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. REVIEWS “Ares Express is a long, adventure-filled, extravagantly colorful, often funny, quite moving, highly imaginative, excellently written story, set on a glorious Mars built partly of sharp-edged Kim Stanley Robinson-style extrapolation, but mostly of lush, loving, Ray Bradbury-style semi-SF, semi-Fantasy, Martian dreams.... I loved it wholeheartedly.” – SF Site “Hugo-winner McDonald’s virtues have long been underappreciated by major North American publishers... McDonald’s fantastic Mars is vividly detailed and owes much to Bradbury’s Martian stories. Despite a bit of hand waving around technology that is glibly indistinguishable from magic, this sequel is entirely worthy of its rightly lauded predecessor [Desolation Road].” – Publishers Weekly “One of the strangest, weirdest, fantastic reads of your life.” – SF Crowsnest “McDonald is clever, lyrical... snarky, and utterly wondrous. The characters would be completely unbelievable in our world, but in theirs they are inevitable...” – Night Owl Reviews

Orbital 2100 is a science fiction setting for Cepheus Engine and other Classic 2D6 SF RPGs. It has realistic (TL 9) feel that is set within our own solar system. The Earth is locked in a Cold War with the people of Luna. Both face off, 400,000 km apart, threatening mutual annihilation whilst they compete to colonise the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Older colonies such as Mars and Mercury are independent and caught up in this struggle for solar system supremacy. Spacecraft use nuclear thermal rockets and create gravity by spinning pods or centrifuges, this is spaceflight as envisaged today! In keeping with the near-future and hard-science fiction themes, role-playing campaigns focus on real people doing real jobs. The game has rules, technology and advice to allow scenarios based around deep space haulage, asteroid mining, salvage, rescue and exploration. Colour cover, with B&W interior. Claim a free copy of the full colour PDF by contacting Zozer: https: //www.paulelliottbooks.com/contact.html