SF/F Review: The Clockwork Dynasty by Daniel H Wilson https://t.co/ZzOyIcOzZf Short Review: 8 out of 10 (1/4)— garik16 (@garik16) October 8, 2017
Short Review (cont): A Story of discovering Robots have been living hidden alongside humanity for ages but are finally dying out (2/4)— garik16 (@garik16) October 8, 2017
Short Review (cont): and searching for a way to save them...while not dying in the process is pretty fun if not particularly deep. (3/4)— garik16 (@garik16) October 8, 2017
Daniel H Wilson's The Clockwork Dynasty is a very entertaining novel. It is not a SF/F work with a major focus on a message or issue (although, like EVERY book in existence, you can find a message in the book if you want), but is instead a pretty entertaining book focused upon a single idea: What if our ancestors way way back built robots before forgetting how, and those robots have existed alongside humanity for millennia and are only now dying out from losing power?
Note: I read this as an audiobook, and the two audiobook readers are excellent. So if you like to listen to the audiobook format, this is a solid choice.
More after the Jump
-----------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
When June Stefanov was a little girl, her grandfather told her the story of seeing an inhuman figure on the World War 2 battleground outside of Stalingrad, and the strange relic it left behind in the snow. When he passed, he left her that relic, and June has spent her entire education and life trying to discover this strange bizarre piece of technology that seems to be hundreds of years old. But when her work on automaton of the distant past reveals a word: "Avtomat," she finds herself attacked by a deadly automaton from the ages and saved by another one, a being called Peter.
Back in the 1700s, the automaton named Peter is awakened back to life by a Russian artificer in order to save the purposes of the Czar Peter the Great. Peter finds that in his heart, he serves "Pravda," Truth and Justice, and seeks endlessly to find a way to fulfill this need. But he and sister Elena soon find themselves swept into the tides of history and caught between a conflict of other automaton, who are thousands of years old.
In the present, the Avtomat are dying out, their bodies running out of energy....and humankind hasn't yet the technology to restore them. It will take knowledge of both the present and the past in order to save the automata from extinction. But June and Peter might not survive long enough as they comb both the past and present in order to find that knowledge....
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Clockwork Dynasty jumps every chapter between present-day chapters narrated by June and past-history chapters narrated by Peter. Thankfully, both narrators are pretty interesting, as are both plotlines, even when the two plotlines aren't directly connecting with one another. June isn't the most active of main characters - while she provides some essential contributions to the plot, most of even the present storyline is Peter's story - but her voice still works. And Peter is pretty great all around.
The plot twists throughout are nicely done - hinted at but still coming to some extent as surprises, which make them fair and work really well. The plot wraps up nicely at the end, and it's a nice mostly happy ending, which is nice to see now and then. This isn't the lightest book, but it's not a dark one either. It's a lot of fun and I really did find myself invested in how things would turn out every time a chapter would end on a cliffhanger and then the plot would flip to the other timeline to keep us on edge.
I do have some minor complaints of course. There's a revelation about what Peter's been doing in the past to set up his activities in the present that comes in June's present story that well....doesn't fit the character really at all (or matchup with the timeline), and it's a little distracting since we know Peter so well as the main character of the past story. And while the twists near the end are nice and not completely predictable, it's pretty clear fairly early on in the story that any danger to June's life is not really going to come to pass. It's why the past storyline works a bit better - because we do actually have doubts about whether the non-Peter main characters are going to survive the past storyline.
The story also a few times references that there is an ongoing war between two factions of the avtomat/automata, but we see a grand total of 7 named avtomat in the entire story, so it's kind of hard to really feel the scope of that conflict.
All in all, a very solid fun book, which is definitely worth reading if you want something SF/F that isn't very deep.
No comments:
Post a Comment