Paul McAuley è un autore britannico di fantascienza. Le sue opere esplorano spesso temi come l'ingegneria genetica, l'intelligenza artificiale e il futuro dell'umanità. McAuley è noto per la sua dettagliata costruzione del mondo e i suoi personaggi complessi. Le sue storie approfondiscono gli aspetti oscuri e intricati della tecnologia e il suo impatto sulla società.
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.
The story of Wei Lee, the most unlikely Messiah since L.Ron Hubbard. It is set on Mars 600 years after the Yankees tried to terraform it, and failed, and 500 years after the Red Chinese took over and finished the job. The author won the Philip K. Dick Award for "Eternal Light".
'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.
Nel 1992 la Guerra Mondiale ha ucciso milioni di persone, e condannato all'estinzione intere specie, costringendo l'umanità ad andare nello spazio. Chi è rimasto sogna di possedere un animale vivente, e le compagnie producono copie incredibilmente realistiche: gatti, cavalli, pecore... Anche l'uomo è stato duplicato. I replicanti sono simulacri perfetti e indistinguibili, e per questo motivo sono banditi dalla Terra. Ma a volte decidono di confondersi tra i loro simili biologici e di far perdere le loro tracce. A San Francisco vive un uomo che ha l'incarico di ritirare gli androidi che violano la legge, ma i dubbi intralciano spesso il suo crudele mestiere, spingendolo a chiedersi cosa sia davvero un essere umano... Tragico e grottesco assieme, il romanzo di Philip Dick racconta il panorama desolato della San Francisco del futuro, il desiderio di amore e redenzione che alberga nei più umili, trasformando il genere fantascientifico in un noir cupo e metafisico. Un'opera che ha influenzato la visione della metropoli futura e ha anticipato i dilemmi della bioetica contemporanea.
A novel which centres on the discovery of an enigmatic star travelling towards the solar system from the galactic core, having been accelerated to a considerable fraction of the speed of light half a million years ago. The author won the Philip K. Dick Award for Four Hundred Billion Stars.
This exotic, fast-paced space opera turns on a single question: who decides what it means to be human?