Players by Paul McAuley

This novel is another of Paul McAuley’s techno-thriller efforts, written in 2007 and about MMORPGs (Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games), which he sets out to explain to the uninitiated – perhaps not in such an info-dumping way as he did in Whole Wide World for DDOS attacks, but there’s still an element of clunk about it.

There’s a murder mystery that isn’t much of a mystery – what’s not given away in the blurb becomes fairly clear about three chapters in when we’re introduced to an exceptionally mad and unpleasant tech billionaire and his (just plain unpleasant) sidekick. Said sidekick is perhaps the best-drawn character in the book, though that doesn’t make him any the more likeable.

Otherwise, what we have here is a fairly straightforward police procedural set in the world of online gaming. There are a couple of nods to McAuley’s science fiction background for the initiated, but otherwise this will seem fairly humdrum, especially seventeen years on. Having said that, the last quarter of the book doesn’t quite go down the expected plot route; the tech billionaire enjoys the pleasures of the hunt, but any expectations the reader may have as to where that was going to take us don’t quite come to pass. So ultimately, this novel was satisfying but not mind-blowing.

Mind’s Eye by Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley continues his expedition into the world of techno-thrillers with Mind’s Eye, a London-based story centred around ‘glyphs’ – graphic images that lodge in the viewer’s consciousness and can induce fits or (with appropriate drug preparations) render the viewer vulnerable to all manner of suggestions, from “buy this product” to “jump from this high place”. The protagonist, Alfie Flowers, was neurologically damaged in childhood by accidental exposure to such a glyph, discovered by his grandfather in an archaeological expedition to Iraq in the 1930s: but now he has suddenly seen graffiti in London that incorporate the very glyphs that affected him, and he wants to know just how this has happened (and whether the artist can provide a cure). But he attracts the wrong sort of attention – others have seen the glyphs and see their potential. Alfie Flowers ends up in a life-threatening chase that takes him back to Iraq and encounters with his past.

The story moves at a great pace and the London setting is convincing. The graffiti art, obviously inspired by Banksy, also convinces. Alfie Flowers and the other characters are all well-drawn, to the extent that when some of them die, there is something of a sense of shock. The plot is, in equal parts, a mix of le Carré, Indiana Jones and The Long Good Friday; written in 2005, it is set contemporaneously and so the technology hasn’t dated.

My one concern is that the device of the glyphs inevitably recalls David Langford’s Basilisk stories about mind-altering graphics, especially BLIT and the 2001 Hugo-winner Different Kinds of Darkness. It is highly unlikely that McAuley was unaware of these stories – the British science fiction community is a pretty small one – but Dave Langford himself is too nice a person to mention this.

And when did the CIA stop referring to itself internally as “the Company”? Some operatives, both serving and former, make an appearance, and keep talking about “the Agency”. Is this officially a thing now?

That apart, this is a compulsive page-turner with an unusual premise and appealing characters.

White Devils by Paul McAuley

The last Paul McAuley novel I read, Whole Wide World, fell down for me because, in part, it was set in the near future at the time it was written, but that setting itself was now in the past; and some aspects of the setting suffered badly as a result. I’m pleased to say that White Devils doesn’t share that fate. Written in 2004, it is a novel of rampant biotechnology and genetic engineering set in the Africa of the 2040s in the aftermath of a major biotech accident. The setting will be depressingly familiar: an Africa riven with conflict and fragmentation, whilst neo-colonialist corporations scheme and intervene for their own ends. Into this steps Nicholas Hyde, an Englishman on a quest to find himself and explore the world. Whilst working as an environmental volunteer, he is persuaded to join a colleague on a field trip to collect samples from the scene of a suspected terrorist attack. But on arrival, the situation proves to be more deadly and horrifying than anyone suspected.

We are propelled into a compelling story of corporate conspiracy, NGOs, scientific and academic rivalry, power games, terrorism, corruption, greenwashing and local politics. Along the way, we find out more than we bargained for about the collision points between genetic research and palaeontology, and about Nicholas Hyde’s own life story.

This is a substantial book, but I burnt my way through its more than 500 pages in about four days. There is action, local colour, and considerable body horror. There are some compelling images – the novel opens with one such, of butterflies, bio-engineered to carry company logos on their wings – and the sense of place is very strong. I’ve never been to Africa, but I had a vivid sense of what the land should look like. At the same time, the interventionist corporation that has taken over almost the complete administration and governance of the Congo is drawn in worrying detail, especially when it becomes clear that they use biochemically-induced emotional manipulation to secure employees’ loyalty to the company. That is only a minor side-strand to the narrative.

Characters are well-drawn throughout, though there are a number who are distinctly unlikeable. Others are shown to be at the mercy of their circumstances, which drives their personal motivations. This may lead some readers to consider that Africans are being shown in a poor light, and European characters in a more positive one. The truth is rather more nuanced than that, but a superficial reading could mislead. And indeed, this is no Afrofuturist novel. Indeed, some may consider that its picture of a future Africa still mired in local conflict is pandering to stereotypes.

The main model for this book, however, is more Apocalypse Now as the protagonist makes a perilous journey into the interior of the continent in search of the bio-engineered creatures that killed friends and colleagues, and about which is a circle of conspiracy and murder. Along the way, he meets various characters, most of which end up very dead. Again, some stereotyping is apparent where the body count is concerned. There is a wealthy local fixer who has a ranch housing bioengineered big game animals, created for equally wealthy clients to hunt; that ranch is almost straight out of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.

The protagonist made me think about another writer – John le Carré – as he purports to be a somewhat rootless young Englishman with an idealised view of helping the environment through assisting in research. But he has spent some time in the Army, albeit in a fairly second-echelon unit. He often comments that he never saw active service; and yet he is quite comfortable with handling weapons and explosives, and is no slouch in the action department. In this, he reminded me of the protagonist in le Carré’s The Night Manager, who also had more in his past than he was prepared to admit.

But overall, this is an involving, immersive book. Many of our attitudes to issues of race and politics have changed in the twenty years since it was written, and a modern reader could find fault with a number of issues within its pages. But its African characters have agency, and their motivations are explored. And much of the villainy in the plot can be laid clearly at the feet of Western neo-colonialist capitalists. White Devils calls out blatant corporate greenwashing, and it maintains a clear view as to who the baddies are. Keep focussed on that and this book will provide a vivid and thought-provoking reading experience.

Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley

This IT-themed police procedural novel was written in 2001 and is set in 2010. This made reading it in 2023 an interesting experiment in how science fiction can never be treated as prediction, because there are huge swathes of McAuley’s future where the tech – and society – worked out differently. For instance, faxes were dead technology within three or four years of this book coming out. And smoking in public places was being frowned upon – and then legislated against – long before the currency of this book.

But of course, it’s fiction. At some point in the book’s backstory, a conjunction of disaffected hackers and terrorists sparked a war where the targets were key parts of the data infrastructure. As a result, the UK has a repressive government and strict laws on licensing databases and websites. Into this steps an embittered policeman, side lined into forensic IT work following the death of four colleagues which saw him admonished.

He becomes embroiled in an unpleasant murder which seems to have pointers to the underworld of illegal porn sites in one direction and the world of tech entrepreneurs in the other. There’s a McGuffin, connected to an innovative CCTV system that one character has sold to the UK Government. And there are unsettling things in the background, such as climate change and a Metropolitan Police that seems preoccupied with internal squabbling and status.

The shortcomings in our real-world experience of the tech are offset by the p.o.v. character, who is quite well-drawn; and the urban London setting. But this makes some of the oversights a little harder to suspend disbelief over. The protagonist has some mildly homophobic views which were probably current within the Met in 2001 when the book was written, but less so by 2010. Perhaps the thing that marks out the book’s age the most is the way in which the protagonist sets up a DDOS (Distributed denial Of Service) attack on a villain’s website and McAuley takes four pages to describe it. Today? I think most readers would have a fairly clear idea of what a DDOS attack is, at least in outline if not in detail.

There is a major jump cut away from London in the last eighty pages or so, and the novel switches from a police procedural to a typical turn-of-the-century cyberpunk thriller, with hip street hacker kids and an exotic location, And the denouement in an uncompleted office block is something that is almost a cliché, or at least would be if this were a film. But the plot turns and the central protagonist saves this book from complete obsolescence.

New Legends, edited by Greg Bear (with Martin Greenberg)

This is an original anthology dating from 1995; the editors, Greg Bear and Martin Greenberg, sought to bring together stories that would have relevance to the coming world of the 21st Century. In this, they broadly succeeded, even though some of the themes might have seemed remote or even of negligible relevance back in 1995.

Mary Rosenblum’s Elegy concerns stem cell research, Sterling Blake’s A Desperate Calculus looks at the machinery and statistics of pandemics. Ursula le Guin contributed Coming of age in Karhide, set in the world of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which has acquired relevance through our current concerns over matters of gender identity.

Greg Benford submits two pieces: High Abyss, and Old Legends, his recollections of working in a high-pressure scientific establishment working on advanced weaponry, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and includes a personal portrait of Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Such an establishment is depicted in Carter Scholz’s Radiance; the politics, both internal and external, in such an establishment seems well-drawn.

Greg Abraham’s Gnota concerns UN peacekeepers and transgenic transplant technology, though there was a practical difficulty for me. The protagonist, victim of a terrorist bombing attack, has an artificial pump implanted to keep him alive until a tailored transgenic heart can be grown for him; Abraham seems unable to decide on how big this medical device is – at one point, it is the size of a hand and a centimetre thick, yet at other times it is bigger than his backpack. I realise it might be depicted as feeling that big, but consistency would help. And as I know someone who spent three years or so with a left ventricular assist device awaiting a donor heart for transplant, Abraham has overlooked the practical difficulties (such as always looking for a power socket to recharge from) his protagonist would have in traipsing across Europe. And as soon as he gave his donor piglet a name – the ‘Gnota’ of the title – I knew we were in for trouble…

Rorvik’s War by Geoffrey Landis looks initially like template military sf, but I saw the twist in the tale a few pages out from its revelation. It has relevance in our days of remote warfare and simulations. Perhaps my stand-out story was Robert Silverberg’s The Red Blaze in the Morning, which involves an archaeologist working in southern Turkey who receives an offer he is reluctant to accept.

Other contributions come from Paul McAulay (Recording Angel), Sonia Orin Lyris (When Strangers Meet), Robert Sheckley (The Day the Aliens came) and Greg Egan (Wang’s Carpets).

There are a few stories that didn’t work for me: James Stevens-Ace’s Scenes from a future marriage, about licenced reproduction in a media-driven North America (although the media landscape was very recognisable to my modern eyes, something about the experience of the couple seeking to reproduce in that future didn’t gel). George Alec Effinger contributed One, where a couple head out in a faster-than-light spaceship to look for life and seed the systems they find with jump gates, but there is an accident and one of the couple dies, leaving the other, who has already displayed signs of stress, to carry on alone, always hoping that the next system he visits will finally have life. This didn’t work for me on a couple of levels: even before the accident, they had discussed the possibility of turning back to Earth if the stress was becoming an impediment to successfully completing the mission. So why didn’t they? And why didn’t the lone survivor do so when they were left isolated?

And there was a Poul Anderson story, Scarecrow, which started out with an Expanse-style vibe but was marred by archaic language (referring to “yonder planet” may have been acceptable in the 1940s and 50s when Anderson was at the height of his career, but not in 1995) and excessive religiosity.

Nonetheless, this was a highly enjoyable anthology and most of the stories in it have not aged at all badly. This is worth looking out for in the second-hand market.