Paul McAuley

In the early 2000s, Paul McAuley wrote a series of novels - Whole Wide World, Players and Mind's Eye - which tended towards the techno-thriller end of the science-fictional spectrum, with a large pinch of police procedural thrown in. He then turned back to hard science fiction with the Quiet War sequence. But the techno-thriller procedural seems to have quietly gestated until in 2015 he produced this clever novel of first contact, Something coming through.

The planet Earth's political show more situation has spiralled downwards and out of control, culminating in the Spasm, where parties unknown unleased suitcase nuclear weapons on a number of world capitals, including London. In the aftermath, we are contacted by the alien Jackaroo, who come bearing gifts - advanced technology and materials to help us reconstruct, and wormholes to fifteen new planets, all ready for us to colonise. The Jackaroo - who communicate with us remotely, via avatars - ask nothing in return. The alien planets turn out to have been occupied by other races before us; they have disappeared, but left relics. Some of these have value to us, either legitimately or through criminal enterprise.

In a London changed by the Spasm attack and now under reconstruction, Chloe Millar chases down alien influences for a French tech billionaire. One of her leads brings her into contact with two orphaned children, who disappear. Chloe begins to try to trace them.

Meanwhile, on the colony world Mangala, a police investigator takes a murder case. He has to work against a background of a potentially hostile planet, a growing colony with transplanted residents who have brought a lot of Earth with them - urban sprawl, consumer goods, consumer capitalism, corruption and crime. There are archaeological sites of disappeared races and a black market in artifacts. The elder races also left behind 'biochines', whose behaviour and purpose remain a mystery.

These two strands come together in ways which sometimes seem obvious, and sometimes retain a capacity to surprise readers (well, this reader for one). The colony sometimes feels a little like some of Bradbury's later Mars stories, and sometimes like the colonised worlds in The Expanse, though I found the ordinariness of it actually a little unsettling. The characters are engaging enough, and for fans of the genre there are some nice Easter Eggs, including a tip of the hat to the late Howard Waldrop.

In all, I enjoyed this for its ingenuity, and the puzzles about the alien Jackaroo left unresolved by the end - what are their motives? Are they really as benevolent as they seem? There is, of course, a sequel, Into Everywhere, which I have not as yet seen. On the strength of this book, I shall be seeking it out. show less

A sort of parts collection of familiar themes: Planet of the Apes, post apocalypse, and evil computer on a spaceship; but lots of unique things going on here too. We start out in the first half only guessing what's going on (we're not even sure of the physical form of our characters). We get only bits and pieces from some successor to humanity, after some calamity of global warming and/or the eruption of Yellowstone. It becomes clear with reveals, which can be guessed, and we do get an info show more dump (unlike many folks, I should note, I am not anti-info-dump) way into the 2nd section, which is a distinct narrative. What's really notable to me about the book, in addition to the unique ideas or combination of ideas, is a recurring theme of cults, conspiracy theories, and who or what is really trustworthy. Who is skewing the truth? There's even a charismatic cool-aid cult leader along the way. A theme very apropos for out times. Kudos to McAuley for working this in, it made the book for me. Although I'm a little ambiguous about the ending, which is weak with a pointless cliffhanger, but, you read it: recommend. show less

This book is a direct sequel to Paul McAuley's 2008 novel The Quiet War. It continues the stories of that novel's various protagonists as they negotiate the peace imposed by Greater Brazil and the other two major Earth powers on the outer worlds. Some choose to move outwards and find new worlds to colonise; others return to Earth and try to pick up the work of reconstruction and rewilding following the ecological collapse of the previous century. But the excesses of the ruling families of show more Greater Brazil become too much for many in the former United States, and revolution is in the air.

I took to this novel rather better than I did The Quiet War, finding myself beginning to take a quite direct interest in the stories of the various protagonists. At the same time, I also found myself reflecting on that novel and my reaction to it. In my review of The Quiet War, I commented on the similarities between these books and James S.A. Corey's series of novels The Expanse (and the associated tv series), which has a similar setting, both in terms of the action of those novels and their political setting. As I said in my review of The Quiet War, one of the features of the science fiction genre is that if different writers choose the same setting, the science of that setting – the physics, the biology and so on – dictate that there will be considerable similarities between those stories. So it is with the Corey novels and these two books by McAuley. There are the same chunks of real estate; they are the same distances apart, travel between them takes the same sort of time, and human activity is limited by the availability of key resources, specifically water and oxygen. Both sequences require the development of advanced propulsion methods – the Epstein Drive in The Expanse and the “fast fusion” drives in the McAuley books – to help move the stories on in a reasonable timescale, though in both cases there is little in the way of unspecified hand-waving future technology to strain the reader's credulity.

Where the two sets of stories do differ, though, is in their treatment of the science-fictional apparatus. In The Expanse, we get a highly political set of action adventures, with well-drawn characters who are nonetheless fairly identifiable types – the Everyman Hero, an Everywoman Hero, a Pilot, a Tough Guy, a Blunt Politician, a Tough Space Marine, a Rebel Leader and so on. The tech shows few radical departures from our own state of knowledge other than those needed to make the story work, and the descriptive writing is sufficient to allow the reader to visualise the setting and follow the story. These elements are present in the McAuley novels – and especially in Gardens of the Sun – but many aspects are better developed. There is a lot of politics in the McAuley; in Gardens of the Sun, we see more of the military dictatorship imposed by Greater Brazil, and slowly we realise that it is not just the exercise of authoritarian power that is on display here, but actual Fascism, with the ruling families using force to impose their will just because they can, and denouncing the practice of democracy as outdated and the root cause of the Earth's ruination. The scientific basis of the society, especially in the outer worlds, is front and centre; whilst McAuley doesn't engage in the amount of exposition of the underlying bio-engineering he did in The Quiet War, it is made perfectly clear that bio-engineering and nanotechnology, in the form of the vacuum organisms (artificial plant analogues that capture the weak sunlight to extract water and metals from underground and enable them to be collected), make life in the outer worlds possible. So much of the plot hinges on the availability of habitats and resources, and the way that availability influences the decisions characters take. It also drives many of the characters and their motivations – we have the “gene wizards”, Avernus and Sri Hong-Owen who were introduced in The Quiet War. They are driving much of the action, even though we never met Avernus in the first novel and only get to meet them towards the end of this one, whilst Sri Hong-Owen's story arc is the other way around. Other characters – an Everywoman Hero, a Pilot, a Spy and a Diplomat of dubious trustworthiness – are all given their turn on the stage but all, at some point or another in the story, step outside their given roles and behave in more human ways than we might expect.

I found myself engaging with this novel rather more than I did its predecessor, which was a pleasant surprise. Towards the end, we find a theme of transhumanism emerging from the logical working out of the plot; this sets the scene for the next novel in the sequence, In the Mouth of the Whale, which moves the action on into new worlds and new characters. The stories started in The Quiet War are brought to conclusion in Gardens of the Sun and new stories are set out for us.

However, I did not find the novel without fault. Although there is some quite effective prose describing the various worlds and their stern and desolate beauty, McAuley seems to have become carried away and there are many sentences without verbs. Some have verbs but neither subject nor object. And some are excessively long. I don't know if this is an authorial tic or just very poor sub-editing; I don't remember coming across this sort of writing in The Quiet War; or if I did, then it wasn't as intrusive as I found it here. Is this what passes for “artistic” writing these days? And I had to chuckle when, in an action sequence set on our Moon, a character launches himself from a mountain crag “into thin air”. “Incredibly thin,” I thought, “if not non-existent”. But then again, having someone launch themselves into thin vacuum might have been even sillier.

In the hands of a less accomplished author, this might have been a serious problem. But McAuley's command of his conception of life in the outer worlds and the events he puts his characters through is strong enough to withstand this sort of failing. A reader unused to science fiction might quibble at this; and although McAuley restricts the scientific expositions, there is enough biochemistry vocabulary used to put off readers determined to understand every word, in the misplaced belief that to read science fiction is to need to understand the science at every touch and turn. Whilst I would say that Paul McAuley is one of the primary practitioners of the science fictional art working in Britain today, I would not recommend this book as a starting point to either the story or the genre; but if you have read The Quiet War, Gardens of the Sun makes a satisfactory conclusion to the stories started in that book. show less

In his Quiet War sequence, Paul McAuley built a convincing post-human future across the Solar System and beyond, based on a future Earth where global political power had shifted to the south as a consequence of environmental collapse. In this novel, he returns to that idea, with a setting in the Global South as a backdrop to a crime thriller that takes us to a different place.

We are in a late 21st/early 22nd century Antarctic peninsula, settled for a good seventy years or so by ecologists show more and their genetically-modified offspring who have been adapted in the womb to cope with a sub-Arctic climate. Global warming has raised sea levels; the Antarctic peninsula has declared independence and has a flourishing economy based on natural but bioengineered resources. The land supports settlements, but in its past bioengineers - 'ecopoets' - have started rewilding and released bioengineered organisms. The environment is roughly what we see today in sub-Arctic Norway; harsh but livable (with care).

The plot concerns Austral, a bioengineered 'husky', adapted to survive in this environment. She becomes embroiled in the plots of a local crime boss; in the course of this, she kidnaps, almost by accident, the daughter of a politician and goes on the run. This is the opportunity for a close look at the new environment of the peninsula. Along the way, we get an impression of the wider world, one where the nations of the southern hemisphere are pre-eminent and the Global North hardly merits a mention.

McAuley builds an exciting chase story whilst deftly showing us a different world adapting to climate change. We see Austral's story in flashback; the narrative takes the form of a history related to her unborn child. There is a twist in the story which brought me up short, because of my own personal history.

I started out with uncertainty, not fully expecting to engage with the characters; but Austral, and the girl she kidnaps are well-drawn and neither slip into stereotype. I think this is probably the best thing McAuley has written; in showing us a plausible future impacted by climate change, he has probably transcended the boundaries of science fiction. The shame is that because of that label, this book's audience is likely to be restricted to those who already seek out this sort of thing. It deserves a wider readership. show less