The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, the greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane.
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I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book, which I would have been interested enough to seek out anyway.
It suffers slightly by comparison to another steampunk sci-fi favourite of mine, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age_Or_a_Young_Lady_s_Illustrated_Primer
but it is well worth the tour of this debut writer's dark imagination.
Even though I felt it was, at first, a gothic horror version of Charlie and the Chocolate factory crossed with Angela Carter's “Nights at the circus” [leaving aside the obvious “The Tempest” and “The Wizard of Oz”:] the plot soon grows into it's own unique creature.
Populated with mechanical men, monsters and wizards this is a fantasy world that is strangely like our own in it's noise and loss of faith in “the age of miracles”
I thought the book had a few sections that I skipped over where it was just a wall of words describing something I had long before gotten the point of, but other than that I thought the world portrayed made sense, had interesting characters and events and told a story I didn't want to put down.
