Paul J. McAuley was born in England in 1955 and currently lives in Scotland. He worked as a researcher in biology at various universities before going to St. Andrew's University as a lecturer in botany for 6 years. He's chosen to move on to become a full-time writer. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars , won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and several subsequent novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, winning one for Fairyland which also won the 1997 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. McAuley also produces a regular review column for Interzone and contributes reviews to Foundation .
All human life is here.
It is almost midnight, yet dozens of barges still plough the black waters of the Huangpu Jiang, hazard lights winking red and green, passing either side of streamlined robot cargo clippers that swing at anchor in the midstream channel. The tall white cylinders of the clippers' rotary sails are fitfully illuminated by fireworks bursting above a rock concert in an amphitheatre on the Pudong shore, close to the minaret of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. Nets of white laser light flex against the dark sky. The howl of massed guitars and the throaty roar of the audience carries over the river to Shanghai, where, along the waterfront avenue of the Bund, beneath tiers of neon, crowds swirl past stalled lines of traffic. Most of the old colonial department stores and banks have been torn down, replaced by skyscrapers with organic facings like muscle fibres or wood grain seen under a microscope's lens, or coralline skins fretted with porous knots and hollows and veins.