At long last available stateside , Ian McDonald ’s Ares Express is a phantasmagoria of nuclear locomotives and raging Martian awesomeness . It ’s a definite must - read .
In an unimaginably removed future Mars has been terraformed by machines so powerful that they ’re understood as ( and might as well be ) angel . Across the Martian comeuppance , enormous trains carry passenger , resource , and factory . These trains are so huge that they ’re efficaciously societies of their own , with their own peculiar custom and stiffly discrete societal strata – the locomotive functionaries , like engine driver and Stuards and Deep - Fusion tenders , are more like kin than they are like job . From the great train Catherine of Tarsis , Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey - roll Asiim Engineer 12th fly an arranged marriage and lurch into a harebrained risky venture on which the hereafter of Martian civilisation depend .
bouquet ’ heroic journey across the Martian landscape painting expose a sprawling world engineered by Macdonald ’s keen social middle fearsome imagination . bouquet journey to Town where the inhabitant have lost their dream , to place that exist only probabilistically , to the cities of the Grand Valley – a rupture that extends a stern of the way across Mars and is entirely cover by a roof made of diamond . It is a Mars that is saturated in impossible far - future technology and still a culture that most intimately resemble former 19th or early 20th century America . There is a good sense of greatness to its empty wasteland , a kind of pioneerism to towns like Solid Gone that cling to the edges of uninhabitable desert . It is a earth of magic and superstitious notion , in which the people are so far outpaced by the skill that permit their bread and butter that it ’s been sublimate into faith .
McDonald does some remarkable things with Ares Express . From the outset , Sweetness herself understand that she is an constituent in a story , protect by the Narrative Laws of the Universe . Yet , despite her sometimes unmixed sentience about what part of the news report she ’s in – even when she ’s in The dot of Worst Personal Threat , and knows that coincidence and serendipity will ill-treat in to relieve her – McDonald never short the story on dramatic tenseness .
It is true that many heroic tale surveil similar patterns of game and action , and despite the fact that we have it away this , we still advert on the border of our tooshie at the tense parts , we ’re still go by sad part , still energized by the Heron ’s brilliant flip-flop of circumstances . Macdonald has , somehow , made this tacit awareness of the rules of story explicit without sacrificing any of the experience of reading .
Much of this residuum on the indefatigable charm of plucky young Sweetness herself : a canny , tough , frankly sexual heroine that never descends into the clichés that those characteristics invite . Though much of the account involve matter happening to her or around her , as she endeavors to recuperate the ghost of her conjoined matching sis ( separated bodily since nascency , but always present in nearby mirrors ) , Sweetness ’ natural selection in the expression of Mars ’ curiousness is never less than compelling .
McDonald is what is more an sinful stylist . His prose is clear and limpid , and at once both beautiful and playful . There is an inescapable sense that Macdonald enjoys playing with words , building prose like intricate clock , which can prevail completely on their knockout , regardless of their subject . look at , as Sweetness ’ grandmother sample to secure service for her grandchild from a pair of postal shop assistant at a run - down post - office in the Martian waste :
Grandmother Taal ’s plea hit a stratum of institutionalised incest annealed to the back of the siblings ’ eyes and abounced , like moonring - gleam from a star - struck bozo . Berya ’s hand seize the stamp like a dramatic snake , annul it to knock down . Laventine barely wrestled him back to the ink pad .
This intricacy extends to the wide social system of the taradiddle itself ; “ kaleidoscopic ” is a word often thrown around in reviews of epical fiction , but it ’s all appropriate here : the fractured elements from which the plot grow organize themselves as the lecturer ’s view broadens . McDonald introduces more and more with every pageboy , but far from exit characters and ideas hang out to dry , they reveal themselves as inbuilt parts of his increasingly - larger narrative . In this respectfulness , it resembles an energetic , brightly colored Book of the New Sun , and for it Macdonald utterly deserves golden comparing to Gene Wolfe .
The Mars of Ares Express is not at all a hard - SF Mars ; readers looking for in - depth give-and-take of the titanic cognitive process by which the barren Mars could be reshaped into a inhabitable Earth will be disappointed . It is also a Mars that is full of magic and superstition , and one that never in full clarifies just how genuine that magic is , where it comes from , and whether or not it ’s simply Clarke ’s sufficiently advanced skill . MacDonald eshews the limitations that hard - SF imposes , to instead construct a paean to all possible red planets , a story that conform to a gloriously slippery path through the many conceptions of Mars that lit has woven over the geezerhood . It is a Mars that is , above all , a Mars of the imagination .
A net tone : Ares Express is actually the subsequence to Desolation Road , which I had n’t read and did n’t realize until I was already eat up this one . If there was some information add in Desolation Road that was required to understand Ares Express , I never noticed its absence . Based solely on how great Ares Express is , I ’d recommend reading both , but I do n’t think it count where you start .
Ares Express is available now fromPyr account book .
Chris Braak is editor of lit & religious cult / ure blogThreat Quality Press , and emperor of the moonshine in expatriate . His credentials , accomplishments , and accolades , are too legion to list .
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