cover image WHOLE WIDE WORLD

WHOLE WIDE WORLD

Paul McAuley, . . Tor, $24.95 (608pp) ISBN 978-0-7653-0392-9

On the heels of last year's near-future novel, The Secret of Life, British author McAuley offers a stunning thriller set in London less than a decade in the future. The U.K. has been transformed by three events: the Infowar, which has wiped out most of the nation's stored computer records; the rise to power of a right-wing government sworn to eliminate all pornographic and violent materials, both hard copy and electronic; and the development of ADESS, the Autonomous Distributed Expert Surveillance System, a huge network of security cameras all guided by an evolving AI, all feeding their information into various police security computers. A market for pornography still exists, however, and young Sophie Booth, a London art student, aims to please, putting on shows for her adoring fans before her apartment's live webcams. Unfortunately, she opens her door to Mr. Wrong one day and is gruesomely murdered in front of those same webcams. A down-on-his-luck London police officer, his career nearly destroyed by false allegations of cowardliness during the Infowar, finds himself at the center of the investigation. Resented, even hated by his fellow officers, threatened by a mysterious and vicious hacker, he puts his life on the line to bring Sophie's murderer to justice. McAuley effectively combines traditional techno-thriller and police procedural techniques with a clear sense of where the World Wide Web at its worst may be going to produce a highly effective, well-crafted and unusually gritty novel that should please fans of both thrillers and computer-oriented hard SF. (May 21)