Thursday, April 8, 2010

Cover art - "Ares Express" by Ian McDonald

This week-end the cover made by Stephan Martiniere for the edition published by Pyr of the Ian McDonald’s novel, “Desolation Road”, won a BSFA Award for 2009 Best Artwork. As I mentioned yesterday I love this cover artwork and it was one of my favorite 2009 covers, so I was happy to see it win the BSFA Award. I was also very happy to see that Stephan Martiniere made another cover for a Pyr edition of a novel by Ian McDonald, “Ares Express”, released this month. And as “Ares Express” takes place in the future of Ian McDonald’s “Desolation Road” I love that the artwork follows the same lines and that Stephan Martiniere used the same colors in general, colors that worked their magic on me from the cover of “Desolation Road”.

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colorful, witty SF novel, taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express 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.

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