Review: Mainspring
Sometimes, the joy of genre fiction is exploring limits. Seeing how far you can take a good idea. When I first discovered steampunk, it struck me as small-scale. Something that a tinker cobbled together, but ultimately worked within a limited sphere. When inventors start building bigger–say with airships or nuclear-powered locomotives–things have a way of blowing up in their faces. When you type the words “hydrogen envelope,” your finger twitches to type “ignite.” Especially once you’ve spent as much time as I have researching airship mishaps on Wikipedia.
Then I found the Hungry City Chronicles (reviewed below), and saw the enormous scope that the genre could achieve. Steampunk makes an excellent vehicle of societal criticism, when you want to use it that way. Sometimes that vehicle can be taken literally, and it can be be very very big. Consequently, very very fun. The bigger, the clunkier, the more elaborate, the more breakable, the more steampunk.
I discovered Jay Lake through his City Imperishable stories, which are filled with so much darkness and so much light that they form a paradox. In writing a steampunk series, I had anticipated Lake would stick to his M.O. and keep it in urban fantasy, but oh was I ever wrong. Lake took the scope of the genre to the next level. Instead of tinkers adjusting their goggles in a lonely workshop, Lake made steampunk cosmic.
Mainspring introduces an entire universe that runs on clockwork. The earth, the sun, and the moon all rotate on impossibly large tracks. Our protagonist Hethor is, appropriately, a clockmaker’s apprentice. He goes to sleep listening to the tick of celestial bodies. Except the world is winding down. If Hethor doesn’t find the Key Perilous and figure out how to wind-up the world, humanity will meet its end. Which goes to show you that there’s a job for everyone.
This is a great book when you want to submerge yourself in a classical hero. Hethor has a clearly defined arc that makes you smile with pity at his foibles and cheer for his victories. That said, this is by no means a simple book. The wide world is much, much larger than Hethor gets to see in full. Lake poses a score of questions that, much to my surprise by the end, go unanswered. One character spits a coiled spring when he dies.
You don’t get to play that card without letting me see its face, buddy!
So it came to little surprise to discover that this was the first book of three (so far), though it works great as a standalone. Escapement is sitting on my desk, tense with expectation. I can’t wait to see what characters return, how their own challenges play out, and what more I can learn about this world. Pinion, the third book, is a new release. I came to the series late, but I’m very glad that I came to it at all.
