Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : M : McAuley, Paul J.

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In Dreams
Four Hundred Billion Stars

Paul J. McAuley
Child Of The River (Confluence)

Paul J. McAuley
Eternal Light

Paul J. McAuley

With this, his third novel, Paul J. McAuley stopped being merely promising and entered the front rank of British SF authors. The galactic backdrop already visited in his earlier books Four Hundred Billion Stars and Secret Harmonies here opens out at huge and exhilarating scale. Our galaxy is infested with quarrelling factions of the irrationally hostile alien Alea, against whose colonies the crumbling and partly decadent human Federation wages a depressing, genocidal war of self-defence. Now an anomalous star travelling at daunting speed has arrived from the galactic core and offers rapid wormhole transit to the centre--where ambitious Alea are building the most gigantic habitats in SF, hyperstructures light-years across. This project's use of energies from outside the universe endangers the cosmos: "Something is rubbing the fabric of space-time thin enough to allow creation to shine through." Only pure mathematical weaponry supplied by advanced "angels" from a fractal reality can stop the unravelling of space. But the ramshackle human mission to the core is beset by strife, religious fanaticism, greed and mutiny, and looks set for bloody failure even before the Alea unleash their own superweapon. A rich, crowded novel that combines exotic descriptions, slam-bang action and a mind-blowing secret history of the universe. --David Langford
Ancients of Days: The Second Book of Confluence

Paul J. McAuley
Child of the River: The First Book of Confluence (Confluence Trilogy)

Paul J. McAuley
Shrine of Stars (Confluence Trilogy)

Paul J. McAuley

Paul McAuley's Confluence trilogy seemed in its first volume, Child of the River, to be taking the reader through radically new spins on some fairly standard fantasy tropes: the hero Yama was found as an infant, floating in a container on a vast and mysterious river, acquired a magic sword and set out, reluctantly on his travels. He acquires a shrewd rat-boy squire and a wolfish barbarian warrior mistress, Tamora; gradually we realise that his exotic world is more rational than it seems. In the sequel, Ancients of Days, he discovers strange powers, and is pursued through a vast city, and down the river, by an inexorable enemy. Now, in Shrine of Stars, Tamora is dead, his squire is left behind, and Yama is a prisoner, not just of the sinister Doctor Dimas, but inside his own body:

"It was as if Yama's self was an island or castle of light surrounded by a restless flood of darkness both malevolent and sentient. Not only was it rising, but it was constantly sending out stealthy filaments and tentacles, constantly probing for weaknesses. Yama felt that if he gave way to it for a moment...then he would dissolve at once, like a flake of salt dropped in the Great River."
The Confluence trilogy is not fantasy at all, but sense-of-wonder science fiction revisited; McAuley gives us standard SF obsessions of the90s like nanotechnology, cosmology and the uplift of new intelligent species, but presents them not as ideas, but as lived sensuous realities. Shrine of Stars is the perfect end to a trilogy, a third volume that forces us to rethink, and reread, earlier volumes. --Roz Kaveney
Ancients of Days (Confluence Trilogy)

Paul J. McAuley
Little Machines

Paul J. McAuley
Pasquale's Angel

Paul J. McAuley

In his fifth SF novel, the versatile Paul McAuley turns from outer space to alternate history and a 16th-century Florence where many of the strange, wonderful devices sketched in the notebooks of the "Great Engineer", Leonardo da Vinci, have been built and made to work. The skies of Italy are darkened with sulphurous smog from Industrial Revolution factories, crude engines throb loudly everywhere, and steam-powered automobiles chug along the streets. Young artist Pasquale--threatened like other painters by Leonardo's latest invention of photography-- finds himself working hand in glove with cynical journalist Niccolo Machiavegli on the investigation of a locked-room murder which is one small symptom of the corruption at the heart of this transformed Florence. Michelangelo, Raphael, Aretino, Copernicus and other historical notables are entangled in events, while ancient Leonardo's now ageing toy-boy Salai plays a sinister part. War with Spain looms, and one particular creation of the Engineer must be kept out of enemy hands. This rearranged history is plausibly and cleverly developed, climaxing with a set-piece assault on the mansion of a supposed magician, using some eccentric state-of-the-art war machines. But Pasquale's art is more important to him than any technology, and McAuley persuades us to sympathize with his private goals. A satisfying read. --David Langford
Red Dust

Paul J. McAuley
The Secret of Life

Paul J. McAuley
Of the Fall

Paul J. McAuley
Fairyland

Paul J. McAuley

Having already made the final shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award with his SF novels Eternal Light and Pasquale's Angel, Paul McAuley finally won this coveted prize with Fairyland. The title's hint of fey fantasy is blackly ironic: this is a streetwise cyberpunk future, replete with gene-hacking, instant designer drugs, and mind-warping viruses that function as "love bugs" or "loyalty plagues". One spinoff of genetic tailoring is a slave race of blue-fleshed "dolls", modified baboons made bright enough to do society's dirty jobs--until they're liberated by the unholy alliance of an idealistic child prodigy and a biologically savvy nerd, boosting them to thinking, evolving, breeding "fairies". And indeed the night becomes full of unwholesome magic and fanged terrors again, as this new race steps into the old mythological niche of the dark elves, attacking venomously from the trees and setting up their private fairyland in the decayed remains of a certain Magic Kingdom outside Paris... Though occasionally obscure and not quite plausible in all its plot details, Fairyland is a creepily effective nightmare of a world becoming increasingly chaotic under the stress of runaway biotechnologies, excessively deadly toys in the hands of people with no more common sense than children. Vivid and viscerally compelling. --David Langford
The King of the Hill

Paul J. McAuley
Red Dust

Paul J. McAuley
Little Machines

Paul J. McAuley
Fairyland

Paul J. McAuley

Having already made the final shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award with his SF novels Eternal Light and Pasquale's Angel, Paul McAuley finally won this coveted prize with Fairyland. The title's hint of fey fantasy is blackly ironic: this is a streetwise cyberpunk future, replete with gene-hacking, instant designer drugs, and mind-warping viruses that function as "love bugs" or "loyalty plagues". One spinoff of genetic tailoring is a slave race of blue-fleshed "dolls", modified baboons made bright enough to do society's dirty jobs--until they're liberated by the unholy alliance of an idealistic child prodigy and a biologically savvy nerd, boosting them to thinking, evolving, breeding "fairies". And indeed the night becomes full of unwholesome magic and fanged terrors again, as this new race steps into the old mythological niche of the dark elves, attacking venomously from the trees and setting up their private fairyland in the decayed remains of a certain Magic Kingdom outside Paris... Though occasionally obscure and not quite plausible in all its plot details, Fairyland is a creepily effective nightmare of a world becoming increasingly chaotic under the stress of runaway biotechnologies, excessively deadly toys in the hands of people with no more common sense than children. Vivid and viscerally compelling. --David Langford
Making History

Paul J. McAuley
Shrine of Stars:: The Third Book of Confluence (Confluence Trilogy)

Paul J. McAuley

Paul McAuley's Confluence trilogy seemed in its first volume, Child of the River, to be taking the reader through radically new spins on some fairly standard fantasy tropes: the hero Yama was found as an infant, floating in a container on a vast and mysterious river, acquired a magic sword and set out, reluctantly on his travels. He acquires a shrewd rat-boy squire and a wolfish barbarian warrior mistress, Tamora; gradually we realise that his exotic world is more rational than it seems. In the sequel, Ancients of Days, he discovers strange powers, and is pursued through a vast city, and down the river, by an inexorable enemy. Now, in Shrine of Stars, Tamora is dead, his squire is left behind, and Yama is a prisoner, not just of the sinister Doctor Dimas, but inside his own body:

"It was as if Yama's self was an island or castle of light surrounded by a restless flood of darkness both malevolent and sentient. Not only was it rising, but it was constantly sending out stealthy filaments and tentacles, constantly probing for weaknesses. Yama felt that if he gave way to it for a moment...then he would dissolve at once, like a flake of salt dropped in the Great River."
The Confluence trilogy is not fantasy at all, but sense-of-wonder science fiction revisited; McAuley gives us standard SF obsessions of the90s like nanotechnology, cosmology and the uplift of new intelligent species, but presents them not as ideas, but as lived sensuous realities. Shrine of Stars is the perfect end to a trilogy, a third volume that forces us to rethink, and reread, earlier volumes. --Roz Kaveney