Just Finished Reading: Fairyland by Paul J McAuley

Alex Sharkey is in trouble – deep trouble. Unable to pay his protection to the local Mob boss and being threatened by the police to provide evidence against him he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. But then the Mob boss offers him a way to pay off all of his debt in one go. Jumping at the deal Alex agrees to bio-engineer a synthetic hormone that turns sexless artificial dolls into fully functional fairies. This is the world of mid-21^st Century Europe where nano-technology and bio-engineering has allowed anyone with the necessary equipment to produce tailored viruses capable of just about anything. It is a world where a company enhanced child tricks Sharkey into producing the first of a new race capable of its own reproduction, a race just as smart as man in many ways but without moral scruple. Travelling across a barely recognisable Europe Alex tries to put the genie back in the bottle the he and Milena released. But she has other plans both for her co-creation and for Alex.

This is both a very good and seriously strange novel. It is also one of the best almost-cyberpunk novels I’ve read. Concentrating on the impact of biotechnology, rather that computer technology, it considers what would happen if tomorrow’s hackers could hack the genome of any creature they have access to – including humanity itself. Where hackers, rather than hiding in their bedrooms breaking into computers on the other side of the world, break into the double helix in their bathrooms and produce viruses who function are only limited by their imaginations. It is both a deeply disturbing and fascinating world picture and certainly one I would not like to live in – though I suspect people living 100+ years ago would find our present day reality equally horrifying!

I’ve read a few of McAuley’s works now and have been singularly impressed by his power to create fully realised believable characters living in deeply complex rich worlds. Not only did I recognise places mentioned both in London and Paris I was shocked by how different they had ‘become’ in the future and no matter how strange things got – and they got very strange from time to time – the incidents in the book were always believable. The only thing I would have to recommend you do with this book is approach it with a very open mind. I have been reading SF now for over 30 years and this still managed to really mess with my head. SF, even after all that time, is still by far my mind altering drug of choice and books like this one are the LSD of the SF world. One more thing: this book is not for the faint of heart or the easily disturbed. I think of myself as very open-minded about most things but I have to admit that this book did manage to raise a few eyebrows here and there. It’s often violent, contains some graphic sex and some definitely disturbing images. It is however very well written and very thought provoking. If you feel in the mood to really blow your mind then I can heartily recommend this book to do that for you.