cahn

The first book of a trilogy (so take everything here with a grain of salt until I finish the third book). It's set in an alternate, less developed world, so has the feel of a fantasy, but without any fantastic elements.

I... am kind of surprised by how much I like this book. But it's got an engineer as the central character! A real engineer, one who reminds me a great deal of D in the scientific characterization (though very little in the non-scientific sense). It's got elegant descriptions of machinery and convoluted conspiracies and people wrecking their lives out of the best intentions (and sometimes knowing it... self-awareness is a painful thing, but one I like reading about). And the last hundred pages seems just one sock to the eye after another (ending with a reveal in the last two pages that was clearly telegraphed and which I totally should have seen coming but didn't). I liked this so much that I'm going to buy the second and third books (and I don't say that very often about trilogies).

I mean, it's got issues. I don't really like the way she does omniscient POV - it gives me a headache because she jumps from character to character too quickly for my taste. Sometimes she uses weird anachronistic phrases which really annoy me ("Great white hope"? "Piece of cake"? Umm... no). It's dark, as might be expected from a book whose themes seem to be the machinery of governments and that love leads to evil. Most glaringly, the engineer himself is a little... Mary-Sueish isn't quite right... too skilled. I liked him very much in the first few chapters, where he is revealed to be exceedingly competent about engineering, as it tallies very well with the competent engineers I know. Once he turned out also to be an expert in politics and people, I lost interest, and although I'm still psyched at his engineering prowess, I think he is the least interesting character by the end of the book.

I don't think it's much like Iain Banks or John M. Ford (though the Mezentine empire could well be a stand-in for Ford's inverted Byzantium in Dragon Waiting... um, now that I write that, maybe it is), but I can feel similar parts of my brain engaging when I read Parker, so I might expect that fans of those authors might also like these books. Dune, as well. It reminds me a lot of The Carpet Makers (Eschbach). I would recommend it highly for

julianyap and dis-recommend it for

mistful, and I have no earthly idea what the rest of you would think about it. If you do happen to pick it up, let me know so I can add the data to my rec engine ;)