The Engine's Child: A Novel

by Holly Phillips

From acclaimed author Holly Phillips comes a major work of visionary fantasy in the vein of Jeff Vandermeer and China Miéville. As richly detailed as it is evocative, the vivid prose of this ambitious novel illuminates a lushly imagined world poised on the brink of revolution.

Lanterns and flickering bulbs light the shadowy world of the rasnan, the island at the edge of a world-spanning ocean that harbors, in its ivory towers and mossy temples, the descendants of men and women who long ago fled a world ruined by magical and technological excess. But not all the island’s inhabitants are resigned to exile. A mysterious brotherhood seeks to pry open doors that lead back to their damaged, dangerous homeland. Others risk the even greater danger of flight, seeking new lands and new freedoms in the vast, uncharted sea.

Amid a web of conspiracy and betrayal, three people threaten to shatter this fragile world. Scheming Lord Ghar, faithful to lost gods and forbidden lore, plays an intricate power game; Lady Vashmarna, an iron-willed ruler, conceals a guilty secret behind her noble façade; and Moth, a poor, irreverent novice, holds perhaps the darkest power of a mysterious link to a shadowy force that may prove to be humanity’s final hope–or its ultimate doom.

Genres: Fantasy, Steampunk, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Juushika · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the island of the rasnan, select groups begin to harness the forbidden power of the mundab, the endless inhospitable sea that surrounds the vulnerable island. Steampunk tends to be 80% aesthetic and 20% -punk, all the romanticization with little of the technology- and change-kindled anxieties. The Engine's Child isn't steampunk, but it's a fascinating counterpoint. It has similar themes, its own strong aesthetic--not Victorian, but seaside: ivory towers towering over endless waters, suffused with monsoon rains and flickering candles, a caste- and religion-bound society--but it makes anxiety its central focus. The mundab is simultaneously the outside world, the magical and technological powers that the society's ancestors fled, and the possibility of change. Phillips awakens it like a golem. She's the perfect author to meld theme and woldbuilding into a living, half-corporeal, monstrous machine.

But this is a prickly book. Both protagonists are unreliable and unkind, and Phillips has an intentionally stilted voice. She plays precise sensory description against conflicted and secretive emotions (set within a number of invented terms and honorifics), and the plot can get buried under that: it's not complex, just difficult to tease out, and as such somewhat underwhelming. This is an easy book to admire and a difficult book to love. As such I can't particularly recommend it, but I wish more writers would do what Phillips does here.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

In The Engine's Child, Holly Phillips has created a rich and interesting world where everyone quite literally lives on an island in a vast ocean. The intrigue among the three main factions--the conservatives who insist on keeping with traditional ways, those who want to find a way back to the land of their ancestors using magic portals, and those who want to master the ocean and find new land--is what fuels most of the story. Unfortunately, the end result left me feeling like Phillips failed to exploit the full potential of her beautiful world.

It's not the unfamiliar terms--mostly honorifics--that fazed me; Phillips handily included a glossary. Rather, there are some unfamiliar concepts that never get explained in a satisfactory manner. The protagonist, Moth, is uniquely attuned to the mystical force called the mundab, which also happens to be the name of the unending ocean that surrounds the island. She works with an expansionist group to build an engine that somehow channels this mundab into energy to power a vessel. The nature of the mundab and the shadowy manifestations associated with it remains vague, at least to me, for the entire book.

Similarly, Phillips' descriptions of the setting never satisfied me. Although I'm interested in the social structures of this world she's created, I have a very poor idea of how it looks and is geographically organized. While I'll never say that maps are essential to fantasy books, I wouldn't turn one down, especially not for this book. How big is the island? Where are these towers located in "the bay"? A simple map showing me the relative locations of various settings, such as the bastion and the tidal, would have gone a long way toward drawing me into the events in the book. The lack of sufficient description detracted from my enjoyment of the drama taking place in those settings.

Few of the characters held my attention for very long. None are well developed beyond a few of the main characters, such as Moth and her mother. I never got a clear sense of who the antagonists were supposed to be, and even the characters who I thought were the antagonists, such as Lord Ghar, had pretty flimsy motivations, at least from what I learned about them.

Indeed, the deficiencies of The Engine's Child all stem from what seems like a lack of depth from Phillips. Where we require specificity and analysis, we get only surface details. Exposition, which is deadly when overused, is fatally underused, and the story suffers as a result. Lacking any real history beyond a rebellion vaguely relevant to the plot, the world stands only in the present, which makes me care much less about its future.

By far the most interesting part of The Engine's Child is the world in which it is set. The island's society exists because of a tenuous and brittle social contract, and the machinations of various characters threaten that social contract's survival. I want to be immersed in this world and experience the hardships of the poor in "the tidal" and the farmers in the hadras (countryside). Ultimately, however, Phillips failed to draw me into her world; I felt always like an outsider, watching shadows of characters acting out a pantomime on the cave wall.

[Mikko Saari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rasnan on saari keskellä rannatonta ulappaa ja kokonainen maailma asukkailleen. Siellä asuvat ihmiskunnan jäännökset, jotka aikoinaan pakenivat magian ja teknologian ylilyöntien turmelemasta maailmasta. Uudessa maailmassa on ahdasta ja vallasta taistelevat vastakkaiset ryhmittymät — toiset haluavat avata oven edelliseen maailmaan, toiset haluavat kartoittaa ja tutkia nykyistä löytääkseen uusia maita ja vapauksia.

The Engine’s Child on vastakkainasettelujen kirja. Köyhät vuorovesislummin asukkaat vastaan vauraat kaupunkilaiset, kaupunki vastaan maaseutu, valtasuku vastaan toinen valtasuku, valtasuvut vastaan hallitsija ja niin edelleen. Phillips on luonut varsin rikkaan ja monipuolisen maailman, joka on tunnelmallinen. Valitettavasti maailma on myös sekava ja kirjan alussa lukija on helposti täysin pihalla. Kirjan takaa löytyy sanasto, joka valottaa maailmaa. Sanasto tuli tarpeeseen, mutta olisi asiat voinut tekstissäkin selittää vähän laveammin.

Tietty kerronnallinen hämäryys on tarinan helmasynti muutenkin. Ei tästä ihan kertalukemisella täyttä tolkkua ota. Nautin tunnelmasta, mutta juoni tahtoi välillä hukkua tunnelmointiin. Tiukkojen ja mukaansatempaavien juonien ystäville The Engine’s Childiä ei siis parane suositella. Omaperäisen maailman se sentään tarjoaa.

LibraryThingin suosituskoje tarjoaa tästä pitäville kolmena kovimpana suosituksena Perdido Street Stationia, Pyhimysten ja mielipuolten kaupunkia ja The Etched Cityä. Nämä ovat ihan hyviä vertailukohtia, vaikka The Engine’s Child ei ainakaan kahdelle ensimmäiselle vertailussa pärjääkään. (29.5.2010)

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful fantasy in the new weird tradition. It reminded me a lot of Thunderer by F. Gilman in setting/plot, though we have an island instead of a city, a sea-going ship rather than a flying one, but there are a lot of thematic similarities between the two, so if you liked the superb Thunderer, try this one too and the odds are you will love it.

Humanity lives on an island - Rasnan, world of exile - in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean, after escaping from a destroyed/decaying world as the current orthodoxy sees it, or being expelled from paradise for its sins as others currently out of favor see it. As expected the biggest issue which leads to the main thrust of all religion, government and what is accepted, is the threat of overpopulation.

There is one city - Shadras - and the countryside - Hadaras - organized in a feudal style, with very strict rules about marriage, sex, children enforced by traditionalist celibate priests.

However the rich and powerful led by the Shaudah - hereditary ruling prince/king - need their comforts, so they allow a limited use of technology, mostly electricity and its support base, to power towers erected at the edge of the sea, connected to the mainland by a bridge that brings the power needed for their habitability from the one technological demesne - the Vashmarna - which is forbidden to extend the use of electricity outside of the city though.

The current Lady Vashmarna, celibate vowed due to a traumatic youth experience, is both a great believer in the Rasnan and its mores/religion, as well as in the possibility of technology making life easier and more fulfilling for everyone, so she tries hard to improve things, despite being frustrated at all turns by the conservative Shaudas.

The biggest traditional house in the Shadras is the Ghar, whose long widowed leader is ironically a secret believer in the superiority of the original "Earth" to the current world, belief which is as heretical to the Shaudah as extending electricity to the countryside is - while his son took celibate vows as a priest/scholar to lead the Collegium.

After the construction of the towers which took decades, many uprooted peasants were forced to make a hardscrabble living in the Tidal area outside of the Shadras proper, living and dying at the ocean's whim in makeshift tenements, and some worship the "living ocean/outside world" - Mundab, and try to draw on its magical powers as conjectured by a heretical scholar killed 20+ years ago in the Lamplighter riots.

The Mundabi want to expand humanity's range on Rasnan so they are natural allies of the Vashmarna, while the Ghar are looking for a return to the original world of humanity so they are connected with the banned Society of Worlds that tries to opens an intra-dimensional connection to "Earth" and bring the pure and deserving back the paradise they imagine...

In this volatile situation, where overpopulation and resource exhaustion threaten despite draconian punishments for unauthorized sex and childbearing, a young Tidal girl Moth, apprentice priest/scholar with a secret sponsor, and even a more secret parentage - though that is soon obvious to the seasoned reader - tries to balance both her great Mundabi magical power and her multiple loyalties to her Tidal friends, mentors, allies, to her secret sponsor and most of all to her "very" illicit lover, Aramis a scholar and engineer of the Vashmarna demesne but associated by family to the Ghar and the Society of Worlds.

Moth balances on a very tightrope course until of course the rope breaks - ironically due to Aramis doing his duty and having no clue about Moth's involvement - and all kinds of things start happening.

With a superb ending that brings all threads together, as well as leaving ample scope for a sequel which I would dearly love to read, Engine's Child is a book that made me a big fan of Ms. Phillips' work.

[Margot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generations ago, on an island world surrounded by endless oceans, an entire people took refuge when their world was destroyed by technological excess. Now their island is overpopulated, their foodstocks are diminished, and it never ceases to rain. Their only hope is to develop the technology that will allow them to properly explore the vast ocean in search of new land--technology strictly forbidden by law and custom.

Holly Phillips' The Engine's Child begins with an amazing premise, but unfortunately falls far short on delivery. Her prose are admirable; this is certainly a fantasy book bordering on the literary. But I felt like Phillips sacrificed character for prose. Throughout the story, I never felt an affinity toward Moth. The character I felt most sympathetic toward was Lady Vashmarna, though still only distantly.

In addition, Phillips' prose never gave me a clear vision of the world in my head. It rained. The towers were white. There was a lot of mud. That's about all I got. Such tightness of prose detracted from the world-building necessary to create a rich backdrop for the story, and the whole thing suffered for it. Instead of actual descriptions of place, she filled the book chock-full of italicized words like rasnan, demesne, janaras, mundab, and purdar (to name only a few). All of these accompanied by no words of explanation whatsoever. Not even, really, through context. It would have been nice to know there was a Glossary before I was half way through the book. The book should have led with the Glossary. And when anything slightly magical/technological happened, the prose got so vague as to leave me wondering if Phillips herself even had any idea what these things she was writing about were supposed to look like.

Consider this manifest of which the reader has no concept to relate it to for the entire first section of the book:
"A curve of darkness traced by the rain's stolen light, a rounded edge etched against the shadow of other edges, a sliding gleam of water caught and diverted by something too large and clean-lined to be human...[she:] could only guess at a shape. Wheels tangled within wheels? Whorls of glassy obsidian, dark coiled shells...
"It rolled away from her down the passage with a smooth, complex, yet awkward motion, a concatenation of too many gears spinning one within the next, dimly illuminated by the rain-caught reflection of the generation station's distant lights. The manifest rolled like a boatload of barrels tumbling in the surf..."

So...what? Is it a spirit, a machine, a ghost, a monster? You won't know until more than one hundred pages later, despite the fact that manifests continue to be seen, thought, and spoken about throughout.

I should mention, however, that I almost gave the novel three stars because it gets a lot better by the end. (Once you've gotten over the constant vagueries and confusion of the first three quarters of the book.) This slightly disappointing novel will not stop me from exploring more of Phillips' works in the future.

[Jillian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I kept thinking this book would get better, but it didn't. I got stuck reading the whole thing.

I hate when books begin like this one - full of jargon and no explanations. The reader gets thrown in and tries to swim in the lack of meaning. Most books that start this way clear themselves up fairly quickly, but this one does not. There is even a glossary in the back for all of the non-standard vocabulary, but by the end of the book I still wasn't clear on what meant what.

The protagonist, Moth, is arrogant but stupid. She has a supernatural connection to some sort of mysterious life force of the world, but this connection isn't described or explained or demonstrated until half the book has gone by (when it becomes clear she can't control it and doesn't understand it). She basically acts like an asshole the whole time, while making stupid decisions that risk the lives of everyone around her. She remains arrogant throughout the book, never learning that it's important to consider other people when you act.

This life force is totally unexplained. It has the capacity to animate machinery. When it's used to do something big, like animate an engine or open a portal, random little machine-creatures just appear and start dancing around! So you know something's up if your bedroom is suddenly filled with animated clockwork demons. Someone's been tampering with the life force again!

None of the characters in the book learn or grow or become better people. The ones who survive to the end simply keep on doing what they did before. Moth ends up with a new quest but is still an asshole.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't actually finish this one, so normally I would delete it from the list, but it's a book group book, plus I've gotten a question about it, so . . .

Another book I really wanted to like. I like the idea of a science fiction novel based in South Asian culture, and I liked that the author dropped us into the middle of the world without a lot of explanation. I even liked the main character, Moth.

But there wasn't much in the way of plot, and characters weren't particularly well-drawn. And while the copy on the back of the book suggested it was comparable to Mieville and VanderMeer, Phillips didn't have either the detailed world-building of those authors, or their amazing, evocative powers of description. And my book group, five other smart, well-read women, who have quite diverse tastes, were of much the same opinion agreed with me, and told me it probably wasn't worth the bother of finishing.

A pity. Phillips does have promise as an author, and I'd try her again in the future, but The Engine's Child just didn't grab me.

[Kim A · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the premise of the book. An unfamiliar world, mysterious magical force, an exotic Indian/Asian flavor to the background. Very interesting characters and dynamics.

However, I couldn't really enjoy the book because I never really felt that a clear setting was established--until the very end of the book, when I could finally start to make sense of some of world around the characters (and it no longer mattered much).

Some authors can approach their setting indirectly, without having to exposit the background details, general geography and sociopolitical context of the world--just create the picture through snippets of a character's interaction and experience. And it works. Unfortunately, I don't think Phillips is one of those authors. Much of the first half to two-thirds of the book seemed hard to appreciate because I couldn't get a feel for the context.

[Elizabeth Hunter · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's always interesting to read science fiction extrapolated from a different culture than my own. The setting is a colony descended from Indian forebears and stranded on a water planet with too little land for their growing population. The tension between religion and technology, between different paths back and an incomprehensible path forward, provides the plot's momentum. The lack of exposition made it a difficult book to get into and the ending felt left open for a sequel and all the characters are so busy hiding their purposes from everyone else that it is hard to get a grasp on who they really are. But the imagery was vivid and inventive and the language beautiful, so floating through it was no chore.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

what i am finding is that the more sick i get of formulaic fantasy/sci-fi, the more tolerant i am of less exciting writing if the influences are non-standard. this book seems to draw upon indian/asian cultural influences, and while the story and characters are not all that compelling, it's not a bad read, and the culture is interesting enough to keep me interested.
why is there not more excellently written, culturally diverse science fiction out there??! or where do i need to look to find it?!
anyway this isn't excellent. but it isn't bad. i'm sure i'll finish it.

[Wraith Tate · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a difference between interestingly vague and aggravatingly vague.

This book was of the second variety. It seems to throw vocabulary at you with very little explanation, and it's as if the author expects you to be able to understand exactly what's going on with a minimum of information. I don't enjoy books like that. Which is why this book only gets two stars. I also found it very aggravating that the text would randomly switch from present to past tense. It was jarring.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think there's a good story in here, but I'm too held up by the made up words that are never really well defined.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and evocative. Strong female characters. I loved this book and I look forward to more from this author.

[Marion Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shading into weird, but a haunting story.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nethspace.blogspot.com/2008/12...