Paul McAuley

After enjoying a non-fiction book about rewilding recently ([b:Wilding|38891828|Wilding|Isabella Tree|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1521964296s/38891828.jpg|60437379]), I was delighted to realise that this is essentially a sci-fi novel on the same topic. While the central plot is is a snowy chase similar to [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|18423|The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #6)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1488213612s/18423.jpg|817527], it is as far from show more being a straightforward thriller as Le Guin’s novel. The story is being recounted by the protagonist Austral, who is both contemplating her past and justifying her choices. Her family were ecopoets, a group that sought to introduce dynamic biodiverse ecosystems to Antarctica as climate changed melted the ice. The political economy of the future world is delineated with remarkable clarity within a first person chase narrative. There is a depressingly convincing progression of events: attempts to create new ecosystems and ways of living in Antarctica are eventually controlled and exploited by capitalism; grand geoengineering projects are doomed to fail thanks to short-termism.

Austral the protagonist ends up trapped in poverty and crime after her mother dies and she’s stuck in a state orphanage. Her status as a Husky, genetically modified to cope with extreme cold, is a barely veiled allegory for indigenous populations and refugees. Thus ‘Austral’ feels very timely, as it confronts questions about borders, climate change, geoengineering, biodiversity, racism, and xenophobia. The central narrative voice is strong and compelling enough to bring all this together. Balancing weighty themes with a thrilling adventure plot is no mean feat and I was really impressed by how well McAuley pulled it off. I was also sufficiently invested in Austral to find the final twist very moving. An excellent climate change novel, to recommend with its urban sibling [b:New York 2140|29570143|New York 2140|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1471618737s/29570143.jpg|49898123]. show less

Every time I finish reading one of McAuley’s novels I get the distinct impression he is channeling Vance, and I say this in the most respectful way. I’m not sure whether I can explain this any better. I think Jack Vance is still the most underrated writer given that he was very influential in a general cultural way through the Dungeons and Dragons route as well as on fantasy and SF (The Dying Earth books and the Planet of Adventure books). That's quite aside from his ability to create show more whole worlds in just a few, albeit often ornate, sentences. He's second to none in that respect. Well, in my mind McAuley has stepped into Vance’s shoes so to speak.

McAuley is a peerless creator of genuinely unearthly mindscapes. “The Quiet War” series, whilst wonderful and much more thouroghly developed, owes a fair amount of basic inspiration to Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, (not a book so much as a setting for a number of his short stories) also set at the end of time amid feuding magicians and a red sun (if I recall correctly). Smith was a poet who wrote horror/fantasy during the depression to make ends meet, his prose is highly stylised and may be hard to take for some contemporary readers (though not to the same extent as Hodgson's “The Night Land”- I would recommend anyone interest in but unfamiliar with Hodgson's trying his classic “House on the Borderland” first), but will be enjoyably different for others.

Much modern SF suffers from a need to be perceived as dark, and combined with a desire to out-epic the competition it's led to something of a sameness in the huge-number-of-mutilated-dead count, tougher-than-the-last-tough-guy hyperinflation, and characters flawed by their amorality or brutality. McAuley maintains a personal scale, even through world-changing events (though his worlds always have a sparseness to them - rarely any heaving multitudes), and his characters are flawed by their vulnerabilities. There's darkness aplenty - I find more horror in his themes of erasure or corruption of identity than in how many hundreds of thousands of anonymous bodies line roads to cities (Baker, Martin, etc.). This approach pays dividends in McAuley’s mastery of character development. His books follow anything but an expected path - unexpected events shape characters in entirely unforeseen ways, and while that can lead to great emotional investment on the part of the reader, McAuley can also be bruisingly unsentimental.

“War of the Maps” clearly shows McAuley is one of the very few worth reading now. McAuley is one of the most influential of SF masters with a chilling ability to hide cruelty and horror behind an amusing or bizarre phrase. McAuley, at his best, is a very good genre writer: which is not to say that genre writers can't be as good as (if not better than) their literary counterparts - but they have not been taken as seriously, which is true even now. Folk finding McAuley’s “War of the Maps” to be overwritten just proves what sort of literary world we now inhabit: Orwell's plain English has come back to bite us on our collective arse, and we can no longer cope with sentences with sub-clauses, or paragraphs full of metaphor via elision. Oh well. It's just that when folk actually write stuff like "The Game of Thrones" is the best fantasy ever written, I have to assume that they haven't read much to compare it to, genre fantasy or otherwise.

SF = Speculative Fiction. show less

Cowboy Angels is a grim and paranoid book about world-hopping CIA operatives involved in a conspiracy to unite every America in the multiverse under the banner of Freedom and Empire. There's no glory here, and little redemption. Just lies, murder, and obligations from the grave. The language is hard and spare as befits the subject, and I think McAuley backed away from the Big Implications of his multiverse, but he kept me hooked all the way through.

'Cowboy Angels' is an exciting combination of crime noir, spy thriller, and science fiction. The idea is that Turing Gates, or portals into parallel worlds, have been discovered. Because they were discovered in America, the government decided to use them to create a pan-American empire. The thread of imperialism that runs through the world-building in the novel is distasteful but strikingly convincing. Only America has access to the Turing Gate technology, unlikely as this seems twenty years show more after its discovery, and the rest of the world is referred to only in terms of being their enemy or ally.

The plot is probably more noir mystery than anything else, despite most of the main characters being former or current spies. It centres around two main characters, Adam Stone and Tom Waverly, who are former colleagues, apparently still friends, and intermittent adversaries. Both of them are hard-boiled types, violent at the slightest provocation, protective of women, fond of liquor, and with a clipped style of speech. Their relationship reminded me somewhat of Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder in the TV show 'Justified'. I thought Tom's daughter Linda was used rather well in the plot, but otherwise there was rather a dearth of female characters. This echoes noir tropes and reinforces the masculine atmosphere of the parallel-world empire. The body count seemed notably high, about equivalent to that in Richard Morgan’s novels. I guess this demonstrated the lack of value the characters placed on human life, but it was still rather unrelenting.

I enjoyed 'Cowboy Angels' more for the world-building than the plot, which was convoluted in the extreme, or the characters, who remained close to cyphers. The ways in which history diverged were interestingly shown, and it was fun to guess which reality was closest to our own. The dialogue became most interesting when the characters discussed politics. I liked some of the little details, like the Elvises. What I really took from it, though, is that America is too macho for its own good in every parallel reality that has transpired. show less