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A review by scopique
The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman
3.0
I really liked Gilman's urban fantasy books, Thunderer and Gears of the City. This one takes place in the American West-steampunk universe, and is nowhere near urban fantasy. I'm not generally a fan of steampunk, but this time the usual anachronistic technology was melded with supernatural elements that seemed pretty incongruous at first, but started to grow on my about midway through.
It wasn't a chore to read (unlike Mieville's The City And The City), but I didn't really feel super-compelled either. I didn't really care for many of the characters, with the exception of John Creedmore, who was SUPPOSED to be a horrible killer, but who came off as a mix between Mark Twain and Val Kilmer's portrayal of Doc Holliday from the movie Tombstone (at least in my mind XD). The rest of the characters were pretty transient, which is sad because the protagonist is supposed to be the doctor, Liv Alverhuysen.
Maybe it's because the characters are actually in the service of much higher powers: The Line and The Gun, two supernatural forces who inhabit machinery (massive steam engines for The Line, and finely crafted firearms for The Gun). With these two forces at war, constantly looming over everything and basically destroying everything they come into contact to for their own selfish reasons, any and all characters are pretty much throw-aways in the service of one or the other. It's the neutral characters who suffer the most, since they can't possibly stand up to either without spiritual support of their own (which is actually present in the form of a hospital. Seriously).
Overall, it's a well written book, IMO. Steampunk fans may get a bigger kick out of it then I did, but it was a quick and easy read, so long as you're not expecting a groundbreaking or groundshaking novel of millennial importance.
It wasn't a chore to read (unlike Mieville's The City And The City), but I didn't really feel super-compelled either. I didn't really care for many of the characters, with the exception of John Creedmore, who was SUPPOSED to be a horrible killer, but who came off as a mix between Mark Twain and Val Kilmer's portrayal of Doc Holliday from the movie Tombstone (at least in my mind XD). The rest of the characters were pretty transient, which is sad because the protagonist is supposed to be the doctor, Liv Alverhuysen.
Maybe it's because the characters are actually in the service of much higher powers: The Line and The Gun, two supernatural forces who inhabit machinery (massive steam engines for The Line, and finely crafted firearms for The Gun). With these two forces at war, constantly looming over everything and basically destroying everything they come into contact to for their own selfish reasons, any and all characters are pretty much throw-aways in the service of one or the other. It's the neutral characters who suffer the most, since they can't possibly stand up to either without spiritual support of their own (which is actually present in the form of a hospital. Seriously).
Overall, it's a well written book, IMO. Steampunk fans may get a bigger kick out of it then I did, but it was a quick and easy read, so long as you're not expecting a groundbreaking or groundshaking novel of millennial importance.