Gardens of the sun

Paul J. McAuley (born 23 April 1955) is a British botanist and science fiction author. A biologist by training, McAuley writes mostly hard science fiction. His novels deal with themes such as biotechnology, alternative history/reality, and space travel. McAuley began writing science fiction with the far-future space-opera novel Four Hundred Billion Stars, its sequel Eternal Light, and the planetary-colony adventure Of the Fall. The novel Red Dust, set on a far-future Mars colonized by the Chinese, is a planetary romance featuring many emerging technologies and science fiction motifs: nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, personality downloads, and virtual reality.