''The back-story of The Book of Confluence is that after ten million years of human history, all the humans have vanished – they have become as gods, and have disappeared into a very big black hole which they've made out of the Large Magellanic Cloud. When I'd done it, I figured out I'd sort of sketched in this huge world with a big back-history, but I'd only really looked at one very small part of that, and I thought, 'Well, what else is out there?' So I worked out a way of exploring it – not only the world as it is, but as it was and will be. Here is how it all began: I did a story called 'Recording Angel' for Greg Bear's anthology New Legends. ''I've committed trilogy, but just a trilogy – only three books, I promise! I did slip one short story out, but that was from five million years before the trilogy started, so I guess I'm allowed that. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and other stories (1991) and The Invisible Country (1996). He recently gave up teaching and is now a full-time writer. Campbell Award, and Child of the River (1997) – first of SF trilogy The Book of Confluence, which will continue with Ancients of Days and (tentatively titled) Ship of Fools. Later works include Mars novel Red Dust (1993), alternate world Renaissance work Pasquale's Angel (1994), near-future SF Fairyland (1995), which won the John W. Dick Award it began a loosely connected series which continued with Of the Fall (aka Secret Harmonies, 1989), and Eternal Light (1991).

His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), was a co-winner of the 1989 Philip K. At 19, he sold a story to If, but the magazine folded before it could appear he made the first of many short fiction sales in 1984, when ''Wagon, Passing'' appeared in Asimov's. McAuley has degrees in botany and zoology and did scientific research in Britain and, for a time in the '80s, in Los Angeles, before becoming a full-time professor in the UK. (excerpted from Locus Magazine, August 1998)

Fairyland paul mcauley