Blast from the Past: Paul McAuley’s FAIRYLAND

As today is a bank holiday in the UK, we thought we’d take it easy ourselves and re-present, for your reading pleasure and erudition, a blog post from the dim and distant past of . . . er . . . 2011.  Enter the time machine – IF YOU DARE!

[2011], in addition to marking 50 years of continuous, focussed SF publishing from Gollancz (we did mention that, didn’t we . . . ?), is the 25th anniversary of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the UK’s most prestigious prize for science fiction literature. As a long-standing champion of British SF, Gollancz is an enthusiastic supporter of the Arthur C. Clarke Award – as well as being the publisher of five of the last ten winners.

The earliest winner on our list is Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden, currently in our SF Masterworks series. That book, though, is a relatively recent addition and was originally published by another SF imprint. The first Gollancz-published book to win was Paul McAuley’s Fairyland. And since we have recently released Fairyland as an eBook – along with four other classic Paul McAuley novels: Four Hundred Billion Stars, Eternal Light, Red Dust and Pasquale’s Angel – we thought it appropriate to ask Paul for some thoughts the award and the book itself . . .

One of my walking routes from Islington into the centre of London takes me down the cheap, cheerful commercialism of Caledonian Road, along the towpath of the Regent’s canal (past converted Victorian warehouses, Battlebridge Basin (where, according to dubious legend, Queen Boudica made her last stand against the Romans) and the new headquarters of the Guardian newspaper), and then to Euston Road via St Pancras Station. The train shed abutting Sir George Gilbert Scott’s gothic pile has already been converted into a grand European terminus; the urban lofts along the roofline are occupied; only the regooding of the Grand Midland Hotel remains to be done. I take a personal interest in the progress of that regooding every time I pass: the first scene of my novel Fairyland is set in the Ladies’ Smoking Room of the Grand Midland.

Fairyland is, I suppose, my breakout novel. It’s set in a near future fractured by political upheaval and out-of-control biotech; its story, likewise fractured, is set in real places (London, Paris, Albania). And it’s written in the present tense. Partly to convey the urgent rush of its future; partly to cut it free from fixed history, to convey a sense of achronicity. Like London, the present of Fairyland is aimed at the future but contains all kinds of deep textures and structures from the past.

I wrote Fairyland in 1994; it was published in 1995; in 1996, it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best SF novel. When I began to write it, I was still working as a lecturer in St Andrews University; when it won the Clarke Award, I had resigned from my job, and was about to move to London. While the award didn’t give me the impetus to become a full-time writer, I did feel that it gave my decision some kind of validation. That was important, at the time. A nice big tick mark. It was also the first novel published by Gollancz to win the award; after formative years of reading Gollancz’s yellow-jacketed SF novels in my local library, it was very nice to be able to bring the award into the firm’s editorial offices. Finally, Fairyland was selected from a shortlist in which, for the first time in the history of the award, British writers outnumbered American writers. I like to think that, in some small way, it helped to contribute to the present heft and swagger of British SF.

What Paul is, of course, too modest to mention is that he, himself, is one of the leading lights of British SF of the last 25 years, his body of work making a significant contribution to the heft and swagger to which he refers. One of the finest writers of hard SF since the prime of Arthur C. Clarke, a founding father of the New Space Opera and one of the earliest exponents of the SF thriller, Paul McAuley has consistently produced science fiction of the highest order. Winner of all three major ‘eponymous’ SF awards – the Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and John W. Campbell – he is a writer anyone interested in SF, in general, and British SF in particular, should make a point of seeking out and reading.

Paul McAuley’s most recent novel, Evening’s Empires, is available as a hardback, trade paperback and eBook.

You can find his books here and here and read about him in his entry at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, here.