Cory Doctorow praises Ian McDonald’s Out on Blue Six. McDonald’s a great writer, and you should also seek out Terminal Cafe, set in LA after nanotechnology allows the resurrection of the dead, and told from the point of view of several people (undead and living) on the eve of the Day of the Dead. His two Martian novels: Desolation Road and Ares Express treat super science (AIs and nanotechnology) as magical realism from the point of view of the colonists.
One of the glories of the Mars books is the look at Indian railroad culture. In the novels, Indians migrated to Mars, and they run the huge steam locomotives, the size of ocean liners, with a Tokamak instead of a oil-fired boiler.
Now if we can get Mayfair Games to publish Mars Rails…