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rushthatspeaksI am so very fond of Felix Gilman. Interestingly enough, this is not based on profound love of his two most recent novels. It is based on profound and desperate love of his first novel, Thunderer, which I recall raving about last year, and which was a book about a magical city that actually demonstrated some understanding of the ways that cities work and was just crammed full of really well-done, fascinating things. His second, Gears of the City, had a lot more wrong with it, but it was also a lot more ambitious-- some of the things it was trying are things I'm not sure it's possible to do, which means I only hold it against the book a very little that it didn't do them. The Half-Made World is also an ambitious novel, and one that mostly works and that fails entertainingly when it fails.
The go-to critical word for the novel appears to be 'grim'-- at least, that's the word that has appeared in every review I've read of the book so far (and now, I guess, appears in this one). I... don't understand that. My definition of grim centers around things being even more depressing than is absolutely necessary, more violent, more gritty, more hopeless. This book, you know, it has violence, and grit, but I cannot think how it could possibly have less of that and work, and it never has anything resembling the terrible gray fog of depression that hung over the protagonists of Gears of the City.
The other go-to critic word appears to be 'steampunk'. That one, okay, maybe, kind of. That is debatable. I don't see it, but it doesn't make me wonder what the reviewers are on about. It's just, this is pretty much the same tech level, and in many ways has some of the same aesthetics, as Stephen King's Dark Tower series; I definitely consider them of a subgenre. Steampunk is not a word I'd put to those.
There is not, however, a word as far as I know for 'the mythic strata of this fantasy is a deconstruction of idealizations of the classic Western'. Which is the applicable subgenre. And it's here I think the book has some of its major strengths and weaknesses, because a) most of its ground in this direction was already covered perfectly well by King, but b) it does a great deal of the same sort of myth-examination in about one-seventh the length, which is kind of impressive. King's series has incredibly high high points and incredibly low low points, and Half-Made World is more even but never quite as high.
So the major objection I had to it on structural terms was that I felt I was reading a book that was principally telling me things that have been said before in a rather similar manner. This is not a crippling flaw. The details are very different, after all, and Gilman's worldview is coming from different places. One of his major strengths as an author is the depiction of powers above or beyond or sideways to humanity, forces that can be demons or gods or simply incomprehensible; he was brilliant at that in Thunderer and he's pretty damn good at it here. This is a story about individuals, yes, but also about forces. In the half-made world, the battle rages between Gun and Line. The Guns are demonic weapons who grant their chosen bearers superpowers and command them to do terrible things, murders, robberies, blackmailing, etc. in the name of the war; the Line is the unstoppable onslaught of the industrial culture that has grown up around demonic trains, with the factories, mines, pollution, bureaucracy etc. pertaining thereto, and the Engines that command their lackeys to do terrible things in the name of the war. So the novel is something of a meditation on individualism, its uses and consequences, much more than King's series is (King generally takes it for granted that individuals have power and effect in the universe). The Line has no use for individuals. The Gun appears to be the ultimate expression of lone-wolfism but actually is a viciously tightly run cabal whose soldiers have, in some ways, no free will left. Neither force is morally good, though the Gun is a hell of a lot more entertaining (and don't they know it-- so does Gilman).
Naturally, then, it's a book that centers around the question of whether moral choice by an unaffiliated human protagonist can affect the war seriously, or not. Which I think it handles well and interestingly, and I like the two forces both in themselves and as metaphor for a particular way of viewing the mythical landscape of the Old West, so I'm all right with a lot of the other metaphors having happened before elsewhere. (Although the extent to which they have happened before elsewhere-- there is a bit where the protagonist sits down and contemplates a numinous-looking rose, okay, and I think the tone would have been generally different if this had been trying to be an explicit commentary/riff on the King. I think.)
Let me see, other things-- I could have done with having more than one major female character, though I do like the way the supporting roles are much more gender-split than they could have been. But still, we don't see much of the women of the Line, and the women of the Gun fall into very specific Western-film stereotypes I would have liked to see transcended a little. I am completely undecided about how to feel about the metaphorical-Native-American analogues. They are so precisely and impressively an invocation of every myth you ever get in Westerns about Native Americans that I honestly can't tell whether I think they're a savagely ironic deconstruction of a whole bunch of stereotypes or whether their story-role, due to the book's structure, ends up unintentionally validating some of the myths it's trying to butcher. Ask me again in a week.
There's a lot of magical-landscape porn in this book, which I enjoyed, as travelogue is after all one of the purposes of this genre, and a lot of coolness and badassery for the sake of coolness and badassery, which is entirely appropriate. The principal Gun character does not quite manage to walk off with the entire book in his pocket, which is a good thing, and it must have been a struggle on the author's part to prevent him, but I spent a lot of time just enjoying his company.
And I could go either way on wanting a sequel. It could if it wanted, but I'm not sure it needs it.
So overall, quite recommended, a very fine book by an author who is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. Some day, he's going to write a book that lives up to every single ambition he has for it, and it is going to be awesome.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
The go-to critical word for the novel appears to be 'grim'-- at least, that's the word that has appeared in every review I've read of the book so far (and now, I guess, appears in this one). I... don't understand that. My definition of grim centers around things being even more depressing than is absolutely necessary, more violent, more gritty, more hopeless. This book, you know, it has violence, and grit, but I cannot think how it could possibly have less of that and work, and it never has anything resembling the terrible gray fog of depression that hung over the protagonists of Gears of the City.
The other go-to critic word appears to be 'steampunk'. That one, okay, maybe, kind of. That is debatable. I don't see it, but it doesn't make me wonder what the reviewers are on about. It's just, this is pretty much the same tech level, and in many ways has some of the same aesthetics, as Stephen King's Dark Tower series; I definitely consider them of a subgenre. Steampunk is not a word I'd put to those.
There is not, however, a word as far as I know for 'the mythic strata of this fantasy is a deconstruction of idealizations of the classic Western'. Which is the applicable subgenre. And it's here I think the book has some of its major strengths and weaknesses, because a) most of its ground in this direction was already covered perfectly well by King, but b) it does a great deal of the same sort of myth-examination in about one-seventh the length, which is kind of impressive. King's series has incredibly high high points and incredibly low low points, and Half-Made World is more even but never quite as high.
So the major objection I had to it on structural terms was that I felt I was reading a book that was principally telling me things that have been said before in a rather similar manner. This is not a crippling flaw. The details are very different, after all, and Gilman's worldview is coming from different places. One of his major strengths as an author is the depiction of powers above or beyond or sideways to humanity, forces that can be demons or gods or simply incomprehensible; he was brilliant at that in Thunderer and he's pretty damn good at it here. This is a story about individuals, yes, but also about forces. In the half-made world, the battle rages between Gun and Line. The Guns are demonic weapons who grant their chosen bearers superpowers and command them to do terrible things, murders, robberies, blackmailing, etc. in the name of the war; the Line is the unstoppable onslaught of the industrial culture that has grown up around demonic trains, with the factories, mines, pollution, bureaucracy etc. pertaining thereto, and the Engines that command their lackeys to do terrible things in the name of the war. So the novel is something of a meditation on individualism, its uses and consequences, much more than King's series is (King generally takes it for granted that individuals have power and effect in the universe). The Line has no use for individuals. The Gun appears to be the ultimate expression of lone-wolfism but actually is a viciously tightly run cabal whose soldiers have, in some ways, no free will left. Neither force is morally good, though the Gun is a hell of a lot more entertaining (and don't they know it-- so does Gilman).
Naturally, then, it's a book that centers around the question of whether moral choice by an unaffiliated human protagonist can affect the war seriously, or not. Which I think it handles well and interestingly, and I like the two forces both in themselves and as metaphor for a particular way of viewing the mythical landscape of the Old West, so I'm all right with a lot of the other metaphors having happened before elsewhere. (Although the extent to which they have happened before elsewhere-- there is a bit where the protagonist sits down and contemplates a numinous-looking rose, okay, and I think the tone would have been generally different if this had been trying to be an explicit commentary/riff on the King. I think.)
Let me see, other things-- I could have done with having more than one major female character, though I do like the way the supporting roles are much more gender-split than they could have been. But still, we don't see much of the women of the Line, and the women of the Gun fall into very specific Western-film stereotypes I would have liked to see transcended a little. I am completely undecided about how to feel about the metaphorical-Native-American analogues. They are so precisely and impressively an invocation of every myth you ever get in Westerns about Native Americans that I honestly can't tell whether I think they're a savagely ironic deconstruction of a whole bunch of stereotypes or whether their story-role, due to the book's structure, ends up unintentionally validating some of the myths it's trying to butcher. Ask me again in a week.
There's a lot of magical-landscape porn in this book, which I enjoyed, as travelogue is after all one of the purposes of this genre, and a lot of coolness and badassery for the sake of coolness and badassery, which is entirely appropriate. The principal Gun character does not quite manage to walk off with the entire book in his pocket, which is a good thing, and it must have been a struggle on the author's part to prevent him, but I spent a lot of time just enjoying his company.
And I could go either way on wanting a sequel. It could if it wanted, but I'm not sure it needs it.
So overall, quite recommended, a very fine book by an author who is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. Some day, he's going to write a book that lives up to every single ambition he has for it, and it is going to be awesome.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
