Paul McAuley is a British author of science fiction. His works often explore themes such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and the future of humanity. McAuley is known for his detailed world-building and complex characters. His stories delve into the dark and intricate aspects of technology and its impact on society.
On the eve of the Medici Pope's visit, an assassin has struck down an assistant to the immortal Raphael. It is a crime that draws a young artist named Pasquale and the investigative reporter Niccolo Macchiaveglia into the deepest shadows of their gray city--where there are fouler deaths to follow, and grave intrigues of war, withccraft and science. HC: AvoNova.
The planet Elysium is long settled, but troubles lay underneath the seeming paradise. Citizens of the Port of Plenty have benefited from new technology, but settlers across the planet are left to fend for themselves.
Confluence is riven by a civil war fired by the heresies of the last humans, the Ancients of Days. And the Great River, lifeblood of the inhabited part of the world, is failing. Yama was found as a baby on the breast of a dead woman in a boat on the Great River. He has two ambitions: to fight against the heretics, and to solve the mystery of his birth. Yama has the ability to control the machines which maintain the fabric of the world. As he journeys, so his powers increase, but his understanding of them is still limited and he finds himself becoming the unwilling focus of a dispute in the ancient and gigantic Palace of the Memory of the People.
Transformed into a reluctant deity by a viral kiss, former Contract Agronomist Technician Wei Lee is set adrift in a terraformed world of cowboys, tribal Yankees, and feral children, appointed to be their savior. Reprint.
'A writer of dazzling range, luminous intelligence and great humanity' Alastair Reynolds
Untold millennia ago, the Preservers made the world called Confluence and peopled it with ten thousand extraordinary bloodlines shaped from beasts of every sort Then the Preservers abandoned their creation -- leaving behind their law, their bureaucracies, and their trillions of machines, awake or slumbering, in the soil and the water and the air. In the gods' absence war came and a dangerous heresy arose that split the world in two. But a babe swept in on the great river, cradled in the arms of death -- the last and, perhaps, greatest of a remarkable bloodline -- signaling the beginning of the end times. And as Yama grows to young manhood, every hairbreadth escape and unanticipated adventure will bring him one step closer to the staggering truth about his heritage and his purpose ... and about a world that is not what it appears to be.
In these nine extraordinary tales, acclaimed author Paul J. McAuley illuminates the unseen and the unimaginable with brilliant prose and incandescent conceptual daring. These stories explore the wonders and dangers of biotechnology and its and travel from a distant alternate past to a breathtaking far-flung future. in sixteenth century Venice, transformed by a premature Industrial Revolution, a physician mourning his daughter's passing meets a mountebank with the power to raise the dead. In a tomorrow of raw and terrible beauty, revolutionaries struggle to free genetically engineered creatures fated to die in combat games and violent sexual encounters. And ten million years in the future, on an artificial world orbiting an immense black hole, a civilization of awesome strangeness and complexity created -- and abandoned -- by God-like Preservers is about to meet the human ancestors of its makers. Enter "The Invisible Country" -- and prepare to be dazzled.
By 2021, companies have built incredibly realistic androids. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government bans them from Earth, but when androids don't want to be identified, they just blend in. Rick Deckard is an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job is to find rogue androids and "retire" them. But cornered, they tend to fight back, with deadly results.
Traveling to the center of the galaxy to confront an invisible enemy that had drawn the earth into war decades earlier and now threatens to destroy the universe, psychic Dorthy Yoshida is unaware of her destined role in humanity's final battle. Reprint.
This exotic, fast-paced space opera turns on a single question: who decides what it means to be human?
