Reviews

A cyberpunk contemporary of Gibsons’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Diamond Age, Fairyland begins in a 21st Century London that has been drastically altered by climate change. Humans have developed live ‘dolls’ and mind altering nanotechnology that spreads like a virus. Andy is a gene hacker under the glamour of a brilliant girl who is the creation of a corporation. She convinces him to help her liberate the dolls and give them the ability to reproduce. What results impacts both cyberspace and a large swath of the globe.

captaincymru's review against another edition

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3.0

I've seen this book listed as Cyberpunk, and biopunk. Both of these apply I think. The world's dsytopian and people lose themselves in the Net or mind-bending viruses. The first two-thirds of the novel are better, set in London, Paris, and Disneyland Paris. The book loses its way some what in the last stretch with characters and locations being thrown at you from all sides. But it has an excellent and evocative atmosphere, from London baking under global warming and the wilds of Albania.

terminatee's review against another edition

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Abandoned 2/20/05 after about 100 pages. It could have been better if only there was a likeable or halfway decent character in the story, but I got tired of reading about all these nasty people doing nasty things to each other. Lots of violence. No character to identify with. Disappointing.

davidscrimshaw's review against another edition

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4.0

I really like [a:Paul McAuley|20433|Paul McAuley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1367680738p2/20433.jpg], but did not like this book as much as others from him. Especially the ones in space and on other planets.

This is set in a dark, confusing future. I didn't really enjoy being there and didn't get as wrapped up in the characters as I would have liked.

Still, I'm glad I filled out the interlibrary loan form to get this book.

lordofthemoon's review against another edition

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2.0

Alex Sharkey lives by his wits as he develops drugs only just inside the law, drugs based on genetics. When he falls in with Milena, a girl who seems to know too much, they hatch a plan to liberate the genetically engineered 'dolls' that do so much manual labour in the early 21st century. This book follows the consequences of that fateful decision.

I must confess that I'm not really that fond of cyberpunk, so didn't hugely get into this book. It was that sort of tarnished chrome near-future stuff (to start with, at least) that's not fully dystopic but well on its way there. And the first segment was set in London as well, so a society that I'm familiar with, and I was much more interested in the untold story of why the welfare state and NHS had collapsed than the dolls storyline, which didn't help my engagement with the story.

The three parts of the story take us progressively further forward in time, although all within a single lifetime, as Alex tries to come to terms with what he's done, and find Milena again, which is what drives much of the second and third parts of the book.

There's a lot of good imagery here and some very interesting ideas (I'm still not entirely sure if all the animals are actually dead or not, although I'm pretty sure it was heavily implied [yet another untold story that I would have liked to read more about]) but I wasn't hugely invested in Alex or any of the other viewpoint characters and, really wasn't sure where we were by the end of the story.

So not really my cup of tea, but in no way am I saying that this is a bad book, it's just one that I didn't enjoy.

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