Whole Wide World
Paul J. McAuley
388 pages
published in 2001

Paul McAuley is part of the group of British writers who came to prominence in the late eighties and early nineties, a group which also included Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter and slightly later, Ken MacLeod. He started out by writing intelligent space opera, but he has also written alternate history, cyberpunk and far future science fantasy. With Whole Wide World he explores yet another subgenre, the near-future thriller with a science fiction sensibility.

The story is set in the Britain of 2010, 18 months after a serious terrorist attack on the City, London's financial district destroyed the economy, through targeted viruses and microwave bombs. This Infowar also helped accelarate the trend in Britain towards a national security state, though it didn't cause it. CCTV cameras are of course even now already ominpresent in British streets, but in the future that MacAuley sketches they are truly everywhere and connected with each other into one giantic network, called ADESS. At the same time, the worst nightmares of cyberlibertarians have come true, with computer and internet use being licensed and heavily censored; it is now nigh impossible to get a proper multi-purpose computer. Finally, the country has gone Mary Whitehouse: no more porn or indecency.

It is against this background that the story unfolds. At heart, Whole Wide World is a murder mystery, but in true technothriller tradition the murder mystery also serves as a gateway for the hero to examine the sordid foundations of the world he inhabits. Said hero being, also in true technothriller fashion being a renegade cop, John Dixon, whose career as a hostage negotiator was ruined during the Infowar and who now serves out his time on the London police force in an obscure and underfunded department as an information technologist. He is called in to help research the computers found at the scene of the murder of Sophie Booth, a young student killed in a horrible fashion. Sophie however also turned out to have her own porn site, a big nono in the Britain of 2010... Dixon grows intrigued with her and starts investigating her death on his own, slowly coming on the trial of something much bigger than the murder of one porn artist...

The resolution of it all was a bit of a disappointment and the mixture of science fiction with a conventional technothriller story was not a complete success. I got the feeling McAuley deliberately restrained himself, perhaps to appeal to a broader audience. Still a satisfying read, but something you'd rather get from the library than buy in hardcover.