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A review by lordofthemoon
Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley
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.
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.