purplecthulhu

Sailing Bright Eternity Greg Benford
Vacuum Diagrams Stephen Baxter
Gateway Fred Pohl
The Clan Corporate Charles Stross
Immortality Inc. Robert Sheckly
Darkland Liz Williams
Starfish Peter Watts
Maelstrom Peter Watts
The Oregon Experiment Alexander et al.
Missle Gap Charles Stross
Blindsight Peter Watts
Air Geoff Ryman
Freakonomics Levitt & Dubner
The Execution Channel Ken MacLeod
The Snake Agent Liz Williams
The Steep Approach to Garbadale Iain Banks
Sun of Suns Karl Schroeder
9Tail Fox Jon Courtenay Grimwood
The Moon of Gomrath Alan Garner


Players Paul McAuley

This is the most recent McAuley and it continues his drift away from SF into writing thrillers and police procedurals. This book, in fact, does away with all overt SFnal trappings and is essentially a psycho-killer book in the 'Hanibal Lector' mold. I've read plenty of books in this thriller/crime subgenre, but I must admit to being somewhat disappointed by this addition. There are some nice touches, chief amongst them is the central protagonist. The setup, involving a transhumanist psycho, computer games, and complex machinations within the psycho's household, is adequately twisted, but the story takes too long to get going and only occasionally hits top gear. The story is set in Oregon. Having visited Portland in March I had hoped to get some new insights as McAuley is usually very good about his sense of place. He's made Mars seem grittily real in a number of books, and he's done well on both north London and the wastes of a bioengineered Africa in recent books. But here, apart from a few mentions of road and bridge names, Portland could pretty much be anywhere. It's also unclear how well he knows this subgenre - his characters start calling the killer a 'traveling man' at one point because he seems to use an RV to get around. Is this a conscious nod to John Connelly's All Dead Things where the killer calls himself The Traveling Man, or is this just luck? Mayb it is conscious and there aqre other nods that I'm not spotting.

So, a reasonable enough book, but not up to his usual standard. The last SF writer I read who went all the way in this direction was Michael Marshall Smith whose The Straw Men was a much more enthralling read. Perhaps McAuley is just settling into this new field and his next will be better, but I'd really like to see him back in full SF mode, writing SFnal procedurals like Whole Wide World or SFnal thrillers like The Meaning of Life, Fairyland or Eternal Light. We want the old McAuley back!