Clockworks Warrior

by Martin Vavpotic

Carrus Vertigelli, a young aristocrat, enrolls in Scholar Society, the greatest academic establishment in the Hegemony. He joins the Clockworks department where tiny flying machines called speyes are built to act as scouts for Hegemony's legions. War brews and a mysterious new enemy appears without warning, devastating provinces on all sides of the Hegemony.
Carrus brings fresh ideas to Clockworks, overhauling the obsolete speye models, turning the tide of the war in Hegemony's favor. However, this also makes the enemy very interested in Clockworks and soon they bring their own devices to counter Hegemony's speyes. A furious competition of predator and prey ensues as Clockworks employees struggle to keep up with the enemy's endless ways to disable their speyes.
Until the enemy decides to employ the most direct way of disabling the Clockworks department...

Paperback

First published April 24, 2012

Reviews

[Samo Petančič · Rating 2 out of 5]

Martin Vaupotics Clockwork Warriors is a solid attempt at a steampunk novella and not a bad feat for second published work of a young author, especially taken into consideration, Vaupotic is not an English native speaker. A story of a young aristocrat, bound to a wheelchair who joins the ranks of imperial Hegemonic University and its Clockworks department to develop drone-like steampunk-level-tech flying scouts is well developed in certain parts and has a credible atmosphere of a threat of invading outsiders, know as Halmurri along with a nice, even if underdeveloped, love story.
With that said, Vaupotic is plagued by writing inexperience, common to young writers. Often, a lot of attention is paid to machines and procedures, while in great part omitting character development, relationships, structural aspect of organization and its place in the city, empire and the world. One of the things Clockwork warriors almost completely lacks is a cultural and societal echo of all the people living in the society, the feeling of the very age events take place in. Some character decisions could also be defined as »plot holes« not in constellation with what we deem »an imperial politics« and all the latter bring.

By being an easy-to read (a great accomplishment for Slovenian speculative fiction literature which is notoriously plagued by bad, elementary-school grade texts with no editorial input) piece of genre literature, Clockwork warriors are, one can hope, a small introduction into a series of works that can - with lots of hard work and proper editorial support - become a recognizable part of steampunk genre.

[Grimread · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it very lacking. The Halmurri are supposed to be the enemy but by the end of the book I still didn't know what or who the Halmurri are and what was the reason they even attacked the Hegemony nation. All this also dampen the urgency and danger that they were supposed to pose to the people.
Also clockworks engineers needed 20 years of working on speyes before somebody had a thought to actually work together on it to design a better model?