Evening's Empires by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
It's been fifteen hundred years since The Quiet War, and the evening's empires, as Bob Dylan put it, "have returned into sand." The
once solar-system encompassing civilization has fractured and decayed, leaving a multitude of smaller communities living amongst the
ruins. Gajananvihari Pilot, better known as Hari, and his family are scavengers, roaming the system for salvaged technology and
supplies. It's a pretty good life until their ship is attacked and stolen, leaving Hari, marooned, as the only known survivor.
In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Fomalhaut was first settled by the Quick, who used biotech to adapt their environment and themselves. The
True came later, found the Quick to be easy pickings, and set up an aristocratic culture with themselves as
the aristocrats. Now both are threatened by mysterious newcomers, the Ghosts, whose goal is altering history to
make themselves the winners. Meanwhile, in an Amazon rain forest, a Child is growing up.
Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Rich Horton
Greater Brazil, in this future, controls most or all of the
Americas, and it is the leading force in the Three Powers Alliance, a union of convenience of the three major Earth
powers in the war to subdue the Outer Planets. Earth politics is dominated by flavors of radical Greenness, a
response to the near destruction of Earth due to climate change. The primary technological effort on Earth is to
restore the planet to something like its pristine, prehuman, condition.
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Climate change has left a ravaged but re-building Earth dominated by powerful aristocratic
families who control, among other things, the large environmental projects upon which much of the populace labors
Further out in the Solar System, the Outers control the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and are engaged in
social and technological experimentation that feels threatening to the interests of Earth.
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Rich Horton
For quite a few years now, Paul McAuley has been publishing stories set in the aftermath
of the Quiet War, a war between Earth and the Outer Planets of the Solar System. Earth won the war, but the
stories suggested that their victory would prove ambiguous. These stories have been largely first-rate, some
of the best hard SF of recent years. With The Quiet War, he has finally written the story of the war itself.
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
It's worth taking a moment to consider the title. Is a quiet war meant to make us think that in space no-one can hear
you scream? But this is no space war, and the pitched battle, when it comes, is fought under a dome on a moon of
Jupiter away from the silence of vacuum. No, I think we are meant to see this as war on the quiet, a stealth war,
formented away from the public eye. Certain political factions and extremists on either side are eager for war,
but while they are doing their best to stymie the peace movement and bring on the conflict, most people see no need
for war and are actively promoting peace. Sound familiar?
Fairyland by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Matthew Cheney
The speculative elements of science fiction tend to age badly, and each passing minute of the real world causes futures that once
attracted us with their visionary wonder to now offer only the amusement of yesterday's tomorrows. Near-future SF that attempts
plausible extrapolations is particularly vulnerable to senescence, and it is rare to encounter such a book that is more than ten
years old and still possesses the power to dazzle, because so often the writer has emphasized the speculation more than other,
more durable, qualities.
Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
In a USA that is not our own, they have invented a device known as the Turing Gate, which allows people to pass between
parallel worlds. But the powers that be in this USA were horrified to discover that other Americas were not as powerful
as they were. There were Americas under fascist rule or communist rule or dissolved into anarchies, there is even one
strangely familiar USA filled with peaceniks who have brought down President Nixon. Into these different Americas
an analogue of the CIA begins to infiltrate agents,
popularly known as Cowboy Angels, to start undermining these unwelcome states and work towards an America more like their
own.
Mind's Eye by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
The story begins with an episode from the childhood of Alfie Flowers, one that left him with a mild form of
epilepsy. Years later, as a professional photographer, he sees a design by a graffiti artist that brings back his childhood
trauma. Alfie enlists the help of a friend to search for Morph, the graffiti artist. Meanwhile, Harriet Crowley,
a securities expert with ties to British Intelligence agencies is also hunting for Morph and the
glyph, not because of epilepsy but because the glyph can be used in a form of mind-control.
White Devils by Paul McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
On the surface, this is a near-future thriller energized by the specter of a world both devastated by and
dependent upon bio-tech. The story concerns Nicholas Hyde and his attempt to discover the secret behind a mysterious species of
white-skinned, ape-like creatures who have viciously attacked humans in a remote part of the African jungle. The author uses
unexpected intrusions of violence mixed with characters whose actions are often surprising to craft a story full of twists and turns.
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Reality Dust by Stephen Baxter and Making History by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Raise your hand if you remember the Ace Doubles. All right, that separates the old-timers from the younger readers. The
Ace Doubles were a series of paperbacks that featured two complete novels, printed back-to-back in the same volume. It was
extra value for the reader and allowed the publication of some books that might not have sold so well on their own. The form
died out as science fiction writers moved away from dependence on the magazines as their main outlet and SF novels became
longer and longer in the 60s.
Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Rodger Turner
Alex Sharkey is a pudgy, socially inept designer of soon-to-be-illegal psychoactive viruses. He's
getting his butt kicked around by a bent cop, the gangster to whom he's in debt, the gangster's minions,
his landlord, in fact just about everybody. He's not happy. One day he meets Milena, who looks about eight,
acts about ninety and who wants him to design an enzyme. With her contacts and his work, they can convert
a new toy of the age, gene-engineered slave dolls, into living beings, fairys. So, he figures, why not?
Whole Wide World by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by William Thompson
Set in London after the Infowars, its former financial district in ruins, society monitored by security cameras constantly
surveying the streets, a landscape whose architecture is decaying while technology and information has outpaced
the very civilization it supports. In the aftermath of rioting, computer-generated fires and microwave
bombs that wiped every hard drive within their targeting radius, within a moment crippling the information
infrastructure of corporate London, every police department has a computer crimes division, watching behind
search engines whose sole purpose is to seek out and monitor information traffic.
Into this realm comes a detective novel, our protagonist is a man at the end of his career, measured more by his
failures than successes, called in on his day off to pick up evidence at a particularly brutal crime
scene that involves the use of video cameras and the theft of computer hard drives.
It soon becomes a personal obsession for him, as well as a last, and some would say desperate, effort to vindicate a life
that has slipped from its track.
The Secret of Life by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Nick Gevers
A very indirect sequel to Fairyland, this novel expands on
some of the concerns and speculations of that dense conflation of cyberpunk and myth; but its plotting and style are
far more open than those of its predecessor. This is fundamentally a quest tale, preoccupied
with the acquisition and public use of scientific knowledge, and the quest soon leads the heroine and her nemesis
on a voyage to Mars.
Shrine of Stars by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Rich Horton
Many of the mysteries introduced in the first two volumes, Child of the
River and Ancients of Days, are slowly dispelled in this
concluding volume. Here, the author actually delivers on the implied promise
of the first two books: the nature of Confluence, the nature of Yama and the
answers to the mysteries of the first two books are all revealed in logical
and satisfying ways. In the end, the three books are clearly, unambiguously, far future science fiction.
Eternal Light by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Jean-Louis Trudel
In this sequel to Four Hundred Billion Stars is all that real science fiction fans could
wish for: complex societies, characters shaped by the technologies of our wildest dreams, wild rides through
space and time, glimpses of surreal landscapes and transcendent beings...
Pasquale's Angel by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Jean-Louis Trudel
This story will delight lovers of the unexpected juxtapositions of steampunk, the clanking engines
of modernity set in ancient streets, the wandering heroes of our own history rubbing shoulders with
characters of the author's own devising. In an alternate world 16th-century Florence, the inventions of Leonardo da
Vinci have wrought an industrial revolution centuries before its time.
Ancients of Days by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Neil Walsh
Many questions, posed in Child of the River, are finally answered in
this 2nd volume of the trilogy. Yama's adventures on the artificial world of
Confluence continue and his quest remains constant: to find out who he
really is and to discover his own people, if indeed they still exist. The
route to this goal, however, is as convoluted as the River is straight.
The Invisible Country by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
This is the author's second short story collection.
The stories, mostly hard SF that draw on McAuley's background in biology,
are a good introduction to a writer who is both a first-rate story teller
and remarkable stylist.
Child of the River by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Lisa DuMond
The mere mention of a new science fiction or fantasy series is enough to send Lisa shrieking from the
bookstore. Sometimes, the stand-alone novel seems on the verge of extinction. But a new series when
the name on the cover is Paul McAuley is cause for celebration.
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