Entry tags:
A Timely Review
Hi,
So I just finished up Mainspring by Jay Lake. Mr. Lake is the author of Trial of Flowers which I greatly enjoyed and so I was interested in picking up his latest offering.
Here's the premise: God created the universe to run with clocklike precision. And it does. You can see the great track that the Earth rolls along. You can see the moon moving along its track. The Earth itself has a gigantic, brass-tipped cog for an equator. In the Northern Hemisphere, Queen Victoria and the Chinese Empire duke it out with airships. On the other side of the cog (or the Wall), everything is strange and fantastic and mysterious and almost no one crosses hemispheres.
OK, so in New Haven, CT, there's a young clockmakers apprentice name Hethor. One night, the angel Gabriel shows up and tells him that the mainspring at the center of the Earth is winding down and that Hethor has been chosen by God to find the Key Perilous and rewind the mainspring so that the Earth doesn't grind to a halt and perish.
No biggie.
As you might guess, young Hethor is swept up into a whirwind adventure in his quest to try and save the world.
The book was...pretty good. I don't think it's nearly as good as Trial of Flowers. I think the biggest weakness of the book was that the tempo seemed a little uneven. Things you wanted to see more of, flashed past, things you didn't care about seemed to go on a little longer -- which I suppose is subjective reality in a nutshell for you, but it was just...off somehow. The big problem was that Hethor is carried along by Fate from adventure to adventure and then you look up and say "hang on, either this book is part of a trilogy or we're going to have to wrap things up awfully fast here. In fact, it's the latter. The day is saved thanks to a bit of Deus Ex Machina and, if you think about it, that probably makes more than perfect sense for the setting.
Still, the book is certainly a fun read and despite a rushed ending, it was a good time. If you're interested in ClockPunk this doesn't really fall into that genre, but you'll probably find it very entertaining anyway.
later
Tom
So I just finished up Mainspring by Jay Lake. Mr. Lake is the author of Trial of Flowers which I greatly enjoyed and so I was interested in picking up his latest offering.
Here's the premise: God created the universe to run with clocklike precision. And it does. You can see the great track that the Earth rolls along. You can see the moon moving along its track. The Earth itself has a gigantic, brass-tipped cog for an equator. In the Northern Hemisphere, Queen Victoria and the Chinese Empire duke it out with airships. On the other side of the cog (or the Wall), everything is strange and fantastic and mysterious and almost no one crosses hemispheres.
OK, so in New Haven, CT, there's a young clockmakers apprentice name Hethor. One night, the angel Gabriel shows up and tells him that the mainspring at the center of the Earth is winding down and that Hethor has been chosen by God to find the Key Perilous and rewind the mainspring so that the Earth doesn't grind to a halt and perish.
No biggie.
As you might guess, young Hethor is swept up into a whirwind adventure in his quest to try and save the world.
The book was...pretty good. I don't think it's nearly as good as Trial of Flowers. I think the biggest weakness of the book was that the tempo seemed a little uneven. Things you wanted to see more of, flashed past, things you didn't care about seemed to go on a little longer -- which I suppose is subjective reality in a nutshell for you, but it was just...off somehow. The big problem was that Hethor is carried along by Fate from adventure to adventure and then you look up and say "hang on, either this book is part of a trilogy or we're going to have to wrap things up awfully fast here. In fact, it's the latter. The day is saved thanks to a bit of Deus Ex Machina and, if you think about it, that probably makes more than perfect sense for the setting.
Still, the book is certainly a fun read and despite a rushed ending, it was a good time. If you're interested in ClockPunk this doesn't really fall into that genre, but you'll probably find it very entertaining anyway.
later
Tom