Fairyland

Review 1 by Simon Petrie, Review 2 by Lorraine Cormack

Gollancz (2007)
ISBN: 9780575081109
$22.95
Buy this Book
Reviewed by Simon Petrie, Mar 2008


Fairyland, McAuley's sixth SF novel, was first published in 1995. It's been reissued as one of Gollancz's eight 'Future Classics'. I've read several of McAuley's books, including most of those that preceded Fairyland, but for one reason or another this one passed me by on its original release.

Alex Sharkey is a biochemical hacker, a designer of tailored psychoactive viruses in 21st-century London. His stock-in-trade is legal, for the moment, but that's about to change. A gangland contact coerces Alex into developing a treatment which will allow dolls, a cloned race of neutered and rigidly-controlled slave labour, to become capable of sexual reproduction. But Alex falls under pressure from other quarters as well, particularly from Milena, a mysterious pre-teen girl prodigy who hopes to break the dolls' biochemical controls for her own purposes. The result of Alex's labours, as he seeks to play the various parties off each other, is the creation at Milena's instigation of a new species, the fairy. Fairies are highly intelligent, independent, and designed for a far greater versatility than is humanity; they're also severely disenfranchised. How will humanity cope with a competing intelligent race, hungry to carve out its own niche?

Fairyland is divided cleanly into three approximately equal sections. The first is set in near-future London, as outlined above, and follows Alex's frantic race to remain alive (there are various parties wishing him dead) as he completes his various biochemical assignments. The middle section is located principally on the outskirts of Paris, a dozen years later, where the fairies have set up an impenetrable encampment within the ruined grounds of 'The Magic Kingdom'. Small children from the refugee camps neighbouring the Kingdom are being abducted, several later found mutilated. The fairies apparently require human body parts for some purpose… and Morag Gray, a public-spirited paramedic, is determined to rescue a little boy whose abduction she witnessed. The book's closing section is set in war-torn Albania, some years later, where a pro-fairy faction of humans, the Children's Crusade, is on a march towards a fabled Fairyland; but there are factions wishing the march stopped, by any means necessary. Todd Hart, an American journalist, wants to find the elusive, charismatic individual behind the march.

This is an uncompromising book, riddled with detail and invention. I found it, however, rather uneven, due primarily to the substantial disjunctions between sections. It's as though McAuley has attempted to compress a work of considerable ambition - chronicling as it does the advent of a new, non-human terrestrial society - into too small a frame, and has done so by excising large segments of connecting tissue. Each of the sections remaining is individually taut, internally consistent, and propulsive in its own way - the opening third of the book, set in London, would have to rate as one of the best, most gripping, expositions of a near-future setting within anything I've read - but the connections between sections are subtle and heavily concealed. Alex Sharkey's story stretches throughout, as he seeks to solve the mystery of the vanished girl prodigy Milena, but Alex's exploits are often far from centre stage, drowning beneath a wealth of descriptive detail (McAuley's usage of adverbs runs towards the high end of what would be considered acceptable in modern prose) and almost innumerable interwoven strands. It probably doesn't help that he appears to gradually become a less sympathetic character as the novel progresses.

It may well be a rewarding read, if you can navigate the tangled plot. McAuley fires off ideas at a frenetic rate, his future society is very vividly visualised, and a lot of his future tech seems worryingly plausible. (And it would be curmudgeonly to blame McAuley for having coined a perfectly decent neologism which became hijacked almost before the ink was dry on Fairyland's first printing. I refer here to the 'fembot', a term McAuley has devised to describe a kind of airborne dust, in essence a miniaturised drug delivery vehicle, employed to devastating effect as a tool for crowd conditioning, highly aggressive advertising, brainwashing, or whatever you fancy. Unfortunately, anyone who's seen the first Austin Powers movie is likely to have a rather different mental image of the word 'fembot'…) One aspect that hasn't yet been tainted by other instances in popular culture is McAuley's treatment of the meme, the society-affecting concept or idea. With the advent of fairies, and assisted by techniques such as Alex's development of psychoactive viruses, it becomes possible to literally infect people with ideas, a notion which McAuley pays considerable attention to, and for which he offers several convincing and unsettling examples.

I have to say that Fairyland didn't fully leave me enchanted. There's a lot to it which is worthwhile, and McAuley has to be one of the best British proponents of cyberpunk when he sets his mind to it, but I felt dissatisfied by the sum of the book's three parts, particularly after the promise of the novel's excellent first section. It may well be, instead, that the book is more reasonably approached by the reader as a set of three only loosely connected novellas.

Gollancz (2007)
ISBN: 9780575081109
$22.95
Buy this Book
Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack Oct 2009


All the time I was reading Fairyland I felt I should appreciate it more. It has some brilliantly clever science fiction ideas. McAuley cleverly blends some of the tropes of more traditional fantasy stories with one that is very definitely science fiction. The science is credible. It’s a novel that should work really well, and indeed it’s won two major awards that I know of. And yet Fairyland missed connecting with me by a mile, to the extent that at times I was positively bored.

Largely, I think that’s down to the writing style. McAuley has written the novel in third person present tense. That’s a difficult style to maintain for an entire novel, and should be another reason to applaud his achievement. For me, though, it felt like a very passive style, which distanced me from the characters. I didn’t really care about any of them, and I found the action not particularly compelling. There was a great deal to appreciate about this novel, but I did it all intellectually, and that doesn’t make for a particularly memorable experience with a piece of fiction.

Fairyland is set in a near future which is frighteningly recognisable. Large parts of the world’s population live in poverty, many of them in regions riven by constant civil wars. A much smaller population lives in a luxury provided by technology. This includes nanotechnology, and genetic engineering which has created a virtual slave race, known as Dolls. Naturally enough, there’s an underbelly to this luxury. Hackers who use nanotechnology to create new ways of giving people a chemical high and people who want to change the programming of the Dolls to use them as sexual toys, to name just two.

Alex Sharkey is part of that underbelly. He’s just barely legal, and just barely above the poverty line, surviving in a London which is still a place of comfort for those with money. But he’s fallen into debt with a petty gangster, and as a result his life starts spiralling out of control. He finds himself caught up in the movement to give Dolls autonomy, and we follow him on a disorientating journey across Europe as he struggles to undo the worst of the horrors he helped unleash and find the woman he loves.

The novel is grounded in reality. The science is solid, and the way the world has degenerated is certainly a believable extrapolation of the newspaper I read this morning. I had no problem at all in believing that this world was real. That solidity helped with the more dramatic inventions; although some of McAuley’s ideas about nanotechnology and genetic engineering are quite a stretch from today’s science (or at least, what’s being done today), it was easy to make that stretch when the more mundane aspects of the world were so very credible. The believable environment and science were both significant strengths for the novel, and will be appreciated by most readers.

However, most lacking in the novel was a character that I could feel I really knew, cared about, or was even more than passingly interested in. Sharkey is the central character, the one we follow throughout the novel, and yet he prompted little but disinterest in me. We don’t find out a great deal about his inner life, and there’s a lack of immediacy to what we do find out about his feelings and thoughts. I didn’t much care about what happened to him – worse, I wasn’t even very interested, which crippled the novel for me. While I could appreciate the cleverness of the ideas, once I put the novel down, there was no particularly strong reason to pick it up again.

That was in part because the plot also failed to engage me. It’s well worked out, and credible, and all makes sense in the context of the world McAuley has built. There’s no “cheating” at the end; it’s all plausible and consistent. But a lot of the plot hangs on Sharkey’s goals, and since I didn’t care about him, it was hard to care about them. I was interested in what we saw of the world as Sharkey chased his goals, but in a kind of abstract way. I wasn’t compelled to find out how things worked out in the end.

The novel’s spectacular lack of success in engaging me is undoubtedly due in part to the fact that sometimes a book (or movie, or any other kind of art) simply fails to connect with an individual for unexplainable reasons. But it is, too, due in part to the passive tone of the novel and the sometimes shallow characterisation. However, the novel has a lot going for it, and is likely to be enjoyed by many people who appreciate hard science fiction with clever ideas and good writing.