UK's Gollancz reprints Paul McAuley’s 1992 novel Red Dust

United Kingdom publishing imprint Gallancz, a division of Orion Books, has reprinted Red Dust (1992), a novel written by British science fiction author and botanist Paul J. McAuley. "A fast-paced manga-style story of a revolution on a terraformed Mars that's slowly dying, and dominated by a capitalist version of mainland Chinese culture," here is a more formal description of Red Dust, taken from the website of Amazon UK:

Mars, 600 years in the future, is dying. Five hundred years after the Chinese conquered the Red Planet, the great work of terraforming is failing. The human-machine Consensus of Earth had persuaded the AI Emperor to follow the Golden Path into a vast virtual reality universe, leaving behind an ungoverned planet swept by hunger riots and the beginnings of civil war. Enter Wei Lee, a lowly itinerant agricultural technician: rock 'n' roll fan, dupe, holy fool - and unlikely Messiah. After stumbling on an anarchist pilot hiding near the wreckage of her spacecraft, he's drawn into a revolutionary plot that has been spinning for decades. With the help of a ghost, the broadcasts of the King of the Cats, a Yankee yak herder, and a little Girl God, Lee travels across the badlands, swampy waterways and vast dust seas to a showdown at the summit of the biggest volcano in the Solar System. Not even the God-like Consensus can predict the outcome of his struggle to define his own destiny.

Interestingly, McAuley explained the genesis and writing of Red Dust in a May 2009 post on his blog, Unlikely Worlds.

[via John DeNardo of SF Signal]