagonist is amusing, and the support cast probably even better illustrated than Sweetness Octave herself, although with her only being roughly 17 in Earth years, most have the advantage of her in age and the capacity to develop ludicrous skills and backstories. Grandmother Taal, in particular shone for me, and would be a worthy opponent to Pratchett's witches.

The problem for me was that, with the density of the syntax and imagery, it turned out to be a bit of a slog. Good as a mental endurance workout, but also taking an annoyingly long time to wade through, and impossible to speed-read at all. Not a problem in isolation, but when I only have so many minutes in the day to devote to a world of speculative fiction it crowds out other things I want to read as well.

Now that I've been introduced to some of McDonald's more recent work and perhaps have a better idea of what to expect in terms of style and how long a book might take me, I'm eager to pick up some of his other SF.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, just....Wow! That's a lot of amazing book right there! I'm gobemouched, as McDonald repeatedly caused his characters to be! This is some magnificent world-building, so dense and beautifully unfolding.
I have to say you'd almost be better off reading this before Desolation Road. In that book, the big background was filled in too slowly; a picture of the larger world became clear in fits and starts. This book was more straightforward even though it still built up gradually.
Great characters in this book, too!
If you've ever read John Varleys Eight Worlds stories, you will love the vision of Mars in the book! Particularly, the roofed over Grand Valley reminded me of Mozartplatz in Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo...but on steroids!
Ian McDonald is, hands down, firmly in my Top Five authors of this genre. His other books left me equally stunned and delighted.
One odd bit that I had chalked up to a weird conceit was the fact that all the characters were so weirdly young. Referring to characters as 9 and 10 years old was casually slipped in but it became strange to think of this whole society consisting of super mature children!
I had accepted this notion in Desolation Road and was halfway through Ares Express before I realized the Martian year is twice as long, therefore doubling everyone's age! Although, it's in my nature to congratulate myself on my cleverness, such self-accolades were muted since it took me so damn long!
One other thing: the Furniture Folk? Not as imaginary as you would like to think. This has basis in fact...the excesses of the Lords of Earth are worse than you fine simple folk can dream!

[Vasha7 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a big, colorful, exuberant adventure story, with the energy and sense of mission of its seventeen-Earth-year-old protagonist; it has inventiveness in plenty, and rejoices in it.

We are on a Mars that's been made habitable, but by art not evolution. Implausible things happen constantly, in fact many events seem like magic, but it's really Sufficiently Advanced Technology. AIs that can manipulate the quantum structure of the world shape reality nearly as they wish, but I imagine there must be limits on their power; after all, things are not quite chaotic, they do have a certain skewed logic, and internal consistency within local patches. The artificial nature of the world might explain the oddly retro nature of the decor -- pop culture seems taken straight from various parts of the 20th century but especially the 1950s (global, though, not just U.S.) It could reproduce chunks of the past if it's implanted rather than evolved. That would (sort of) explain the presence of the Glen Miller Band, which seems to be the actual Glen Miller Band.

I know the author has some thematic reasons for what he chooses to write, he's not just having fun -- but he's having fun too. The whole thing is extremely self-conscious about being Story (the main character ticking off when she goes through the major plot arc points), which may be a reflection on what things would be like if we really could manipulate reality by its quantum structure.