Mainspring is an excellent and inventive work of fantasy, filled with miracles, adventure, heroism, and love.
In short, Jay Lake has filled it with the reasons humanity learned to write and share stories.
Synopsis: Young apprentice clockmaker Hethor is charged by the Angel Gabriel to wind the spring that powers God’s clockwork world. Those who he finds to aid him often do him more harm than good as he makes his way to the Mainspring– and Hethor’s choice between rationalism and faith will ultimately decide the fate of the world.
This is the first steampunk novel I’ve read– if it is indicative of the sub-genre, where do I get more? On the whole, it is an immensely satisfying read: Lake moves quickly into the action– within the first, say, 50 pages, our protag has skipped school, left his home, been assaulted several times, and managed to get on board an airship.
An AIRSHIP, I said! Does it get any better than that?
Spoilers ahead!
Mainspring has its flaws– the protagonist is a mite too passive for my taste. The choice he’s called to make– let the world run down naturally, or recharge it according to the angel’s words– is only given token attention. I never really felt there was a jeopardy there, though that is the conflict given over to the climax. Hethor is pushed from stunning location to stunning situation, over and over– rarely does he himself make a choice about which path to take.
(And if someone quotes Hari Seldon, I will shoot you in the face with a pie. A pecan pie. I swear it.)
Toward the last quarter of the book, the prose becomes a bit…muddy. Lake chooses to be inventive with his imagery, which is fine, but I felt it was a real digression from the simple and elegant prose I’d been reading up to that point.
Finally, Hethor develops a magic that doesn’t seem to cost him anything, and that came as a complete surprise to me. Again, in the last quarter of the book, all problems are solved by Hethor’s newfound understanding of magic. It’s a bit of a cheat. When Hethor conjures summer, complete with flowers, sunlight, and rabbits, in the middle of an Antarctic winter, with no hint of this kind of power previously, I kind of had to put the book down for a second, until my brain could adjust. To the new paradigm. You know.
End spoilers
That said, I’ve found an author to put on my ‘To Buy’ list. Mainspring was delightful.
SOME MORMON-SPECIFIC RAMBLINGS
I mentioned to Jay that I was reading Mainspring. He mentioned that Eric James Stone commented that the beginning of Mainspring resembled the vision that Joseph Smith had of the Angel Moroni.
I agree with Eric– it does. But to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Just about any time a young man has a task given to him by an angelic messenger, to a Mo’ like me, that’s going to conjure Joseph Smith. There are a few more similarities, which if Jay wants he can confirm as accidental or intentional; but before I go into them, I’ll mention that Jay is an athiest (or agnostic– I’m not sure which, as the terms can be interchangeable depending on the company one finds oneself in)
Hethor is given a gold-plated tablet by the Angel at one point, which has its correlation in Mormonism: Joseph Smith was given golden tablets by the Angel Moroni, which carried the scriptures, the Book of Mormon.
The message on the plates carries a very Mormon-sounding message:
The heart of God is the heart of the world
As man lives, so lives God
As God lives, so lives the world.
This compares (a bit) with the Mormon saying:
As man is, God once once was;
As God is, man may be.
Anyway; Hethor is most definitely NOT an allegorical Joseph Smith; while some similarities exist, the differences are fairly obvious as to make the idea ludicrous. And philosophically, the majority of Mainspring bears no resemblance at all to the theology of Mormonism.