Fairyland

Fairyland is an Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel by Paul McAuley. I enjoyed my recent read of his Four Hundred Billion Stars. This book is much different but just as enjoyable.

from the back of the book:

Before he met the brilliant, hypnotic child Milena, Alex Sharkey had never played with "dolls" - blue-skinned, gengineered lifeforms designed for work, amusement, or destruction. But the underground gene-hacker is seduced by a megalomaniacal little girl's dream of providing the soulless genetic constructs with free thought and a future - and he unwittingly unleashes a plague of madness on the world. Now there's a void in his life and memory that must be refilled, but it means pursuing the dangerous sentient species he helped sire from the ruins of a Magic Kingdom through a wasted Europe. It is Alex Sharkey's last chance - and the last hope remaining for a once-dominant human race.

The SFSite review says it "dazzles" and

It is a story propelled at its best moments by ideas, and yet it doesn't neglect to present characters who are, more often than not, individual and unpredictable, and so it helps break down the supposed barriers between the novel of ideas and the novel of psychology in the same way that it breaks down the more intractable barriers between hard science fiction and high fantasy.

SciFi.com calls it "an intense, dense and enthralling read" and "an amazing book -- full of exciting ideas that are plausibly extrapolated and told in a thrilling and powerful narrative voice."