nonionay | Babbling about Escapement

I typed up a review of Jay Lake's latest book, Escapement ages ago, and of course, promptly forgot to post it until days after the darn book actually comes out.

Short version: This book is wonderful and fun, with unique characters and the most fascinating worldbuilding you'll see in a long time. I liked Mainspring all right, but it occasionally dragged, and I didn't care much about the main character, but in Escapement, all those problems are non-existent.

Escapement by Jay Lake (ARC won at Norwescon.)

This is the sequel to Mainspring, Jay Lake's unique novel that came out last year. It's set in a world where the planet has a huge gear around the equator, and spins around on a brass track around the sun. To call it unique is an understatement. My favorite thing about the world is the huge amounts of entertaining speculation it leads to. Somewhere on the internet is a discussion of how such a world would actually rotate. If the year were actually 365 days, the planet would spin so fast, the sun would be bobbing up and down constantly. So the world would have to rotate slower, the year be longer, but maybe with seasons simulated by twists in the track. Random stuff like that.

But on to Escapement...

Unlike the first, single narrator book, this one has three point-of-view characters, two of whom are minor characters from the last book, a librarian and Scottish air-sailor, who were my favorites. And I love them even more now. But I'll be honest, at first, I hated the new girl, Paolina. She struck me as incredibly self-centered and Mary Sue-ish in her talents, as if Lake, who realized there were virtually no females in the first book, tried too hard to make a strong girl protagonist. At the root of my irritation, I think was the fact that she had little to no connection to the small, isolated town she grew up in. Her mother is mentioned only cursorily, and that only added to Paolina's self-centeredness. Everyone in her town is likely dependent upon each other for survival, but all we see of that is how ungrateful everyone else is for Paolina's vital mechanical skills. As awful as being taken for granted is, she takes them for granted too. Not that I don't think she should have left when she did, rightfully despising the way she was treated, I just wish I could understand her background and how she got to be how she was. Instead, she's just some random girl who can suddenly make clocks in the dark.

Then again, I'm infamous for hating teenage girls in books, and

kehrli and

csinman completely disagree with me.

But, as the story went on and left the village Paolina seemingly had no connection to, she ceased to bother me, and I look forward to seeing her in later books. She grew, had illusions shattered, made hard choices. The magic that is involved is too fascinating to hate.

I've got no complaints about the other two characters, a librarian and Scottish air-sailor; they were my favorites in the last book, and nothing's changed.

Like the last book, this one is travel-centered, and showcases the amazing world it's set in. The Wall is a world of its own, a magical, mysterious realm right here on earth. The first book stood alone, and this one mostly does as well, but leaves some definite loose ends to be explored in later books, which I look forward to.

This was the first Advanced Reading Copy I've ever read, and that was an interesting experience in itself. I wonder how they're printed, because the print was strange, with the serifs thinning to oblivion is places, but in a jagged way, as if it was printed on a cheap ink-jet. One amusing annoyance was the fact that I had the cover on my huge computer monitor at work (thanks, Tor!) so I have it ingrained in my head, but I turned to the ARC's cover, to look at the airship, and of course, it wasn't there. And I kept doing this! At least five times! And then, when I finally got the final version of the book, the cover still jars me, because the desktop was only a cropped version!

This is the book where I caught a freak geographical error in the ARC. At Iron Springs I ended up flipping through the book to see if it got fixed in time. Because Jay and I were the only one's who'd read it, there was much, "was it before or after the...thing...happened? When they...moved..." Anyway, it did get caught in time, and now I have two copies of Escapement with interesting stories.