Fairyland

Author: Paul Mcauley

Science fiction is all about changing our world, new technologies, new ways of doing things, new forms of perception always transform the familiar, in large or small ways. Few transformations have been so extensive yet so carefully thought-out as Paul McAuley's Fairyland. We start in a recogniseable, near-future Britain, but already developments in nanotechnology ad genetic engineering are starting to create the world anew. As the novel progresses, we follow, step-by-step, each new logical development, and at each stage the world gets stranger and stranger. By the end there are weird transformations, an underclass of genetically manipulated dolls who serve as gene slaves until they start to revolt, and the once familiar world is like nothing we have seen before. Why it's on the list: Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic, but most of the authors who have taken up this idea have just jumped straight into the magic. McAuley shows us how we might get there, while still revealing a future destination that is truly an awe-inspiring fairyland. The novel won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.