Fairyland is the story of middle-aged, overweight biohacker Alex Sharkey. At least it begins that way. Author of many popular street drugs, he spends his days in a dim apartment cooking up bioengineered narcotics and his nights trying to repay the debts he owes a local London gangster. Stuck in the cycle, Sharkey finds himself in the unenviable position of having to create a gene splice that goes far beyond the legality of his already illegal drug manufacture. Kick starting an evolutionary leap he knew was likely but couldn't stop, London proves to be only the beginning of Sharkey's story, as soon enough the world will know of his creation.
Had he wanted, McAuley could have taken such an outlay down familiar genre roads. You know them: hardboiled noir, tough guy antics, brain technology, etc. it could have been stereotypical cyberpunk. But McAuley goes a different direction. The dystopia remains in-your-face, uncompromising, but the book's angle is biotechnology. Molecular biology forms the source of the story's narcotics (as opposed to the typical chemical-only form), which allows the manner in which tech invades the body to be more than just mechanical; it can be genetic also. The gene splice Sharkey is foreced to create takes what were previously just biodolls and turns them into sentient , blue-skinned beings: fairies.
Fairyland is divided into three acts with major time jumps between: Sharkey's time on the streets of London, a burgeoning fairy uprising in the slums of Paris, and the inevitable clash of humans and fairies in Albania. An effective technique, it allows McAuley to create discrete bits of story that introduce new characters without having to create lengthy, and ultimately unnecessary, transitions. The reader is brought up to speed, slowly and steadily, in the course of each subsequent act.
McAuley's prose is sharp and on-point throughout Fairyland. He does an excellent job using a few, precise words to describe an item, a place, or a minor character, never letting exposition get in the way of pace. Moreover, his hand-wavy technobabble never overwhelms. It easily gets the reader across the bridge of disbelief—even now in 2025.
One of the challenges of the novel is how heavily McAuley feeds the dystopia. Fairyland is BLEAK. I get a grim future is part of the book's motif, and deviating from it risks diluting the product. But damn, there isn't a bright spot. You do not want to live in McAuley's future.
On the flip side of that coin, there is value in the future McAuley portrays, particularly the manner in which it parallels the fast rate of change in our own world. The uncertainty we feel with such fast, pervasive social and technological change is captured in this novel. The roots are clearly different; Fairyland focuses on experimental narcotics and gene mutation whereas fast change in our world seems to be driven through changing perception of gender norms, AI, and social media. But the result is similar. All of us with a foot in global media have increased, nagging thoughts in the back of our mind regarding the rapid change happening in the world (or at least the perception thereof). Nobody feels it's under control, and McAuley captures this magnificently in Fairyland.
I normally do not mention this in reviews, but Fairyland did win a few awards in its day. In the time before checking DEI boxes was the arbiter of “best”, books were allowed to stand out based on their own merit and word of mouth. In 1995 word got around that Fairyland was a good novel. And I think in 2025 it still is. There are the aforementioned parallels to quick, widespread social change. The imagination is rich. And McAuley's writing holds up. You would be hard-pressed to know this was a '95 or '25 novel without looking at the publisher notes. This is a piece of cyberpunk worth going back for.
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