Book Review: The Waking Engine
/The Waking Engine
"There are a thousand worlds, each more unlike your home than the last. Where you end up, or how you get there, nobody really knows. You just do. And you go on. Dying and living, sleeping and waking, resting and walking. That's how living works. It's a surprise for most of us, at first. We think our first years of life are all we'll ever see. We are wrong ... When we die, we don't cease to exist or turn into shimmering motes of ectoplasm or purple angels or anything else you may have been brought up to believe. We just ... go on living. Someplace else."
The book's US cover, by the wondrously talented Stephan Martiniere, is evocative enough to be studied in detail as the visual representation of Edison's superb description of the City Unspoken as it sprawls before Cooper in his first sight of it:
Through the telescope he saw snapshots of the whole: monuments and mausoleums pitted and scarred with age lay tilted, stone and gilt akimbo as the growth of the city slowly devoured them. Mansions hid behind the walls that sheltered riotous gardens and skeletal gazebos. To the west, sculpture of a weeping woman worked entirely in silver sat buried up their massive head in newer stonework - a garland of exhaust pipes about her neck belched bruise-purple smoke into the air from below. Not far from that, an alabaster angel blew his shofar before a ramshackle square that brimmed with black oil, summoning a host that would clearly never come. And chains, everywhere chains - thick as houses, exposed by canals, or pulled up from belowground and winched liked steeples over bridges and buildings, draped across districts, erupting from the tiled floors of public squares.
This style of unabashedly opulent prose fills The Waking Engine from one end to another and makes it a quite memorably impressive debut in a field not particularly characterized any longer by its lovely prose. That prose keeps pace with the rapid procession of Cooper's adventures in the City Unspoken, where he's something of an anomaly (naturally - inventive or not, it wouldn't be science fiction if it weren't at heart messianic) around which the book's many parallel plots eventually come to revolve. Only occasionally does Edison's sweet tooth for video game-style grind-and-growl prose mug the narrative and yield up moments like this:
"Listen to me very closely, trash," Sesstri hissed, twisting the plank until the man squealed. "When I have been twice attacked in as many days, I abandon the willingness to curb my violent impulses. I do not know why you're following me or why you have the poor sense to challenge me on your own, but I was raised by a warlord who taught me to kill before I learned to speak: the next time I see your face I will scrape it off your skull with my boot heel. Do you understand me, you miserable waste of meat?"
Edison peoples his first novel with a large cast of vividly-drawn characters - excepting Cooper himself, of course, who's noteworthy mainly for the fact, rare still in mainstream genre fiction and rarer still to be incorporated so matter-of-factly, that he's gay - and the imaginative concepts on display everywhere are uniformly fascinating. In fact the book's biggest weakness is its central conceit, since it requires its readers to adopt religious belief even to get started. Since demonstrably nothing of an individual survives death, the just-because explanations of characters like Asher or Sesstri take perhaps more getting used to than the narrative allows, much as if a character were to growl at the book's beginning, "We're actually all mechanical androids, and when we die we get re-designed." Science fiction and fantasy have a long history of amply rewarding the willing suspension of disbelief, but there are limits - we're not bunny rabbits, after all, and a book asserting we were and then barreling forward could expect to lose a few readers right at the outset.Luckily, the book deepens this conceit too as the chapters go on, and everything in the world of the City Unspoken (and its numberless adjacent universes) ends up so engrossing that those initial difficulties are almost entirely overcome. The payoffs here are ample; they're worth the leap.