I Read Books: Whole Wide World
Paul McAuley’s 2001 near-future surveillance state murder mystery. There’s a murdered woman in a Britain where the internet is highly controlled. There’s a cop in the computer department of the Met who is under a cloud after an incident during the InfoWar riots when all the data was deleted. There’s a whole world stretching from the dead woman’s artistic videos through grey and black market pornography through to the tech-billionaire behind the chips in the surveillance system.
This still could be a future thriller though the tech is a little old fashioned and descriptions of how secret websites (“the dark web” as we now call it) work and the surveillance state feel dated. It’s in half the crime shows on TV. The idea of the InfoWar, the deletion of data on people has also been used on TV, most notably in Mr Robot.
In fact McAuley’s slightly science-fictiony murder mystery has been so co-opted by slightly science-fictiony TV thrillers it feels almost cosy and familiar, which is an odd feeling from a McAuley novel. Really, I’m looking for strangeness and alienation when I read him, juxtaposing human feeling against an inexplicable universe (albeit one explained in scientific detail).
Read This: For a techy murder mystery that tours a familiar yet transformed future London
Don’t Read This: For anything truly mindbending.
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