Inkthinker
07-17-2008, 02:52 AM
Just picked this up yesterday, and so far it's been pretty damn good.
It's a steampunk-genre novel by Jay Lake, in which he imagines the universe as made by clockwork... the Great Equatorial Wall is a gigantic mountain 100 miles high topped with unbelievably huge teeth that run the Earth along a massive brass orbital track... essentially a gear at the equator. The inside of the planet is a mass of clockwork, the moon a smaller cousin that runs along it's own circumferential track around the Earth. Victoria's England is at war with the Chinese for dominance of the Northern Hemisphere, and a young clockmaker's apprentice in the British principality of Connecticut has just been visited by the brass archangel Gabriel, charged with finding the Key Perilous to wind the Mainspring of the Earth before it all runs down to disaster.
Needless to say, in a world like this there is little question of a Creator, but mankind can still argue (and war) over who that creator was, and what their intentions might have been.
Aside from that the setting is a fairly interesting twist on the traditional turn-of-the-20th-century period (1900 to be exact), with plenty of references dropped in that ought to appeal to fans of the steampunk genre, and the story itself has been a page-turner. Airships, electricks, exotic lands, and bizarre creatures round it out, and I'm already looking forward to the sequel Escapement.
Worth checking out if you like steampunk, or if you're just looking for something new and different.
It's a steampunk-genre novel by Jay Lake, in which he imagines the universe as made by clockwork... the Great Equatorial Wall is a gigantic mountain 100 miles high topped with unbelievably huge teeth that run the Earth along a massive brass orbital track... essentially a gear at the equator. The inside of the planet is a mass of clockwork, the moon a smaller cousin that runs along it's own circumferential track around the Earth. Victoria's England is at war with the Chinese for dominance of the Northern Hemisphere, and a young clockmaker's apprentice in the British principality of Connecticut has just been visited by the brass archangel Gabriel, charged with finding the Key Perilous to wind the Mainspring of the Earth before it all runs down to disaster.
Needless to say, in a world like this there is little question of a Creator, but mankind can still argue (and war) over who that creator was, and what their intentions might have been.
Aside from that the setting is a fairly interesting twist on the traditional turn-of-the-20th-century period (1900 to be exact), with plenty of references dropped in that ought to appeal to fans of the steampunk genre, and the story itself has been a page-turner. Airships, electricks, exotic lands, and bizarre creatures round it out, and I'm already looking forward to the sequel Escapement.
Worth checking out if you like steampunk, or if you're just looking for something new and different.