Desolation Road (Desolation Road Universe #1):

It all began thirty years ago on Mars, with a greenperson. But by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every conceivable abnormality from Adam Black's Wonderful Travelling Chautauqua and Educational 'Stravaganza (complete with its very own captive angel) to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar.

Its inhabitants ranged from Dr. Alimantando, the town's founder and resident genius, to the Babooshka, a barren grandmother who just wants her own child-grown in a fruit jar; from Rajendra Das, mechanical hobo who has a mystical way with machines to the Gallacelli brothers, identical triplets who fell in love with-and married-the same woman.

Drunken Dragon Press - Signed Limited Edition

Ian McDonald:

Ares Express (Desolation Road Universe #2):

Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's "Desolation Road," this novel 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.

Earthlight - First Edition Hardcover

British Science Fiction Award nominee 1992.

The Land is the last remaining province of a decaying Empire, separated from it by a vast river. For millennia the Land has been blessed by biotechnology – everything, from housing to transportation, is organically grown, while the dead, absorbed in Ancestor Trees, form a vast information net, the Dreaming.

Such a place should be a paradise, but the Land is troubled, divided by religious conflict between Proclaimer and Confessor, and by political conflict between the forces of the Emperor and those, like the warriors of Destiny, who would see the land free of the technocratic Imperial yoke.

When conflict comes to the small town of Chepsenyt, Mathembe Fileli and her family are made refugees. In her teens, Mathembe has never spoken, by choice. Now she finds herself embarking on a journey into the unknown with her parents, her rebellious brother and the head of her irascible Grandfather, as vociferous in death as he had been in life. One by one, the family is split up and Mathembe is finally alone. She sets out to find them, a small mute girl in a world of glory, squalor and terror. Her journey through countryside and teeming city, through refugee camps and down the great River forms a compulsive story, atmospheric, lyrical and moving.

Stunning (albeit sunfaded) art by Jim Burns.

Gollancz  First Edition - Hardcover