Review: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Published : Avon/Gollancz (1995)

Awards Won : Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell 

Awards Nominated : British Science Fiction Association

The Book :

“Before he met the brilliant, hypnotic child Milena, Alex Sharkey had never played with "dolls"—blue-skinned, gengineered lifeforms designed for work, amusement, or destruction. But the underground gene-hacker is seduced by a megalomaniacal little girl's dream of providing the soulless genetic constructs with free thought and a future—and he unwittingly unleashes a plague of madness on the world.

Now there's a void in his life and memory that must be refilled, but it means pursuing the dangerous sentient species he helped sire from the ruins of a Magic Kingdom through a wasted Europe. It is Alex Sharkey's last chance and the last hope remaining for a once-dominant human race.” ~WWEnd.com

This is the first book I’ve read by Paul McAuley, and one that I started in 2013 and finished in 2014, making it ineligible for my 2014 Challenges.

My Thoughts:

There’s plenty to unpack in the novel Fairyland, from the bleak, complex future setting, the mix of cyberpunk and fantasy tone, and even the structure of the narrative.  Fairyland shows a violent, unstable future, where identity is a very malleable concept.  Nanotechnology exists that can easily manipulate people’s beliefs, motivations and memories.  The commercially produced “dolls” seem to have no identities at all, at least until their programming is illegally modified to turn them into “fairies”, with a fragile sentience.  The world was often disturbing, but I also found it very interesting to see such a dark portrayal of what humans would do with these kinds of future technology.

The main plot of the stoy involves Alex’s search for the little girl Milena, across several countries.   The story is split into three sections, each with their own separate subplots and additional viewpoint characters.  The first part is a gangster story set in London, where Alex first becomes involved with “fairies”.  The second is set near Paris, where a group of child-abducting fairies have turned the abandoned Disneyland resort into a nightmare.  In the third section, the quest draws to its conclusion.  While Alex’s search for Milena runs through all three sections, they sometimes seemed a little disconnected.  Many of the characters vanish when their section ends, and their subplots don’t always seem to have much bearing on the central story.  However, the details that are introduced through their experiences—about the fairies, Milena’s possible intentions, and the manipulation of identity--help build up to the final conclusion.

It’s with the fairies that a kind of fantasy atmosphere is folded into a rather hard science fiction novel. The fairies have a scientific explanation for their existence, but they also follow many cultural ideas about fairy kind.  For instance, these fairies are cruel, enigmatic and capricious, they steal children, they have ‘glamours’, and (through future technology) they can induce hallucinations of a fantastical world in their victims.  It is with the fairies that the story reached its most nightmarishly surreal. Unfortunately, though, the way they were portrayed made the fairies seem so distant and unsympathetic that it was difficult to feel positively about their rise to sentience.

In addition to the fairies, I found it rather hard to sympathize with most of the characters of the novel. Alex Sharkey is the primary character, and he is a man with a geas laid upon him (by nanotechnology) to follow the genius girl Milena.  This completely changes his life and his goals, and it bothered me that both the story and his character development were dominated by such an external factor.  I found some of the minor viewpoint characters (including a deserter with a ware-personality and a compassionate aid worker) to be more interesting, but their time in the story seemed too brief.  Overall, I think there is a lot to enjoy about Fairyland, but I never really felt a strong enough connection with the characters to become deeply enough invested in the story.

My Rating: 3/5
Fairyland was a novel that I appreciated more than I enjoyed.  It takes place in a bleak but fascinating future, where peoples’ minds are easily manipulated by nanotechnology and blue-skinned gengineered “dolls” are in common use.   The story follows Alex’s pursuit of the genius girl Milena, after they jointly uplift these dolls into sentient “fairies”.  While the ideas were really interesting, I always felt a little too detached from the characters, including the fairies, to ever become really drawn into the story.  Though it’s not exactly to my current tastes, I think it is a book that was worth reading.

Review: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Published: Pyr, 2010

Awards: BSFA Award, John W. Campbell Award

Nominated: Arthur C. Clarke Award, Hugo Award, Locus SF Award

The Book:

“It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square.

Welcome to the world of The Dervish House; the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union; a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million; Turkey is the largest, most populous and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It's a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and Central Asia.

The Dervish House is [five] days, six characters, three interconnected story strands, one central common core—the eponymous dervish house, a character in itself—that pins all these players together in a weave of intrigue, conflict, drama and a ticking clock of a thriller.” ~barnesandnoble.com

I read The Dervish House as a part of my effort to read all of the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominees. 

My Thoughts:

In some ways, this was a challenging book to read.  At first, there is very little in common between the many storylines, except that they all have some physical connection to the old dervish house at Adam Dede square.  Since the narrative skips constantly between each narrative thread, it is difficult, at first, to get any deep understanding of each story.  In addition, McDonald used a lot of Turkish and Islamic terms that were left unexplained, though they were often understandable through context.

The main characters are (and here I resort to bullet points):

• A disgraced former economics professor, Georgios Ferentinou, who is a member of the tiny remaining Greek community of Istanbul
• Nine year old ‘Boy Detective’ Can Durukan, who has a deadly heart disease, a lot of curiosity, and impressive toy ‘bots.
• Country girl Leyla, who is trying to make a name for herself as a marketing expert
• Slick businessman Adnan, who has a not-quite-legal scheme that could make him millions
• Adnan’s wife Ayse, an antique religious art dealer searching for a mythical Mellified Man
• Necdet Hasguler, who has been taken in by his brother’s newly formed Islamic shariat. Necdet started seeing djinn and the green saint Hizir after witnessing a tram bomb.

As you can see, that's quite a lot to introduce simultaneously.  Each of these characters’ plotlines interacts with the others, kind of like billiard balls on a table.  Sometimes they merely cross each other’s paths, sometimes they deflect each other, and sometimes they stick together for a time.  All of the threads don’t start to come together until near the end, and even then, I never really felt like they truly meshed into a coherent whole.

Even without a sense of coherence in the end, I did enjoy all of the individual stories.  While all of the main characters had their flaws, I was able to find something to appreciate in each of them.  There were also some scenes, mostly later in the book, that were particularly lyrical or emotionally effective.  The one that stands out the most in my mind is a pivotal scene for Adnan, where he shows through his actions exactly what kind of man he will allow himself to become in his pursuit of money.

Another strength of The Dervish House is McDonald’s vividly described near-future Istanbul.  I have never been to Turkey, so I have no idea if the Istanbul I have built up in my mind is anything like the one that actually exists. However, McDonald’s descriptions have left me with a very clear and detailed mental image of the physical city of Istanbul and its inhabitants. Beyond the physical presence of Istanbul, McDonald also presents a kind of ideological characterization of the city.  He illustrates a city both leaping into the future and bound to its past.  It’s a place that could be the birthplace of the Nanotech Revolution, the physical expression of the name of God, and the hiding place of the legendary honeyed corpse of a Mellified Man. This novel definitely gave me a desire to go and see the city for myself (maybe this summer—I hear short-term visas aren’t too hard to get). If the real Istanbul is anything like McDonald’s fictional representation, it must be a truly breathtaking place!

My Rating: 4.5/5

So much happens during the book that it’s hard to believe it all occurs within five days! However, since most of the plotlines are running in parallel, the action still sometimes seems to move slowly.  The many different storylines and characters made it initially hard to get into, but by the end I desperately wanted to know how everything worked out.  Once you get to know all of the characters, their distinct personalities and intricate, overlapping stories really drive the novel. The future city of Istanbul is also prominent in the story, and its society, along with its physical and ideological presence, influences the story significantly. While The Dervish House is a thoroughly entertaining read, the separate threads of story don’t mesh well enough into a coherent whole by the end to leave me completely satisfied.

Review: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

The Diamond Age (or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer) by Neal Stephenson

Published: Bantam Spectra, 1995

Awards: Hugo Award, Locus SF

Nominated: John W. Campbell Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award

Sub-genres: Nanotechnology, Cyberpunk

The Book:

In a future where nanotechnology is so commonplace that it literally fills the air, even the poorest levels of society have access to basic food and clothing via “matter compilers”.  Rather than nations, ideological phyles are the most important distinctions between groups of people.  One of the richest of these phyles, the Neo-Victorians, embrace the strict etiquette and manners of dress of the British Victorian era.

The Neo-Victorian nano-engineer John Percival Hackworth finds himself assigned the high-profile job of creating an educational book for a Victorian nobleman’s granddaughter.  This “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” is an interactive book that is intended to educate and entertain. More importantly, it is also intended to instill a certain subversive attitude that will help a young girl become the kind of risk-taker that is capable of shaping the future of society.

Hackworth makes an additional, illegal copy to give to his own daughter. Through an unforeseen sequence of events, the Primer finds its way to Nell, a lower-class little girl who lives with her neglectful mother, protective brother, and a string of her mother’s abusive boyfriends.  The primer becomes Nell’s invaluable companion as she struggles to make her way through this highly complicated world.

I bought this book at a used book sale, since I had heard a lot of positive opinions of Neal Stephenson’s work.  This is the first novel I’ve read by Neal Stephenson, and it was really entertaining.

My Thoughts:

There were a lot of narrative threads in this book.  For the most part, they were tied in some way to the central stories of Nell and John Percival Hackworth.  For instance, the story often jumped from Nell to a seemingly unrelated subplot that might have some future influence on her life.  These subplot threads almost seemed to be picked up and discarded at random.  There could be a series of chapters talking about a really interesting minor character, and then that character was never mentioned again, or their story was never resolved.  Among others, these interesting minor characters include Carl Hollywood, Constable Moore, Judge Fang, Dr. X, Fiona, Lord Finkle-McGraw, and the Dramatis Personae.  The lack of closure on many subplots at the end of the book was a little jarring, but I enjoyed reading it so much that it didn’t bother me as badly as it might have otherwise.

Of the two ‘main’ storylines, I was really interested in Nell, and kind of bored with Hackworth.  I found it really intriguing how Nell’s life story was told partially in reality, and partially through the interactive stories from the Primer.   Nell came from a terrible home life, and she had tremendous odds stacked against her very survival.  I appreciated that Nell was not secretly the daughter of some major player in the world.  I enjoy stories about people who succeed due to their own determination, not due to their pedigree and born privilege. Hackworth, on the other hand, was an engineer who got into a fair bit of trouble when he made the illegal copy of the Primer.  He had plenty of trials and tribulations, but I didn’t really care all that much about whether he made it through.  His story was interesting enough, but I felt that it lacked the emotional depth of Nell’s story. 

 As for the writing itself, The Diamond Age was incredibly information dense. Often physical descriptions verged into short digressions about history, politics, or science.   I liked reading these asides, as it was primarily through them that the reader learns about the world and how it works.  Sometimes there were even descriptions of things common to current-day life described in an amusingly fresh way (such as sex-based advertising or KFC).  Beyond the deliberately out-of-date Victorian etiquette, I don’t think this book really felt dated.  I don’t think any of the changes in society since 1995 have rendered The Diamond Age’s fictional future obsolete.

My Rating: 4/5

I enjoyed reading The Diamond Age.  The world was interesting, and the prose was quirky and densely packed with information.  There were a lot of unresolved subplots, and the ending was very abrupt, but I had so much fun reading the book that I was mostly disappointed that it had ended at all.