Paul J. McAuley: Child of the River (1997)

Edition: Gollancz, 1997
Review number: 1130

The strange world of Confluence is the setting for McAuley's trilogy of the same name; Child of the River is the first volume. It was created by the Preservers, who populated it with diverse creatures derived from Earth's animals raised to human intelligence, and who then disappeared. Confluence is now considerably decayed, full of machines whose purpose is not understood, whose workings follow the Arthur C. Clarke dictum and are indistinguishable from magic; while the Preservers themselves have been mythologised into a pantheon of gods supposedly watching over the fate of the inhabitants.

The central character, the boy Yama, appears set apart from the beginning; Moses-like, he is found as a baby floating down the great River, not in a reed basket but accompanying the coffin of a dead young woman. He is brought up as the adopted son of a village official, but becomes the centre of intrigue when others start to investigate his "bloodline" - he is not one of the common types found throughout Confluence, and so his heritage is unknown. He finds that he experiences a strange communion with the machines around him which marks him out, and he begins to travel to find out who he is and why he is there.

The plot clearly picks up many ideas from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, but it is the setting and style which are of greater interest. The latter is distincly reminiscent of Gene Wolfe, a writer greatly admired but not, I think, frequently imitated. There are two sequences of novels which Child of the River calls to mind: The Book of the New Sun and, even more so, The Book of the Long Sun (which is more or less contemporary with this trilogy). This similarity is partly because of connections between the backgrounds of the series, but it is mainly because of the way that the background is expressed in the story. (The down side of this, more obviously so in McAuley than Wolfe, is that exposition of the setting and delight in detail get in the way of plot development.) I would not say that McAuley is as good a writer as Wolfe, not that Child of the River is his best work; it is a little too derivative for that. It is, though, an interesting and worthwhile read.

Paul J. McAuley: Pasquale's Angel (1994)

Edition: Gollancz, 1994 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 745

What might have happened if Leonardo da Vinci had concentrated exclusively on engineering, creating working versions of many of the devices he sketched? That is the intriguing idea behind Pasquale's Angel, which is set in a sixteenth century where these devices have precipitated an Industrial Revolution centred on Florence.

The central character of the novel is apprentice artist Pasquale, who becomes involved in momentous events after meeting journalist Niccolo Machiavegli. While drawing an illustration for his newspaper of an argument between one of da Vinci's entourage and visiting artist and diplomat Raphael, news comes to the office that one of Raphael's aides has been murdered. This is a minor locked room mystery which is modelled extremely closely on The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

The plot of the novel, which is rather poor, is mainly an excuse to speculate on what might have become of some of the important figures of the time in the changed background posited by McAuley. It is as a novel of ideas that Pasquale's Angel is interesting. I'm not sure how much an early Industrial Revolution is actually possible, given that the advances two hundred years later depended on economic and technological developments which had hardly begun in the sixteenth century. Capitalism was in its infancy, and materials technology, in particular steel manufacture, was not advanced enough to actually make some of the devices described, such as large scale steam engines.

Paul J. McAuley: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)

Edition: Gollancz, 1988
Review number: 702

McAuley's auspicious debut, this novel, won awards, which were well deserved. It is an imaginative and original piece of science fiction.

Humankind is engaged in a war throughout the galaxy with mysterious, high tech aliens, who attacked an unmanned survey ship. No alien has ever been seen, because they always self-destruct their ships when in danger of capture. There is a small clue to their identity, as another survey has discovered a planet which was already planoformed in the past - set spinning when it must have at one time had one face perpetually turned to its sun, as the moon does to earth. The planet has a strange ecology, which includes animals which have been extinct for millions of years from a range of locations including Earth. But it is the unique animals which draw the attention of the human scientific community and military it is thought that they are possibly the degenerate descendants of a colony of the aliens they are fighting.

Astronomer Dorthy Yoshida is sent to the planet not because of the speciality that she has chosen to follow but because of one she has rejected. She has telepathic powers, able to sense something of what is in the mind of others. The idea is that she can try to find out the truth about the origins of the animals by searching for clues in their minds. However, as she descends from orbit to the surface of the planet, she has the momentary impression of contact with a vast intelligence. Finding that intelligence becomes the focus of her time on the planet.

The novels that Four Hundred Billion Stars most reminded me of are both among the best known in the genre: Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead and Dan Simmons' Hyperion. While not as subtle as the former or as gritty as the latter, this gives an indication of the quality of the novel.