McAULEY, Paul J.

(1955-)

   UK biologist and writer. He began publishing sf with "Wagon, Passing" for IASFM in 1984; his best shorter work is collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories (coll 1991). With his first novel, FOUR HUNDRED BILLION STARS (1988 US), he launched conspicuously into afar-reaching series which, combining SPACE-OPERA plots and cosmological speculations, fruitfully amalgamated influences from both US and UK traditions: H.G. WELLS and Larry NIVEN consort, sometimes uncomfortably, in these tales of interstellar warfare, world-building and universe-creation. Further volumes are Of the Fall (1989 US; vt Secret Harmonies 1989 UK) and the very substantial Eternal Light (1991), whichbest exemplifies to date PJM's control over the instruments of 1990s HARD SF: wormholes, agathics to forestall death, GENETIC ENGINEERING andcosmogony on the hugest scale. The series itself ostensibly concerns the attempts of an almost fatally wearied corporation-run Earth - reminiscent of Cordwainer SMITH - to fend off the panicked aggressions of an ancient starfaring species, itself hiding from enemies of its own ilk; but the pleasures of this ongoing sequence seem more and more to lie in the increasingly comprehensive physical history of the entire Universe adumbrated in Eternal Light.PJM's next two novels are singletons, and represent his most accomplished work to date. Red Dust (1993) is set, like many 1990s novels, on a MARS which has been colonized (and terraformed) by humans. His treatment of this dominant theme - in terms of a quest plot which takes its American protagonist across a complex landscape ruled by the Chinese - is vivid, swift, and spontaneous-seeming. Pasquale's Angel (1994) is an ALTERNATE WORLD story set in a Renaissance Italy dominated bythe remote figure of Leonardo da Vinci, who in this reality has created a dystopian society through the power of his engineering genius. In the mid 1990s, PJM is beginning to look like one of the significant exploratorytalent of late sf.

   JC Other work: In Dreams (anth 1992) with Kim NEWMAN.

   See also: ALIENS; AMAZING STORIES; BLACK HOLES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CYBORGS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; ECOLOGY; EVOLUTION; GAMES WORKSHOP; INTERZONE; METAPHYSICS; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PARANOIA; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.