Product Description

In 21st century Europe, ravaged by the changes of war and technology, gene hacker Alex Sharkey is a bare step ahead of the police and the Triads. When he helps a super-smart girl turn a genetically-engineered doll into a new species, he doesn't realize he's giving history a dangerous shove.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #681561 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

About the Author
Paul J. Mcauley won the Philip K. Dick Award for his first novel and has gone on to win the Arthur C. Clarke, British Fantasy, Sidewise and John W. Campbell Awards. He gave up his position as a research biologist to write full-time. He lives in london.

Customer Reviews

An Enjoyable Science Fantasy Loses It’s Way
For two-thirds of its length Fairyland is an enjoyable character-driven science fantasy, but unfortunately it falls at the final hurdle with an overly obscure and anticlimactic ending. The central idea seems to be an expansion of McAuley’s earlier short story ‘Karl and the Ogre’ (collected in The King of the Hill) with it’s setting of a seemingly fantastic landscape created out of technology. The story centres around the evolution of genetically engineered dolls into fairies – part one showing the creation of the first fairy, with part two dealing with an early colony set up in the remains of the old Disneyland Paris. Both of these are expertly paced as the sympathetic characters draw the reader deeper into the mystery of fairy ‘Queen’ Milena, and paint a disturbing picture of a world where nanotechnology is capable of changing people’s perception on a massive scale.

This is excellent stuff, but unfortunately it all falls apart with a confusing finale concerning Milena’s quest for immortality. This muddled and unclear ending ensures the novel ends on a low point, which is a shame for a novel that promised so much. Fairyland also suffers in comparison with Richard Calder’s Dead Girls – another novel that tackles the idea of engineered dolls gaining their freedom, only with a lot more style and emotion. Fairyland is patchy and rather staid in comparison, but this is still an interesting read for sf fans.

Alex in Nano-land: Cyber-opera and our cultural origins.
This book blew my mind. Without giving too much away.. it started like a detective novel, snaked its way through cyber-punk and blossomed into a treatise on the very nature of what it really means to be alive with our need for hopes, fears, symbols and myths.

In the not too distant future the boundaries blur between technology , mythology and magic. This is science fiction at its heady best and although somewhat slow to get into, I guarantee that by page 60 you'll never want to put it down. This book lives with you. Fabulous. If you enjoy it (and i know you will) also try Ice People by maggie gee and Child Garden by Geoff Ryman.

Very Dark, Very Confusing, Very Good
An amazingly vivid and colourful read about the future, the dark imagery used for places you can imagine or even know really come to life in a decaying near future set up. The 3 Stories in one are very cleverly interlinked exploring the Birth, Rise and Fall of the free thinking slave robot's called Fairies or Fays. You shoot from London to Paris to Albania in a chase for knowledge and survival against the government and the corperations. I loved it, i will be reading more of his books.