Pyr unveils cover for reprint of Ian McDonald’s 2001 novel Ares Express

The cover for Pyr’s forthcoming reprint of British SF author Ian McDonald’s novel Ares Express (2001) is posted on Amazon. The follow-up to McDonald’s Desolation Road (1988; Pyr, 2009), Ares Express is scheduled to be released in April 2010. Here’s a description of the novel:

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colourful, 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.

Pictured: Pyr reprint of Ares Express (April 2010).

[via John DeNardo of SF Signal]