Imagine that there are thousands of worlds in many different realities, and every time a person dies they wake up as themselves to live a new life, but on a different world. This is repeated over and over until the person eventually wakes in the City Unspoken, the only place where True Death can be found. Most people show up at the City Unspoken after living many lives; Cooper wakes up there after just one, and he’s not even sure he died first.
The Waking Engine has elements of science fiction, fantasy, religion, classic faerie tales, a little bit of history, and quite a lot of horror. Unfortunately it looks like David Edison has taken these elements, thrown them all into a sack, and then violently shaken the sack. To say the results are confusing is putting it mildly.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about this book. Edison has a flair for otherworldly settings; The City Unspoken is a sprawling mass of humanity (and otherwise), surrounded by architecture that includes giant chains threading their way through streets and buildings, an extinct volcano that’s been turned into a memorial for the death of religions, a glass dome that’s larger than most cities, an ever-changing sky (the number of suns changes randomly), and a district made entirely of theater props. The author also introduces the concept of being “body-bound”: nobles and prisoners can have their souls tied to a body that will reconstitute itself after death. Handy for consolidating power, not so great for the suicidal, and torture can go much, much further, making for a pretty effective touch of horror.
The plot, however, is a mess.
Part of the problem is the writing style. The characters aren’t written consistently, so you have instances where Cooper sometimes talks like a hapless American, and sometimes with a kind of stilted, cliche fantasy style. Characters have whiplash-inducing mood changes; on at least three occasions you have someone throwing their head back and howling with rage, with no buildup. It’s jarring. Edison will also change the point of view in the middle of a section, sometimes having dialogue from two different characters in the same paragraph. You can argue that third-person omniscient is just a stylistic choice, but it comes across as bad editing.
Mainly what bothered me was that there was too much going on, and none of it was very clear. The author would act as if someone’s motivation should be obvious, and then make jumps in logic that left me behind. I found myself wanting to yell, “Wait…what? Were we supposed to understand what that was about?” Every chapter has overly dramatic revelations to mysteries that weren’t fully explained, with answers that make no sense. The multiple plot lines – the city that’s a hub of realities and the god-like city founders, the nobles trapped in the dome who pass the time by murdering each other over fashion blunders, the evil halfling marchioness with the faerie queen mother-turned cyborg – just make things worse. They’re all treated as separate elements of the same story, when each of them could have been separate books.
And that’s probably the biggest disappointment. I would have loved to read more about each story (the fairy-queen cyborg especially; I rarely understood what was going on, but it would have made one heck of a cyberpunk novel), but all of them together in the same book was too much. By the ending I knew vaguely what had happened, but not how, or why. This is Edison’s debut novel, and for a first book it shows a lot of promise. A tighter focus going forward would let him draw out all the fascinating details for the worlds he creates, without drowning the reader with information.