Fairyland by Paul McAuley

All things exist within it, and
all possible configurations
of things.

Twenty-three years ago, as of the writing of this, Paul McAuley hadn't yet seen the birth of online monstrosity Google and was ten years ahead of Facebook. Only one year ago, Jeff VanderMeer was tinkering disturbingly with biotech in his [*FABULOUS] post-apocalyptic horror/sci-fi novel Borne. And yet McAuley seems to have predicted the moral and legal morass of genetic engineering (not the first, I might repeat, referencing John von Neumann etc...) misappropriated for fun, profit and warfare. He also predicted the smoking ban. And that's just in the first few pages. Whereas a lot of speculative fiction is vulnerable to senescence, Fairyland has remained surprisingly spry, aging gracefully whilst maintaining it's whip-smart wits and energy.

Perhaps building on William Gibson's classic (was it a classic in 1994?) Neuromancer, McAuley plunged into the proto-pools of his biologist and botanist background and pulled out the dolls and fairies that populate his future European continent. Equal parts future-tech sci-fi, warped fantasy, an old-fashioned quest, and psychological exploration of the force of habit and the inevitable attrition of intention, McAuley creates a compellingly structured narrative populated with strong, believable characters which manage to suspend disbelief through some of the now hackneyed tropes to the very end.

Alex Sharkey, gene hacker, lights the touch paper of a genetics conflagration with an accidental creation. He then departs on a 20-year quest to find a girl, the gamine, inscrutably knowing fairy queen Milena, who may or may not have infected him with a nano-bot designed to inspire inexplicable love. Along the way he travels the breadth of Europe seeking the figurative, titular Fairyland, rather than the literal, physical citadel of the fey, an edifice not very loosely based on Disneyland Paris, encountering gangs, corrupt cops, corporate greed, designer viruses, many based but also improving on his old designs, and an underworld of enhanced humans and genetically modified life forms, many borrowing the mythos and nomenclature of fantasy - the fey, trolls, fairies.

Like Neuromancer before it, it's a staggering work of prescience and foresight and pulls together such diverse aspects of the various fiction genres it touches upon that makes it folly to attempt to pigeon-hole, although many are happy so to do, and where it has leaked out across the boundaries of genre fiction it has garnered cautious plaudits. Not a gentle introduction to speculative fiction, it is, however, a brilliant novel in its own right.

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