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Review - Fairyland - Paul McAuley

Science authors' favourites - Brian Clegg

It's always a risky business writing about 'our world a little way into the future'. For all its originality and accolades, 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, was terrible at this. In other cases, the picture isn't 'right' but it still works - for example with John Brunner' Shockwave Rider, based on the predictions of Alvin Toffler's classic non-fiction futurology Future Shock.

What's striking about the dystopian, drug-ridden future of Paul McAuley's Fairyland is that it is still as stunning today as it was when it was written back in 1995. What is also remarkable is that, even though it is a fairly dark and dismal story - and the 'hero' Alex Sharkey is not exactly the most appealing of characters - it remains an enjoyable and entertaining read. It's dark without being depressing.

McAuley makes superb use of extensions of biological concepts, from viruses and nanostructures designed to modify our sensations and beliefs to manufactured sub-human creatures called dolls that are subverted by a genetically enhanced little girl to become the hypnotically strange fairies. For a lot of the book Sharkey is driven by a geas, desperately searching for the girl who captivated him so many years before (perhaps the urge is chemically induced - he isn't sure and doesn't care).

The book is divided into three sections - the second and third aren't quite as satisfying as the first, in that the book would probably benefited from a single point of view, and we stray more later on. It's also fair to say that some of the concepts later on, involving a pair of human beings being mentally absorbed into the internet are a bit confusing. Even so there's huge fascination in the way McAuley spins the storyline and the book piles on superb original ideas on future ways we could misuse our minds and bodies.

As far as I can see this book is out of print (though plenty of copies are available from Amazon Marketplace using the link) - this is a crime. It's a true classic.

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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