Paul J. McAuley

McAuley began with far-future space opera Four Hundred Billion Stars, its sequel Eternal Light, and the planetary-colony adventure Of the Fall.

Red Dust, set on a far-future Mars colonized by the Chinese, is a planetary romance featuring many emerging technologies and SF motifs: nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, personality downloads, virtual reality.

The Confluence series, set in an even more distant future (about ten million years from now), is one of a number of novels to use Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory (that the universe seems to be evolving toward a maximum degree of complexity and consciousness) as one of its themes.

[1] About the same time, he published Pasquale's Angel, set in an alternative Italian Renaissance and featuring Niccolò Machiavegli (Machiavelli) and Leonardo da Vinci as major characters.

McAuley has also used biotechnology and nanotechnology themes in near-future settings: Fairyland describes a dystopian, war-torn Europe where genetically engineered "dolls" are used as disposable slaves.