............cybertech and gene engineering, tinkering with human DNA to produce the world of Faery in a civil-war-strewn Europe of the near future. Fairyland is, in fact, hardest of hard SF.
............the story relates what happens when Alex Sharkey, designer of psychoactive viruses (giving a safe high without drugs), meets up with a scary, super-smart young girl called Milena. Sharkey helps Milena design a means of instilling intelligence into a Doll, the genetically-engineered slave labour of Europe and the rest of the First World. The pair thus create the first of the fairies, who turn out to be every bit as fey and dangerous as their fantasy counterparts. Milena absconds with the first fairy, leaving Sharkey infected with a nanotech device that ensures he will search for Milena. In the next two parts, Alex and others seek to discover the secrets of the fairies, and of Milena, their strange creator, on a quest to make herself immortal.
