A review by librarycore
All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

4.0

As a work of postmodern fiction, "All Those Vanished Engines" has a plot twisted in on itself and layered on top of itself, full of self-referential winks and dream-like asides. Is it science fiction? If pressed, I would call it classic magical realism. The reader is never quite sure how much of the weird stuff has actually happened and how much has been created, dreamed, or hallucinated by the narrator(s). The story is told in three parts. Names, places, and events weave in and out of these parts, each of which comment on the family history of the narrator of the second and third parts. The first section almost stands alone as a piece of alternate history fiction, until it's subverted two-thirds of the way through by the intrusion of sci-fi tropes. The second section tells the heartbreaking story of a writer trying to decide what to do with his ailing father and autistic sister after his mother has died. His fragile emotional state is further aggravated by both his painful family history and his relationship with a student of his who is writing a work of fiction that, unbeknownst to her, mirrors his own childhood. The final part of the book takes place in the near-future. The narrator from the middle portion is now an old man, but has returned to the abandoned library of a ravaged city to find out why his life seems to be cursed. The connecting threads of these tales contain ghosts, aliens, lost manuscripts, hidden jewels, and a Civil War event called "The Battle of the Crater," which may or may not have had supernatural significance. Behind all of the narrative gymnastics, Paul Park has written a haunting work about how the decisions of the past, made by family members long dead, inevitably effect our own life and future in ways we will never be able to understand. The researcher and genealogist may uncover pieces of the map, but most of the connecting roads will remain shrouded in the shadow of story.