unbalanced of predictable script that fill your subgenre beano card with the same subgenre elements over and over ? With The Half - Made mankind , Felix Gilman has blended elements from alternate account , Steampunk , Westerns , and epic fantasy to create something truly original .
Spoilers onward …
The jacket description of The Half - Made World is cryptic , to say the least . There ’s reference of an onetime General lock in an asylum and the Doctor of Psychology come to bring around him . That would be Dr. Liv Alverhuysen , latterly come from the civilized East . She ’s a widow woman and a doctor of psychology and she ’s tired of sitting through these interminable module meetings . Upon receiving an offer to join the faculty of the House Dolorous , an harebrained refuge far to the West , she right away mob her purse and dress out .
What she does n’t know is the House is home to a bury hero : General Enver , once the loss leader of the democratic Red Republic and now a madman ineffective to remember anything but the snatch of nursery rime . Years ago , he believe he had the power to stop the relentless , destructive warfare between the Line and the Gun , the two great powers trying to work the West in their own image . The soulless , mechanistic Line require to bring the land to list , while the Gun seems to enjoy lawlessness . And each have remove men to beguile the General . The Guns send one of their Agents , the disreputable and grave John Creedmoor , while Sub - Invigilator ( Third ) Lowery represent the will of the Engines . Liv know nothing of the General ’s past tense , but she wants to cure him ; Creedmoor and Lowery require to seize him . And so the novel ’s three period - of - prospect lineament are set at crossing - purposes .
Liv steals the novel right out from under the other persona . She ’s a spiritual baby to Eula Goodnight , the magnificently ego - ensure spinner missionary played by Katherine Hepburn in Rooster Cogburn . At first glimpse , she look like the van of civilisation , come to institute Sunday school and good personal manner . But spend more clip with the persona and you realize she ’s just not docile enough to live anywhere but the uncivilized , crazy Dame Rebecca West . It ’s just the only place big enough for her . At the goal of the novel , she ’s harder and maybe just a bite dangerous , but last her own adult female . It ’s an emotional journey often associate with chick literature , but here it ’s worked in blood and cordite , rather than appletinis and stilettos .
Felix Gilman has produced a great westerly , with the drear substance of a classic like Shane or The Searchers . Forget the epic sheriff in the lily-white cowpoke hat — these main characters are profoundly flawed . The respectable Liv is addict to laudanum and strangely queasy , while Creedmoor is a liar and a grampus and a Noel Coward who ca n’t break away from his masters . As he tells Liv : “ Some of us are not suit to domesticity . Some of us , fight it though we may , are not suited for reason ; we must make our peace with craziness . ” They ’re just not cut out for good , settled places , and when set free on a lawless place , they make for compelling , crimson storytelling .
But the speculative elements make Gilman ’s West more turbulent and unsettling than the background of the most fevered 19th - 100 dime novel . The steampunk component are lightly deal , used largely to constitute the culture of the occupation and establish that the rest of the world is no lucifer for these unstoppable machine . linesman feel no need to glamorize wide - opened spaces ; anywhere set for habitation is made of iron and fill with deaf engine noise . They require to convey parliamentary procedure to the human beings , and they ’re aided by an raiment of anachronisms , like film and radio transmitters and flying machine .
Then , not contented to leave this a simple story about diligence overpowering environment , Gilman consume his existence - building even a gradation further . In this raw , ontologically unsound land , our dreary impulses are n’t just given free reign . They become literal monster , active in the earthly concern . The Colt revolver and the train , two hallmarks of the genre , have become more than prop — they’re animate creature , each with their own schedule that takes no history of world .
Any one of these genre straining would have made a half - decent novel . But the man fit so well , and they ’re coalesce so skilfully that it make something new and and exciting — and well worth reading .
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