Whole Wide World

Whole Wide World

by PaulMcAuley (Author)

Synopsis

A compelling police procedural set the day-after-tomorrow: a chilling murder mystery and a gripping conspiracy thriller London, the second decade of the twenty-first century, two years after the InfoWar. The cameras are everywhere: smart, tireless, and linked together by the Autonomous Distributed Expert System, a vast, cold, unsympathetic system that's still testing its limits. There's no escape from its gaze; everyone's a suspect. But there's a flaw in the system, a way of outwitting its gaze, and someone has been murdered because of it. The InfoWar: high explosive and microwave bombs were set off by terrorists in the City; viruses shut down cooling fans inside computers and started thousands of fires; bank accounts ran back to zero; phone lines were randomly cross-connected; TV channels transmitted porn or insane rants by computer-generated talking heads; every traffic light in London jammed on red; the Internet went down. Our narrator has kept his rank but not his status since he was seconded to the Information Technology section of the Metropolitan Police. He was badly wounded in the InfoWar and his superiors would rather he took early retirement. But he is called to the scene when Sophie Booth is found dead on a chair in front of three webcams, blood pooling beneath her. And in the ruins of the smashed computers and disabled cameras he sees a way to redeem himself and get back to active duty. So begins a very dangerous game for Minimum (our narrator's nickname), especially since there's no hiding from the CCTVs that are everywhere and in the control of people who would rather he did not solve the crime.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 388
Edition: New Ed
Publisher: Voyager
Published: 15 Jul 2002

ISBN 10: 000651331X
ISBN 13: 9780006513315

Media Reviews
'A quality novel that further confirms McAuley's place in the first rank of British SF authors' Time Out 'A chilling thriller from one of Britain's best SF writers, now turning to crime fiction with awesome ease' Guardian 'Here's a topically relevant crime thriller full of great narrative twists' Starburst 'McAuley conveys a sense of loss and of ambivalent despair which underpins and gives depth to his dark vision of a future that is not so much near, as already with us' Interzone 'Whole Wide World is a major novel and McAuley is one of our best' Locus
Author Bio
Paul McAuley worked as a research scientist and lecturer in Britain and the United States for twenty years before becoming a full-time writer. His novels have won the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell awards. He lives in North London.