Sean McMullen

It's a wonderful feeling, re-reading a novel you loved as a teenager and finding it lives up to your memories entirely. Indeed, I think 'Souls in the Great Machine' was formative of my sci-fi tastes. There is so much to love about it! For one thing, it's the first in a trilogy yet stands alone brilliantly. Moreover, the characters, plot, and world-building are all distinctive and fantastic.

If I had to pick my absolute favourite feature, it would have to be the characterisation. The women are ambitious, driven, competent, intelligent, machiavellian, ruthless, sometimes vengeful, and in charge. I adore Highliber Zarvora; few other protagonists can compare to her. Lemorel makes an excellent antagonist and her motivations are a neatly gender-swapped version of many heroic male characters. In her case, this shows the hollowness of, "I'll burn down the world because my romantic partner was taken from me". Other characters have also been harmed or lost people they love, but don't launch a continental war about it. Although I still respect Lemorel's skill as a warlord. Her final showdown with Dolorian is incredible. Darien is another brilliant female character, whose disability is cleverly shown but does not define her. I should also mention Theresla and Jemli, both delightful. The friendships, loyalties, and enmities between these women are absolutely central to the book. By contrast, the male characters are essentially himbos; easily manipulated even if clever, punished for treating women badly, and mostly there to be love interests. The main two, Glasken and Ilyrie, repeatedly learn painful lessons until they respect women properly. I'm not sure I noticed as a teenager that several forms of polyamory are shown, carefully distinguished from cheating.

That brings me to the world-building. 'Souls in the Great Machine' is set in Australia, two thousand years in the future. An ice age has been and gone, orbiting satellites fry any attempts at using electricity, and whales have taken revenge on humanity via the Call. This essentially mind-controls any mammals above a certain size to walk into the sea, where they are eaten by sharks. The massive impact this has on society, the economy, technology, and even theology is cleverly explored. It made me jump a little to read that the Call began in 2021! As electrical power is off the table and there is an ongoing taboo against steam engines, machines use ingenious forms of renewable energy. Trains are powered by wind or human pedalling and are run by engineers still obsessed with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Great Machine of the title is a human-powered computer that is central to the story. This incredible technology cannot be kept secret, despite best efforts, and the book chronicles the revolution it unleashes. More specifically, I love the fact that librarians run this world, fight duels over any professional or personal disputes, yet also guard what books remain from earlier times.

Finally, the plot is fast-paced and exciting. It covers a long period of time, a wide area, and a sprawling cast of characters, yet flows beautifully and keeps up the pace such that 600 pages seem too brief. There are moments of delightful farce, as well as tragic hubris, extreme drama, and thrilling discovery. For several hundred pages it is a war narrative that adeptly balances the epic and the personal, the political and the technological, the brutal and the exciting. Basically, this novel is just what I want from escapist comfort reading. Few writers hit on a combination of character, plot, and world-building that suits my tastes so well. I recall not loving the latter two books in the trilogy quite as much, but that doesn't matter. As a stand-alone novel, 'Souls in the Great Machine' remains one of my all time favourites.… (more)

Overall this would be best classified as a fun book to read. Lots of action and lots of fun characters. The characters remind me quite a bit of characters from Ayn Rand's books, which means they seem to be slightly one dimensional in the behavior, but that does get toned down some later in the book. It loosely qualifies as steampunk. The post-apocalyptic nature of it sets it in a different era than a lot of steampunk. The setting for most of the book is Australia (in later books it seems that North America comes into play) and a lot of the book is about factions of religious zealots or just simply crazy people at war with each other.

I can't legitimately five star it due to the laborious battle scenes and the unexplainable (and unexplained) behavior of one of the main characters. At best I could simply extract that the character was just crazy and neurotic, at worst it comes across as a sloppy character shift for no other reason than to advance the plot.

Nevertheless, I found myself pouring through it at a brisk pace enjoying the larger scifi elements of the story and at the end I am wondering where it's all going to end up (I have the other two books on the shelf to find out).… (more)