Paul J. McAuley is a British botanist and science fiction author. A biologist by training, McAuley writes mostly hard science fiction. His novels dealing with themes such as biotechnology, alternative history/alternative reality, and space travel.
McAuley began with far-future space opera Four Hundred Billion Stars, its sequel Eternal Light, and the planetary-colony adventure Of the Fall. Red Dust, set on a far-future Mars colonized by the Chinese, is a planetary romance featuring many emerging technologies and SF motifs: nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, personality downloads, virtual reality. The Confluence series, set in an even more distant future , is one of a number of novels to use Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory as one of its themes.
About the same time, he published Pasquale's Angel, set in an alternative Italian Renaissance and featuring Niccolò Machiavegli and Leonardo da Vinci as major characters.
McAuley has also used biotechnology and nanotechnology themes in near-future settings: Fairyland describes a dystopian, war-torn Europe where genetically engineered "dolls" are used as disposable slaves. Since 2001 he has produced several SF-based techno-thrillers such as The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, and White Devils.
Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988. Fairyland won the 1996 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 1997 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. "The Temptation of Dr. Stein", won the British Fantasy Award. Pasquale's Angel won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History .
Wikipedia
“You can’t hate change. It’s like hating life.”
In Jonathan Strahan (ed.) Drowned Worlds (e-book edition, ISBN 978-1-84997-930-6)
Short fiction, Elves of Antarctica (2016)
“They survive. Ah yes, survive. And achieve nothing to deserve it.”
“The only meaning of life, if it can be said to have meaning, is to survive. My brothers and sisters, herding their children on the plains, find meaning in the simple pattern of their lives and need nothing more. They are immersed in the processes of the world: all is one. That is their religion. They seek no other meaning.
“Your race, now, believes that expansion is all. You think to outrace your dark destiny, believe that the whole universe is yours when you understand so little of it.”
Chapter 4 “At the Core” (p. 271)
Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)
“Stay the same and after a while you come to think that nothing will ever change.”
Source: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Chapter 4 “At the Core” (p. 269)
“I didn’t know that you were into politics.”
“Anyone with money has to be. Real money, I mean. Even criminals need to keep a politician in their pockets these days.”
Chapter 3 “The Keep” (p. 223)
Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)
“It was both true, and not the complete truth, like so much of his talk.”
Source: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Chapter 3 “The Keep” (p. 197)
“And now you have had to alter your theory.”
”Well,” Andrews said, smiling, “that’s science.”
Chapter 3 “The Keep” (p. 182)
Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)
“It has everything in it, if you look hard enough,” Dorthy said, taking the sheaf. “Love, jealousy, avarice, loyalty, murder, madness...I find it reassuring that human nature is so constant.”
Chapter 3 “The Keep” (p. 171; ellipses in the original)
Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)
Source: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Chapter 2 “The Hold” (pp. 131-132)
Source: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Chapter 1 “Camp Zero” (p. 38)
“We must remember that they are alien.”
“That’s hardly a basis for speculation now. It explains everything and nothing.”
Chapter 2 “The Hold” (p. 70)
Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)
Source: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Chapter 1 “Camp Zero” (p. 38)
