re:mote voices

Title: Ares Express
Author: Ian McDonald
Publisher:Simon & Schuster

Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th is 12th generation Engineer. One of the track dynasties, the families that keep the trains running across Mars. The Stuards who serve the passengers, the Deep-fusion people who keep the fusion engines running, and the Engineer who drive the trains. Sweetness lives on the St. Catherine of Tharsis, and dreams desperately of getting a chance to drive the train. But daughters don’t drive.

At age 8 (in Martian years), Sweetness finds her life thrown into upheaval. A trackside prophet predicts engagement, but not marriage at the same time, unbeknownst to Sweetness, her family are negotiating her marriage to a Stuard. But Sweetness has ambition, and a confidence that there is more to life than being married to kitchen staff, even if they do have a stainless steel kitchen, so she runs away. Unfortunately she soon meets Devastation Harx, the head of a mail order church, their run in ending with her losing her most precious asset to the scheming church leader. An asset that Sweetness must retrieve or else Mars will be plunged into War.

To some extent Ares Express is a follow up to Ian McDonald’s earlier novel Desolation Road. Though the Mars presented can also be considered as being an alternate version of McDonald’s idea of Mars. At the core of Ares Express are the AI’s and 11 dimensional quantum mathematics – math being used to form reality from possibility, plucking a manformed Mars from versions that might come to pass.

This makes reality a tenuous concept, one that McDonald experiments with. Partly to emphasize and explore the idea further, McDonald takes the idea of reality being malleable a step further, with the idea of narrative as reality. Sweetness is conscious of the fact that from the point she meets the green man, the trackside prophet, she has become a part of a story, and as such comes to embrace the rules of the story to her own advantage. This gives the science fiction novel that is Ares Express an edge, a veneer of magic realism.

Sweetness as a character is, in her own words, “the feisty and resourceful (but cute with it) heroine”, and lots of fun with that. To a degree Desolation Road was about place, and following the story of place – ranging through generations, the rise and fall of a town. Fiction that takes that kind of approach can have a distancing effect, as you don’t always feel the same relationship to a place as people. Ares Express has much of the eccentric colour of Desolation Road, but is much more character driven, and with that I enjoyed Ares Express more.

An extract from Ares Express can be found on the Infinity Plus site.