Paul J. McAuley was born in the UK in 1955, St. George's Day (April 23rd). He is a well educated man, having a Ph.D. in Botany and having studied at many of the world’s finest educational establishments, including Oxford and UCLA. He has lectured in botany at St. Andrews University and now wiles away his hours writing novels in his London home.
He wrote his first short story when he was 20 years old and the magazine that was to publish it promptly went out of business. After a long break from writing due to this omen, he took up the quill again to write the novel "Four Hundred Billion Stars" (published in 1995) which won the prestigious Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. His next novel, entitled "Fairyland" won both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke award for best sci-fi novel and the John W. Campbell award for best novel. Since then, Mr. McAuley has won a seemingly endless stream of awards for various short stories and novels.
The Books which this fine man has produced are extremely well written and thought out, with exciting story lines and vivid characters. His knowledge of current and speculative science and technology lends itself well to his work and he makes full use of it to create environments which seem amazing and unusual, but not implausible or unrealistic. One of the major plusses of his books are that the science in them works, unlike other sci-fi writers like Stel Pavlou who let errors creep into their fictional worlds through sloppy research and limited knowledge.
As well as short stories and novels, he also writes a regular column for "Interzone" (A British sci-fi magazine).